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Keith Shull

Why is writing a good voiceover script so hard?

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Why is it so hard to craft a good voiceover script for eLearning?

Blame it on our English teachers (and I used to be one!) We were taught in school to write for formal compositions and essays. But a good voiceover script shouldn’t sound like an essay. When writing a script, think “conversational” instead of formal. Your script should sound like a real person talking to a friend. This is true whether the script is a radio ad or an eLearning module, whether the goal is to train or to sell.

For most of us, our previous writing was targeted at the reader – usually our English teachers. But voiceover scripts aren’t meant to be read; they’re meant to be heard. Write the way you talk. Write for it to be heard, not read. Read it out loud – not silently in your head. You’ll hear phrases that just don’t sound natural. They look fine on paper, but they don’t roll smoothly off your tongue.

Cut, cut, and cut some more. With school assignments like “Write 500 words on this topic,” we learned to stuff extra words into our writing – words that don’t add any value, just bulk. In writing for school, our goal was never communication – it was getting the assignment finished. In his classic book, On Writing Well, William Zinsser said, “Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.”

And speaking of “pompous” … Trying to sound educated and important, we often write more than we should. We create long sentences, filled with long words. And the result is the same: sounding foolish. To quote William Zinsser again, “Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without losing any information or losing the author’s voice.”

Another thing to check for (actually two): passive voice and not including the learner in your sentence. These two things often go together:

  1. Use active voice. Verbs give a sentence its forward movement, its action. In active voice sentences, the subject is doing the action. But in passive voice sentences, the subject is being acted upon, not doing the action. Avoid using “be” verbs (am, is, are, was, were, etc.). Instead of “When the dial is turned counterclockwise, the system will shut down,” try writing “When you turn the dial counterclockwise…” or “By turning the dial counterclockwise, you will shut down the system.”
  2. As much as possible, make the learner the subject of your sentences: “When you start the engine, listen for …” (rather than “When the engine is started, it should sound like …”). In the first sentence, the learner is doing the starting and the listening.
    • “Click the red icon to activate the …” instead of “The red icon, when clicked, will activate…”
    • “Open the flux capacitor and disconnect the flibbertyjibbet” rather than “After the flux capacitor is opened, the flibbertyjibbet should be disconnected.”

Most adjectives are unnecessary. Zinsser again: “Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty, and the sentences become longer and longer as they fill up with stately elms and frisky kittens and …sleepy lagoons…Not every oak has to be gnarled.”

Keep your paragraphs short. Two reasons come to mind:

  1. Your learners need a break – even a short one – to absorb and process the information they’re hearing. Writing short paragraphs provides more breaks as the voice actor takes a breath.
  2. That’s the second reason: your voice actor needs to breathe now and then. That’s also a good reason to keep your sentences short. I’ve seen voiceover scripts where one sentence ran on for 30, 40, even 50 words – WAY too long for a single sentence!

Practice writing – and re-writing

Are you familiar with the old joke about Carnegie Hall?

A tourist on 57th Street in New York City sees a musician getting out of a cab and asks, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” Without missing a beat, the musician replies, “Practice.”

The point of the punchline: to become good enough to perform on that world-famous stage requires practice.

The same can be said about becoming a better writer: practice. When you read something – anything – that sounds pompous, too wordy, or just poorly written, take five minutes and re-write it. It doesn’t matter what it is – an email, a piece of junk mail, or a paragraph from a magazine article. Make it sound human. Re-write it the way you would say it. 

One last Zinsser quote:

Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time.
Or the third.
Keep thinking and rewriting until you say what you want.

My best tips:

  1. Write the way you talk. Write for it to be heard, not read. 
  2. Read it out loud. Several times. If it doesn’t flow smoothly off your tongue, change it. As the author, you already know what it’s supposed to say; if you stumble over a phrase, you can be sure others will have trouble with it too.
  3. Avoid using “be” verbs (am, is, are, was, were, etc.)
  4. Shorter is better – shorter words, shorter sentences, and shorter paragraphs.
  5. Have another writer (or two) read it. Ask them to be ruthless with their editor’s pen. Better yet, have a collaborative review session with your whole team. Different reviewers will notice different areas for improvement. Working together makes the process more efficient.

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