Newspaper Style

Newspaper Style
English newspaper writing dates from the 17th century. The first of any regular English newspapers was the Weekly News which first appeared in May23 , 1622. The first English daily newspaper “The Daily Courant “ was puplished on March 11, 1702. English newspaper style can be defined as a system of interrelated lexical, phraseological and grammatical means which is perceived by the community as a separate linguistic unity that serves the purpose of informing and instructing the reader. Information in the English newspaper is conveyed through the medium of: brief news items; press reports; articles purely informational in character; editorails , advertisements and announcements. The newspaper also seeks to influence public opinion on political and other matters. To understand the language peculiarities of English newspaper style it will be sufficient to analyse the following basic newspaper features: 1) brief news items, 2) advertisements and announcements, 3) the headline, 4) the editorial.
Brief News Items .The principal function of a brief news item is to inform the reader. It states facts without giving explicit comments. As an invariant, the language of brief news items is stylistically neutral, which keeps the allegedly neutral and unbiased nature of newspaper reporting. But apart from this, newspaper style has its specific vocabulary features and is characterized by an extensive use of:
a) special political and economic terms (president, election);
b) non-term political vocabulary (nation, crisis, agreement, member);
c) newspaper cliches (pressing problem, danger of war, pillars of society);
d) abbreviations (UNO (United Nations Organization), TUG (Trades Union Congress), NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), EEC (European Economic Community),
e) neologisms ( stop-go policies –contradictory policies)
As the reporter is obliged to be brief, he naturally tries to cram all his facts into the space allotted. The size of brief news items varies from one sentence to several (short) paragraphs. And generally, the shorter the news item, the more complex its syntactical structure is . The vocabulary of brief news is mostly devoid of emotional coloring .


Headline The main function of the headline is to inform the reader briefly what the text that follows is about. English headlines are short and catching. A skillfully turned out headline tells a story, or enough of it, to arouse or satisfy the reader's curiosity." In some English and American newspapers sensational headlines are quite common. The practices of headline writing are different with different newspapers. Headlines also abound in emotionally coloured words and phrases: End this Bloodbath (Morning Star) „ Milk Madness (Morning Star) ,Tax agent a cheat (Daily World) .No Wonder Housewives are Pleading: 'HELP* (Daily Mirror), Roman Catholic Priest sacked (Morning Star) .
Other stylistic devices are not infrequent in headlines, as for example, the pun (e.g. 'And what about Watt'—The Observer), alliteration (e.g. Miller in Maniac) , etc. Syntactically headlines are very short sentences or phrases of a variety of patterns having the following features :
a) Full declarative sentences, e.g. 'They Threw Bombs on Gipsy Sites' (Morning Star), 'Allies Now Look to London' (The Times) b) Interrogative sentences, e. g. 'Do-you love war?' (Daily World), 'Will Celtic confound pundits?' (Morning Star) c) Nominative sentences, e.g. 'Gloomy Sunday' (The Guardian), * Atlantic Sea Traffic' (The Times), 'Union peace plan for Girling stewards' (Morning Star) d) Elliptical sentences, f.e. with an auxiliary verb omitted, e.g. 'Initial report not expected until June!' (The Guardian), 'Yachtsman spotted" (Morning Star)

Editorials The function of the editorial is to influence the reader by giving an interpretation of certain facts. Editorials comment on the political and other events of the day. Their purpose is to give the editor's opinion and interpretation of the news published and suggest to the reader that it is the correct one. Like any evaluative writing, editorials appeal not only to the reader's mind but to his feelings as well. Hence the use of emotionally coloured language elements, both lexical and structural, is predominant.
Advertisements and Announcements There are two basic types of advertisements and announcements in the modern English newspaper: classified and non-classified. In classified advertisements and announcements various kinds of information are arranged according to subject-matter into sections, each bearing an appropriate name. In The Times, for example, the reader never fails to find several hundred advertisements and announcements classified into groups, such as BIRTHS, MARRIAGES, DEATHS, IN MEMORIAM, BUSINESS OFFERS, PERSONAL, etc. This classified arrangement has resulted in a number of stereotyped patterns regularly employed in newspaper advertising.