Speaker 1: When I was a student here in Edinburgh, I once submitted an essay that I'd written in a hurry without having done any of the background reading. My tutor saw through this and sent it back to me with a single sentence that has stayed with me all my life. You have a pleasing turn of phrase, he wrote, but nothing much to say. This for me has become the first golden rule of good, effective writing. Have something to say. There's a second golden rule. One of my former bosses once told me that he'd noticed something about the correspondents and reporters who worked for him. Those he thought of as the good writers always had a book under their arm when they came to see him. It sounds obvious, too obvious to state maybe, but if you want to be a good writer, you have to read books and not just newspapers. To use this language well, you have to love it. So build some time into your daily life for reading. And read poetry. Read it slowly. Think about the way the writer bends the language to his needs. This speech is one of the most famous rhetorical passages in our language's history.

Speaker 2: We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.

Speaker 1: What's so special about that? Why is it so stirring? Ed Murrow famously said that Churchill mobilised the English language and sent it into battle. But why was his prose so effective? Well, for one thing, he reached deep into the very oldest part of the language, to the solid Anglo-Saxon core of it, and eschewed words like, well, eschew, for example. It's said that Churchill showed no interest in Latin or Greek at school, and for me his prose has a punch and a directness, precisely because it's not dressed up in convoluted classical forms. Churchill also preferred words of one syllable. We shall fight in the fields. We shall fight in the hills. We shall go on to the end. So set yourself this task. Rewrite one of your old scripts and limit yourself to words of one syllable only. It'll force you to think differently about the language. It'll force you to think about the way you choose and combine words. It'll force you to seek alternative routes through the language to the same destination. The third golden rule is to understand the medium. Writing for radio is not the same as writing for television, and different again to writing for print. In television, the script must never do in words what the picture is already doing in images. The words must complement the picture. In radio, the words and sound effects must combine to carry the burden of the narrative and paint a picture. Listen to this piece by Mike Duncan about seal hunting among the Canadian Inuit. Listen to how sparing he is with his script, how he does just enough to paint a very graphic image.

Speaker 3: Feeding time under an arctic dawn for Isaac Unterlach's team of huskies, chained out on the frozen bay. A skidoo, not the dogs, will haul the sled on this hunt, but the tools of Isaac and partner T-man's lethal trade remain traditional.

Speaker 4: These are the only tools we've got to bring. The knives to cut up the seal, plus the harpoon head is made of steel with a blade at the end. The shape doesn't change very much.

Speaker 3: A rifle is also stowed before the sleds hauled out onto the sea ice to bump a breathtaking 30 miles to open water. For Isaac, on the sled, the arctic's unique wildlife is a shopping list.

Speaker 4: Seals, bearded seal, walrus, polar bear. We still have to provide food for our family and to the community. The headless trade, where we're going is open year round. It's a strong current. Where we're going we'll be able to see some seal holes.

Speaker 3: A curtain of mist shows the sea ahead. The eyes beneath the frosted caribou fur hood sweep the horizon and back again, for a grey shape to break the surface. Isaac calls his prey and prepares.

Speaker 4: There's one right there.

Speaker 3: The wait is short.

Speaker 4: Let me try it.

Speaker 3: The excitement not disguised. That's that one. I have to hook it. This can never be a gentle act. The current carries the dead seal to the flow edge and as it's brought ashore, the snow stains crimson.

Speaker 1: We're going to hear some more examples of writing for radio taken from some of my own pieces and for each one I'll try to explain what I wanted the script to achieve. This is a question you should ask yourself. What is the burden I want my script to carry? For example, do I want to tell a straightforward story, a simple narrative with events in chronological order? Or perhaps I want to evoke an atmosphere, a feeling, a sense of anticipation, of foreboding perhaps or trepidation. Or maybe I want to provide context, to explain not only what has happened but why it matters and what it means. If you're clear in your own mind about the burden each sentence must carry, it'll help you write a clear script. The burden I wanted this next piece to carry was a combination of narrative, atmosphere and analysis. In June 2004 I covered the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings. Six months later at Christmas time, Radio 4 asked me to write a piece reflecting on what the day had meant. The guns of Normandy were fired that weekend in June, not in anger this time, but in salute. We watched the generation of 1944 reassemble one last time. All weekend it was the same. They wanted no talk of what they had done, no talk of the courage of their youth. The leaders of the Western world came to pay tribute to them, but they wanted no tribute for themselves. Their concern was for those that didn't make it, for the friends they left behind in the soil of liberated France. Those of us who were not even born when they stormed the beaches that summer long ago may have felt, and we did, humbled as we mingled with them. But they brought with them to Normandy the vivid memory of the beaches littered with the bodies of men so young that it was they the survivors who felt humbled, they who wanted to pay and not receive tribute. And so they went quietly to the cemeteries.

Speaker 5: They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old. Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun, and in the morning, we will remember them.

Speaker 1: The American journalist Ernie Pyle crossed the channel with the invasion force. In a dispatch he sent by wireless from the beachhead, he called the Normandy beaches this long thin line of personal anguish. It is a line, he said, of human litter, which extends like a high water mark for miles along the beach. This is the strewn personal gear, gear that will never be needed again, of those who fought and died to give us our entrance into Europe. Socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles. The latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out, one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked. What struck Pyle again and again was the extreme youth of those who fought. It is always the young. In Iraq last year this same observation struck me as I followed American infantrymen into Baghdad in the days after the emblematic toppling of the statue of Saddam Hussein. One day I came back to my room in the Hotel Palestine, with its window on the broad blue-brown sweep of the River Tigris, and I found two American servicemen waiting by my door. They looked to me almost unbearably young, boys in the grown-up clothing of muddied desert camouflage and each cradling his M16 assault rifle. Sir, one of them said cautiously, courteously, we heard you had a satellite telephone here. We haven't had any word from home in four months. This was the first of what would become a regular stream. I would give them my phone for a few precious minutes. Almost always they called their mothers. Almost always they called their mothers. Be direct. Write short sentences. Count the number of words in each one. If your average is more than 16, your sentences are too long. In this next extract, the average length of a sentence is 15 words. Some sentences are very short, one or two are very long. That varies the pace. It's from a piece I wrote in the Congolese capital Kinshasa. It was the week that a rebel army seized the city and overthrew the dictator Mobutu Sesiseko. What I was trying to do here was tell a story, conjure a visual image, and evoke the changing, turbulent atmosphere of those days. The long march from the east is over and the war is won. Today I walked with the rebels to the corrupt centre of the Mobutu Empire. A single file column of exhausted men, earnest and disciplined, snaked its way up the hill to Camp Chachi. They had come from Kalemi, far away on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, and they have progressed through the heart of this huge country at the pace at which a man can march. They scarcely fired a shot. The dereliction to which Mobutu's regime has reduced the country has finally worked to its benefit. The army was rotten to the core and could not put up a fight. Kinshasa was spared the bloodbath it feared. This was not a war at all. It was a people's uprising. From the impenetrable vastness of the rainforest and along the tributaries of the river, hope has marched into the city on bare feet and weary legs. And now there is retribution. In a suburban street, seven members of the old secret intelligence service have been set upon by the mob and killed. Their bodies, piled together, have been doused with petrol and are burning. I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn. Those to whom evil is done do evil in return. While the reek of burning flesh fills the air, the crowds sing songs of freedom and liberation through the smoke. Two more golden rules, each related to the other. Clarity and precision. Be clear and precise about what you are trying to say. If the cost of something is high, then say it's high. Don't say it's considerable or significant. And be suspicious of adjectives. Use them sparingly. About fifty years after he wrote The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer said he'd come to think of it as a young man's book. The scarcest noun, he said, that isn't holding hands with the nearest available adjective. Coffee was always piping hot and pauses were always pregnant. Filter your scripts for tired or overworked word pairings. They're nearly always clichés and have lost any power to convey effective meaning. The same is true in spades of metaphorical language. Try to adopt this rule. Never use a metaphor whose literal meaning you don't understand. For example, when we say that something, an election maybe, is in the offing, what do we mean? Is it soon? And if so, why not say soon? Or do we mean that it's approaching or that it's inevitable or that it might happen but it might not or that it's likely or that it's possible but unlikely? Which of these meanings is in the offing intended to convey? The term is imprecise because we use it without having a clear understanding of the image it's supposed to evoke. The offing, by the way, is a nautical term. It's the stretch of water visible from the shore. And you must write for the listener. You must make the written word mimic the spoken word. You must make succinct and disciplined prose sound like conversation. You might be broadcasting to millions of people but try to imagine that you're talking to just one person who might be sitting beside you. And remember that your listeners only have one chance to understand what you're telling them. They can't go back and re-read a paragraph that hasn't made sense first time round. So write and re-write and re-write again. And each time you re-write, simplify. Don't simplify the thought you're trying to express. Simplify the language in which you're expressing it.