Reading and Writing in a Digital Age

audio essay draft

Making a radio show is really hard. Aside from the recording and finding the clips that are relevant, the actual editing is a killer. I really invested a lot of time in this project, and im still not happy with it. I have a newfound respect for Ira Glass.

The point of my radio show is that Americans are conflicted, and it is very clear in this election season. They are not sure what they want, and the candidates are able to manipulate voters by saying what people want to hear. I have made a sort of satire of this in my radio show. I hope it is funny and makes my listeners laugh as they reflect upon the points being raised. I also wanted to give the effect of an actual radio show, so I put in some commercials to make this show seem legitimate.

Two pieces of advice I payed special attention to while making my radio show are:

“You actually have to set aside as much time for the looking for stories [as for editing your story]”(Part 2, 36 seconds in), and

“What your making is not that great… but you can tell that its still sort of crappy…. the most important thing to do is to do a lot of work. Make deadlines for yourself. “(Part 3, 1 minute in).

I found both of these insights to be true. Firstly, deciding what to make my show about took as long as editing it. And second, I am definitely able to tell that my work is still sort of crappy. But I wont give up- I will continue to draft this piece untill the revision is due, and i hope it will get better.

I think my main struggles in making this show are due to lack of experience, and i hope that it will get better in time and practice.

Dear Listener,

For our Audio Essay we decided to do a spin on the Letters segment we listened to in class; instead of just reading a variety of interesting letters for entertainment value, we chose three letters from the Letters of Note website and took turns reading (either the entire letter or parts of the letter) aloud in two different tones. Our aim, aside from entertaining our audience with witty letters, is to show the audience how the tone of the speaker determines the effect and mood of the letter. For example, when speaker 1 reads a letter in a joking tone and speaker 2 reads the same letter in a serious tone, the effect in completely different-, even though the words of the letter have not changed.

The point that we are trying to covey is that our voices and how we choose to use them can be incredibly powerful. We encourage our listeners to recognize the power of their voices and to use them for constructive purposes. We want our listeners to walk away motivated and empowered to use their voices to make a difference, especially in election season. To get our point across to our listeners, we used mood-appropriate music and explained our purpose at the end of the Audio Essay.

We chose to focus on Ira Glass’s advice about using an anecdote and a moment of reflection (part 1). We use an anecdote-or a sequence of actions-as an introduction to our segment in order to captivate the listeners; we briefly describe how we came up with our idea and how we found our letters. At the end of our segment, we have a moment of reflection and explain to the listeners the point of listening to our segment in a broader sense; we reflect on how our segment demonstrates the power of an individual to use his/her voice in a constructive way. Both of these tools are important because they give our segment structure, meaning, and entertainment value. We also chose to focus on Glass’s advice about the importance of “abandoning crap” (part 2, 1:50). Glass stresses the need to be selective and ruthless to get something really good. We had to follow this advice when narrowing down the letters we included to 3 instead of 4 and when deciding what sound effects or comments to include in general.

Our main problems arose in the editing process. Both of us have little experience with Garageband and other editing software. We envisioned our Audio Essay to sound more professional and crafted, but we obviously couldn’t get it to sound perfect. We also struggled a little bit with making our tones sound varied when we took turns reading the letters, since we are not professional actors, but we recorded it a few times until we were satisfied with the results.