How to Write for a Prompter in TV News

Video Transcript

"BILL ALBIN: Hello, I'm Bill Albin. And on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to teach you what you need to know to be a local news reporter. In this clip, we're going to talk about formatting and how exactly you write certain things within a story. In television, you write things in a certain fashion that you wouldn't write for a newspaper or even for school. For example, you write numbers 1 through 11, you don't write 1, you don't write the number 2, you would actually write out O-N-E or T-W-O. The reason you do that is you don't read that information the same way you would read information in the newspaper. If you're looking at a newspaper, you could say "Well, that's the number 1." If I see this thing flash by in a TelePrompter, a 1 goes by, is it a one? Is it an I? Is it part of something else? So I would write 1, O-N-E, because it needs to be instantly recognizable. You also write everything that I'm going to say in all capitals. You don't use capitals mixed with other letters. For example, ill, I-L-L, or if that's the first part of the sentence, that could be the number 3, Roman numerals. It could be and so on so the third. So everything is all capitalized, and numbers are written out in certain ways. For example, acronyms, you wouldn't write an acronym, you would write it the same way you say it. For example, NAPA, you just say NAPA. You'd write N-A-P-A and you'd read it like any other word. But NAACP, for example, has to be instantly recognizable and easy to say. So N-A-A-C-P in the prompter would flash by and you would not want to say NAPA. You wouldn't want to say NAACP 'cause that's not how people speak. So you type it in all capitals, N-A-A-C-P, because as that rolls by in the prompter, I can say N, double A-C-P. And it's easier to recognize and easier to understand. You would also not write out symbols. You would--I'm rather you would--like for example, that is more--it's difficult to see when it flashes by quickly on a scrolling prompter. You would actually type out "PERCENT". And in the case of our earlier example, if it's 10%, you wouldn't put 10, you'd go ten percent so that it's easily to quickly see and understand and read those things as they go by. And there are a lot of little rules including the numbers and the acronyms and a lot of other things that make it easier for a reporter or an anchor to speak about as those things go by in the prompter and not confuse anyone when they're working. "