The Art of the Audio Essay
PWR 2 Fall Quarter 2007
Jonah G. Willihnganz
Stanford University

Audio Essay Script
Due Wed Nov. 14. Post to Course Forum by 12noon.

Now that you have thought through how you will use your sources and made an outline of how you would pursue your question in a print-based essay, you are now ready to write a script for your audio essay. In writing the script you will bring to bear not only your research but everything you have learned so far about oratory, audio essays, and writing for the ear.

What an Audio Essay Script is:

The purpose of writing this script is to define your piece's basic shape—its approach to the subject, its structure, its rhetorical strategies for getting us invested and then persuading us of the piece's point of view. The script is a plan for the audio itself, describing not only who will speak when and what will be said, but also what kind of sound will be used when and how.

Your goal here, then, is to establish how the piece will start,who is going to say what when, how transitions will be made, what the story line and how it emerges, and how it will conclude.You want to write or transcribe the text for each speaker and indicate audio cues correctly, but there's just no need to fret over exact wording or at this point. As we saw with Whitney Pastorek's piece at the start of the term, a script will go through substantial revision. This is the first draft.

Form of the Script:

Your script should be formatted like scripts we have read, indicating speakers, audio cues, and the like. For our purposes, the best models to follow are the scripts we have examined in class—for example, "The President Calling" and "The White Stripes." These scripts specify speakers and audio carefully and following this format will give you the clearest map of your piece when you sit down to record, mix, edit your audio.

In your script be sure that you identify every speaker. If there is a narrator and the narrator is present throughout, indicate the name just once and then set off every other voice and sound (see "The President Calling"). Indicate sound other than narration and interview tape by indenting or italicizing or both and signal when sound begins and ends if it overlaps any speech. Also, it may be useful to indicate the approximate length of segments of the script or —at least make a guess about elapsed time at the bottom of each page.

There is no set length to your script. Just remember your time constraint and read it through to judge whether or not it will exceed the time limit.

A suggestion about the process of writing this script:

Writing an audio essay script is very much like writing a play—especially a musical. For example, the decisions you need to make as you write are very similar. What is the scene and how will it be established? Who are the characters and when will they speak? What is the plot? The format is also quite similar. You need to indicate "entrances" and "exits" as well as sound effects, music, and the like. So imagine yourselves, as you write, as playwrights as much as essayists. This is true even if your piece is largely a "one man show."