Podcast emergency response

I've been staring at these notes on the whiteboard across from my desk. I scribbled them down in preparation for a call about a podcast script emergency. Having been called on a few times recently to rescue podcasts-in-distress, I had asked myself, "How do podcast scripts get in trouble, and what have I done to save them?" The answers were clear: they get in trouble by taking content written for the eye, and just making it shorter. I save them by recasting the same content for the ear. And looking back at some rescued scripts, I could see it was an issue of Orientation, Organization and Voice. 

• The Orientation needs to be centered on you, the listener -- not us, the all-knowing podcaster. It's not "here's everything we know about X." It's "something has changed in your world, and now X is more important to you than you may have thought." 
• The Organization that's worked for me is "here's something you need, here's what we've done for others who needed the same thing, and here's how we can do it for you."
• And the Voice has to be how people really talk. Seriously. All first responders to podcast trauma should be trained to clear "voice" as a probable cause. Code blue...we've got acute separation of verbs from their subjects, abnormally high counts of dependent clauses and a Flesch Reading Ease score that barely registers.