An outline of the analysis of a newspaper writing

1.4.1. To fully understand the linguo-stylistic peculiarities of English newspaper style it will be sufficient to analyse the two basic newspaper genres, namely, a news report as best illustrating a purely objective, matter-of-fact way of presenting information, on the one hand, and a feature article as a vehicle of subjective interpretation and appraisal, on the other.

The first step in the analysis of a newspaper writing is to distinguish between the above two newspaper genres and to justify your choice. It is recommended that you should do it in accordance with the following plan:

1. to characterize the type of information a newspaper item conveys and the author’s attitude towards it;

2. to analyse the arrangement (layout) of the information conveyed (the division into physical and conceptual paragraphs, the presence of the so-called ‘lead’);

3. to highlight the most salient linguo-stylistic features of a newspaper writing in question, including lexical and certain grammatical ones.

4. to comment upon linguo-stylistic peculiarities of a headline and subheadings (if any);

5. to make a conclusion concerning the genre of a newspaper writing under analysis.

1.4.2. Further analysis of a newspaper text presupposes the implementation of a textlinguistic approach to it. Like any text, a newspaper text, no matter what genre it belongs to, is characterized by functional-communicative, structural and semantic wholeness which, first and foremost, manifests itself in the unity of its compositional structure and the logico-semantic integrity of its content. So, it is expedient to focus on the analysis of a newspaper text in terms of such important text categories as informativity and cohesion turning, first of all, to various lexical means of cohesion which contribute to the logico-semantic wholeness of a text.

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