Should I Podcast From a Script?

This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “Should I Script My Podcast?

The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.

Transcript:

Shayla: Welcome to the Shortcut Content Podcast. I’m talking today with founder Dave Young. And, Dave, when I’m recording a podcast, should we script it out and read it or just kind of improv it as we go?

Dave: You should script out a podcast? Hmm. I think if you know me at all, if you’ve listened to anything I’ve said, I would say the answer is no. Now, if you’re going to script your podcast, it probably means that you’ve got the time to write a blog post anyway. We use podcasts as source material for blog posts. So when we interview an expert, when we interview somebody about a particular topic, we don’t expect them to have it written out. In fact, that’s the step that we’re saving them, when they use Shortcut Content. We conduct a short interview so that they can spit that content out and not have to sit down and write it out.

Now I’ve seen podcasts, or I’ve heard podcasts that were obviously written out before they were recorded. A lot of them are short form podcasts. I suppose you could say similar in length to what we do, and I think the reason for that is nobody’s going to sit down and write out a long-form podcast, certainly. When you listen to a podcast that’s an hour or an hour and a half in length, those are typically just long rambling conversations between a podcaster and their guest. The short versions of podcasts are often scripted. The way to spot them is if you’re look at the website of a podcaster and they have short podcasts, maybe three to six minutes, and they actually post the transcript of the podcast and the transcript reads word for word and reads very well, as if it were actually written for you to consume in a written format.

Most people don’t speak that way; we don’t speak the way we write. Our voice is going to be similar, and by voice I’m talking about your writing voice. It’s going to be similar to the way you speak. That’s usually the way it is. And some of your best writers will tell you that your written words should be conversational. That being said, we speak in fragments. And we often don’t finish thoughts, especially if we’re involved in a back-and-forth conversation with someone. I’ll start a sentence and you’ll finish it and vice versa. So if you transcribe that as your podcast, it’ll be really hard to read, it won’t make any sense.

So if you see a transcription of a podcast that reads word for word the way the podcast sounds when you listen to it, odds are they wrote it out ahead of time, especially if that transcription reads very well and very smoothly. It means that they actually wrote a blog post and their podcast is a reading of that blog post. And I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with that. We just like to skip that step. We do the writing afterwards. We take your words and we transcribe them, and then we rearrange them to make it a little easier for people to read. And that’s how do things at Shortcut Content.

Shayla: And a lot of times, Dave, if someone’s an expert on their topic, they don’t need much more than a bullet point to get going, right?

Dave: That’s exactly right. You don’t need to script out the entire thing, if you can just start with bullet points, you’ll have everything you need. Now, when we do interviews, often our guests, our experts, our customers, they’ll have a bullet pointed list of the main things that they want to talk about. And if you’re doing it by yourself, if you’re just recording yourself doing a podcast or even doing a video, one of the other techniques you can use is instead of using bullet points, write each bullet out as a question, and then answer the questions, as if you were being interviewed.

Shayla: And if anyone has any questions about how to get started with you guys, where do they go, who do they talk to?

Dave: They’ll find everything they need at ShortcutContent.com.

Shayla: Thanks, Dave.

Dave: Thank you.