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Journalistic Genre: Style, Features and Linguistic ToolsA Paper in Stylistics

Course Instructor Assist. Prof.

Dr. Muhammed A. Al-Mallah Dec.2013

Journalistic Genre: Style, Features and Linguistic Tools

Journalistic style holds a special place in the style literary genre; it seeks to satisfy both intellectual and aesthetic needs. The importance of topics covered by the media requires a thorough reflection and appropriate means of logical exposition of thought. Expression of the author's attitude to events is often impossible without the use of emotional language. Journalistic style is characterized by the wide range of literary vocabulary, scientific and technical terms of everyday words. Sometimes the writer goes beyond the literary language, using his speech or slang.

Generally speaking, one of the important functions of journalism (in particular, its newspaper and magazine types) is its informative nature. The desire to promptly report the recent news is reflected in the nature of communication. As fiction, it has considerable power to influence, using variety of trails, rhetorical figures, and multiple lexical and grammatical means.

Form and style matter in journalism. To a large extent, a newspaper’s identity is determined by its appearance and its tone. Readers want to feel comfortable with a paper’s design, its departmentalization and its use of illustrations, color and headlines. The style of writing and the form of stories should please them.

Journalism is a performative discourse which aims to impose and legitimize valid representations of the social world. The process of gathering, selecting and presenting news is mostly based on unnoticed and undisputed conventions and professional routines. Firstly, these principles and practices determine which parts of reality are represented in the media – in other words, which facts fit the form. Secondly, the form chosen determines how news is framed – the same facts can be used to construct many diverse stories. Michael Schudson argues that the power of journalism mainly lies in its ability to provide the forms in which things are declared to be true. Conventions of form and style determine, therefore, which stories are told and how they are told. By doing so they determine how we experience the world. Schudson speaks in this respect of the politics of narrative form. Style in journalism can be defined as ‘the choice between functionally equivalents of language’. As one journalist puts it: ‘a “that way” which could have been chosen instead of a “this way” … and these different ways of speaking can carry different social meanings’.

Style refers to practices and routines which underlie them. These routines are the cultural values commonly shared by groups of journalists. They determine what journalism is and what it should be to a specific group – what news is and how a journalist should act. What is included in or excluded from stories is to a large extent determined by routines. They offer the ideological framework which lies behind the process of gathering, selecting and presenting news.

Features of Journalistic style: Lexical choice of words and their meanings:

Words convey the imprint of society and of value judgments in particular. They convey connoted as well as denoted meanings. Take this text for example, published in the Guardian Weekly, which examined words used by journalists during the 1991 gulf war against Iraq:

Iraq

Has

Coalition forces

We have

 

A war machine

 

army, navy and air forces

 

Censorship reporting restrictions

Propaganda press briefings

Destroy suppress

Kill eliminate

Kill neutralize

Iraq Launches

Sneak attacks

Without provocation

 

We Launch

First strikes

Pre-emptively

Their men are

troops

Our men are

boys

Sentence construction : Syntax and transitivityTransitivity describes the relationships between

participants and the roles they play in the processes described in reporting. The study of transitivity is concerned with how actions are represented; what kind of actions appear in a text, who does them and to whom they are done. For instance, consider the sentences published by two politically divergent publications during the miners’ strikes in 1983 in the UK: the Daily Mail, a conservative, and the Morning Star, a left- wing newspaper. - 41 policemen had been treated in hospital the Daily Mail - Police horses and their riders were stoned

In terms of transitivity, the police are represented here as the objects of violent transitive action, while the miners appear to be the agents of this violence.- Police attacked isolated group of miners The Morning Star- Several miners were hit by truncheons Here, the miners become the object of a violent police transitive action.

Modality forms the counter-part of transitivity, referring to judgments, comment and attitude in the text and talk, and specifically the degree to which the writer or speaker is committed to the claim he or she is making. Consider this sentence in the Daily Mail.

- Britain could suffer a Madrid –style terrorist attack in the run up to the Royal Wedding and General Election, the country’s most senior police officer warned yesterday (Feb. 2005) The ambiguity of such modal claim is paradoxically heightens the sense of dread and threat.

C. Rhetorical Tropes: Journalism is best approached in an argumentative

discourse genre. A journalist’s style should aim to persuade the audience that his interpretation of an event is rational and appropriate. Such an aim is best achieved through the strategic use of figurative language tools like (metaphor, metonym and wordplay).

A Metaphor, in its general sense, perceives one thing in terms of another. Such utilization of this trope is common in journalistic style economy (overheated economy, stagnant economy, tiger economies; Production: peak, financial boom), Sports (attack and defense, counter-attack, shoot at the goal). If a team is under pressure for a long time, it is under siege. Four basic figurative tropes prevailed before the invasion of Iraq 2003: games of the Iraqi regime, patience of the white house, making a case and selling the plan.

Metonym is a form of substitution in which something that is associated with X is substituted for X. A metonym is one word; phrase or object is substituted for another from a semantically related field. Metonymic replacements are of several kinds, to name but few:

Replacing an object for another: Rachel Corrie was killed by an Israeli bulldozer.

People replaced by a place: the White house declared. Puns are another form of achieving effectiveness and

persuasion. It works by substitution of one meaning, sound, spelling and so on for another - they can be aural or visual and are very common. Ambiguity is essential for a pun, but locating the exact point at which a pun works is not always clear, and many involve meaning, spelling and sound together. There are several types of puns employed in journalistic style:

Homonymic puns – based on the similarity of words identical in sound and spelling but with two or more unrelated meanings;

e.g. Panda can’t bear beastly behaviour

In this headline the word bear has two meanings (animal [n.] vs. to have tolerance [v.]). Furthermore, the stylistic significance of the headline is supported by alliteration: bear beastly behaviour.

The Stone age

In its primary meaning the Stone Age is a period in human history. However, the article refers to the surname of an American actress to indicate that she is ageing.

Polysemic puns – based on the similarity of words identical in sound and spelling but with two or more related meanings; e.g.

It’s business and it’s fishy.

In its primary meaning, fishy means resembling fish in taste or odour, but in the contextual meaning fishy refers to something dubious.

Homophonic puns – based on the similarity of words identical in pronunciation but different in spelling and meaning; e.g.

Czech out the prices in BrnoThis example uses the word Czech instead of the verb check. The article is about the Czech city of Brno and the surprisingly low prices there.  Finnish and be done with it The pun is based on the homophones Finnish – finish. The article makes reference to the Finnish language and political correctness.

References Broersma, Marcel (2006) Form, Style and

Journalistic Strategies. A paper in Stylistics

Richardson, John (2007) Analysing Newspapers: An approach from Critical Discourse Analysis. Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire, UK.

Štulajterová, Alena (2010) Wordplay in Media Discourse. An unpublished paper in stylistics.