The Language in News Stories

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 319.

Come back to Tasks 1-3, choose any story and on the basis of the given information write a lead and the secondary paragraph. While writing keep in mind your supposed audience, time, space and if necessary, intertextuality.

You have already learnt some things about the structure of a news story and the extralinguistic peculiarities of its contents. Now you are going to read useful information about the language of a news item. After reading formulate short rules about the language of this genre.

Text 4. Writing for Newspapers [5]

As a reporter, you should use simple and straightforward language. You also need to get the balance right between being formal enough to sound authoritative but also using the language that is lacking in stuffiness.

As a general rule you should not be using colloquial language or slang apart from in quotes. However, some newspapers do use terms like “cops” and “town hall chiefs” and you need to find out your newspaper's policy on these.

Even if you do not use slang, you need to make sure you are only using words that people use in everyday conversation. For example, never write “in addition to” because a person in the street would be unlikely to say this. Use “as well as” instead.

You also need to make sure you are concise. This means you should go through every story after you have written it to make sure there are no words that do not need to be there. As the maxim goes, if in doubt, take it out.