For the ear

The request was that I read a video script and make sure it was written properly for the ear. Here's one sentence (with client identity masked) that I felt the need to doctor:

For more than XX years, we've worked with clients in da-da-dee and da-da-dum, and have developed superior industry expertise.

I edited it to read:

For more than XX years, we've worked with clients in da-da-dee and da-da-dum, developing a superior brand of industry expertise along the way.

The first problem was that second "and." It puts working with clients and developing expertise on equal footings, like "we mowed the grass and trimmed the hedges," two ideas side-by-side -- when actually the industry expertise was an outgrowth of the XX years of working with clients.

So we delete the "and" and insert the comma and we change "have developed" to "developing." All of which serves as a setup for the thing we really want people to remember, which is superior industry expertise. However, the way this sentence was written, those three key words race past the ear and then the sentence abruptly ends: Zoom! Screech!

We need to slow that whole sequence down and create a little space for the ear to do its work. So we change it from "developed superior industry expertise" to "developing a superior brand of expertise along the way," where "brand of" is a timing device and "along the way" is a rhythm apparatus; the ear gets two beats to grab "superior" before it has to snag "industry expertise," and then it has "along the way" as a cool-down period before cranking back up for the beginning of the next sentence.

The eyes that review this script can take all the time they want, reading and re-reading, and viewing each phrase in the context of the total piece. But the value of the script is determined by what happens when the words in spoken form go sailing past ears that get only one fleeting shot at them. Those ears need all the help they can get.