PH Audio Blog

Picture credit: sooperkuh @ flickr

Writing for voiceovers

Something we wrestle with on the PH Media copywriting team is how things are said. Not so much pronounced – although the odd company name might throw us – but written to be said. We write scripts for our professional voiceovers to read aloud, which means thinking about more than the rhythm of speech and the balance of a sentence.

And, because the difference between what’s on paper and what’s spoken can often be larger than we realise, we know a few things about what works – and what doesn’t.

Say what?

In practice, the considerations are simple. The first one is exactly that. If we keep it simple, the message is easily understood. Keep it snappy, and we keep it sharp. Ramble away, and the message is garbled; the audience is lost.

Every prompt carries its own message – information about an aspect of a business or the sales line for a product. So are you more likely to read a prompt that wings its way around the point – or one that’s on the button?

Here’s one we made earlier

Here’s an example. I’ve invented a company. They’re called Gumguardian, they’ve made a new kind of dental floss product and they want PH Audio to deliver a targeted music on hold service that ties in with their print advertising campaign. They’ve briefed us about the product, so we know what it does, and now they want their on-hold messaging to reflect their printed message.

Here’s what we could say:

Utilising the latest innovations in dental technology, Gumguardian has been developing a revolution in dental flossing – Gum-champ!

Sounds quite impressive, doesn’t it?

Now read it aloud.

When did you last utilise anything? Maybe in an essay. You’d certainly never say you were off to utilise the toilet. And that bit about Gumguardian doing something in the past – it’s almost old news; it doesn’t sound fresh.

This is where simplicity wins through. Utilise means use, which has only one syllable, so it’s simply written and simpler to say. And, by putting things in the active, present tense, the sentence develops an urgency you can’t help but listen to.

Here’s the same message with these things considered:

Choose Gum-Champ from Gumguardian – the revolutionary dental floss you can actually use.

Direct, to-the-point, effective.

Next time, we’ll have a look at the importance of correct punctuation in an audio script – and how something as little as a misplaced comma can be disastrous when read aloud.