Structural Integrity

Now that I've written a draft for my actual transcript, I can take a step back, surveying that transcript from a broader view, to get a look at what sort of structure my podcast takes.

In the spirit of How Sound's podcast "My Kingdom for Some Structure," I have drawn my own visual representation of the structure for my podcast, presented to you here:

Here I adapted Bradley Campbell's structural representation of Morning Edition to suit my own purposes. First is the opening scene, which I use to introduce my topic. Then there's the deep dip of the V, the half-or-so of the podcast taken up with the history and explanation of pronoun cases. Last, are those three disjointed lines-- the tips I give for a few different common grammatical issues involving pronoun cases. You'll notice that, unlike in Campbell's drawing for Morning Edition, none of those lines are attached to the starting line-and-V, because I don't really return to that initial scene of my students asking the question.

The other important thing to do once I've got the words written out is citation-- the "integrity" part of my structural integrity. In a podcast, it is extremely important to cite sources verbally, so that those listening will know where the information's coming from. Once I wrote out my transcript draft, I went over everything again, making sure that I attributed everything in a natural manner in the body of the podcast, in addition to the usual in-text citations for the written transcript.

A great example of a professional podcast with oral citations is 99 Percent Invisible's podcast "Icon for Access." When I first listened to the short podcast (it's about fifteen minutes long, just like the one I'm writing), I counted about five overt verbal citations. That didn't seem quite right to me, so I played it again-- the second time, I noted fifteen verbal citations. They did such a good job of seeding the citations into the podcast that at first, I missed two-thirds of those! I can use the manner of citation in that podcast as a guide for good ways I can attribute my sources in the course of my own podcast.