For Podcasts With Stories or Narration: If you are performing or reading a story, narrative or essay, you will need to write the piece first. And if you are using narration to introduce interviews or other sound elements, you may need to script that as well.
Listen to Cece Benz’s first-person narrative podcast, “A Day in the Life of an Anxious High Schooler.” It begins:
[Alarm clock beeping.]
No. It’s 7 already? I just went to bed. I can’t do this again. I just need to turn my mind off. Is there like an off switch or something? Cause I’d love to find it.
[Shuffling.]
Great, just great. I am suddenly attacked by dog kisses. This is bad. This is really bad. There are thousands of tiny bacteria entering my pores and infecting me and I’m going to slowly die. So, I guess today is the day. See ya! Actually, no.
What do you notice about Cece’s podcast? What do you think was effective? What writing do you think she had to do in advance?
For Podcasts With Conversations: You may want your podcast to sound like you’re having an off-the-cuff or improvised conversation. That’s great, and you may be able to improvise while recording. But it is often helpful to draft a script outline or sketch, if not a complete script, before recording.
Listen to “Black Ink,” a conversation podcast by Kaela Wilkinson and Jalen Lewis. Here’s a partial transcript of how it begins:
Hi, and welcome back to “Black Ink,” the podcast where we talk about notable books by black authors.
I’m your host Jalen.
And I’m Kaela.
And this week we’re going to be reviewing “Their Eyes Were Watching God” by Zora Neale-Hurston. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of you have read this book because it’s definitely somewhat of a classic.
Right. So we’re going to be doing a brief recap of the book, but mostly we want to focus on some of the themes and social commentary that Hurston included because even though she wrote it in the 1930s it’s definitely still relevant.
Reflect on how they conduct this conversation. In your opinion, what elements are effective? What pre-writing do you think they did? What aspects are probably unscripted, but still important?
Finally, invite students to study some of the transcripts from popular Times podcasts. What can they discover by looking at transcripts from “The Daily,” “Still Processing” and “Modern Love”? For instance, how do these podcasts vary the voices of the different speakers with music, sound effects and archival material? How is that rhythm different in a news show like “The Daily” and a pop-culture conversation like “Still Processing”? How does the variety and rhythm affect the listening experience?
