ENGL 213
Making Radio Spring 2023
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

This course has two aims. The first is to teach the necessary skills (including interview technique, field recording, editing, and scoring) to make broadcast-worthy audio nonfiction. The second is to use this process to investigate fundamental aspects of narrative. How does a story build a contract with listeners? What’s the role of the narrator? How can one appropriately speak for (and sometimes against) another person? This is less a course in journalism than an experiment in documentary cinema for the ear. We’ll do some reading in narrative theory and radio technique, and will listen to exemplary works (including episodes of This American Life, RadioLab, Love and Radio, and Snap Judgment), but most of our time–and this is a time-consuming course–will be spent making and critiquing each other’s pieces. Students will produce five or six pieces total, at least two of which must develop out of interviews with strangers.