What is word economy?

It’s the art of using less words to get your point across.

One thing I noticed when I was presenting my own radio shows was that admittedly, I wasn’t the best at this because sometimes I didn’t prepare as much as I should have!

By preparing properly, you have the chance to look at your notes, bullet points & stories, and reword it so it can be understood by anyone.

Word economy is a skill that you will need to build up over time and a skill I am still trying to master to this day!

Let’s say you find a story that you want to share with your listeners, but there are far too many details to share in a short link. The simple and most effective things you can do is take out the details that don’t need to be there and reword it so that anybody can hear what you’re saying and understand it.

For example:

“This week, a woman called Irene has celebrated her 100^th birthday by winning the jackpot at her local bingo hall in Glasgow. She took home the grand prize of £250,000 after getting a full house at 8pm on Tuesday.”

The story is good, but the content would sound strange on-air if you were to read it straight off the page because;

1. It’s written like a news story.
2. There’s a lot of information there – Some important, some not important.
3. Can you put your own spin on this?

We’ll cover point  3 in future post, but for now, let’s make a note of the most important information.

• This week
• Irene
• Glasgow (local?)
• Wins £250,000 (Jackpot)
• 100^th Birthday

From these bullet points, you can see the full story in short form & structure your link using word economy;

“This week a local woman called Irene has hit the headlines because she won the £250,000 jackpot at the Bingo! Why is it a headline? She won it on her 100^th Birthday!”

Immediately, you can see (and hear) that you’ve got the most important points over quickly and most importantly your listener can still understand it!