RSSReview: Introducing the Language of the News
May 29
AUTHOR: M. Grazia Busa
TITLE: Introducing the Language of the News
SUBTITLE: A Student’s Guide
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Sibo Chen, Simon Fraser University
SUMMARY
Living in the age of information, we are surrounded by news reports. These
stories not only keep us updated on current affairs around the globe, but also
fundamentally shape our values, beliefs, and behaviors through their
agenda-setting and framing effects. Thus, it is crucial for undergraduates who
are interested in news to learn the production of news texts and the functions
of language within this process.
Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, “Introducing the Language of the
News” aims to offer an accessible reference for the study of news from
linguistic perspectives. Using English news as its primary examples, this
textbook covers key issues within news discourse analysis and introduces how
different linguistic choices can highlight different interpretations of news
texts. In addition, the exercises after each chapter make the book an ideal
reference reading for students learning English news writing in an English as
a Foreign/Second Language (i.e., EFL/ESL) context.
Introduction: Language and Texts
The introduction overviews “linguistic competence” and “register”. The author
highlights several factors contributing to variation in language use in our
daily lives: communicative purposes, discourse participants, communication
media (e.g., spoken versus written), and social contexts (e.g., formal versus
informal). In short, this introductory chapter discusses key components of
genre/register research and sets the theoretical background for the discussion
of news discourse in the following chapters.
Chapter One: Making News
The focus of Chapter One is the media industry and driving factors of news
production. To be specific, the chapter reviews six factors of news
production: media ownership, market pressure, labor division with the
newsroom, time deadline and space-on-the-page constraints, information
technology, and convergence of media forms.
Chapter Two: Defining News
This chapter provides a definition of news and explains factors influencing
the writing of news stories. According to the author, news can be defined as
“the relaying of events that are both recent (new) and relevant (interesting)”
(p. 25). Following such a definition, the author reviews the primary factors
that make a story potentially newsworthy: timeliness, location, topic and
familiarity, pictures and multimedia, dramatic potential, and public
interests. In addition to newsworthiness, objectivity is another crucial
standard for news texts and it determines the neutral language style of news
texts. The author concludes this chapter by explaining different types of
newspapers (e.g., broadsheets versus tabloids) and stories (e.g., hard news
versus soft news).
Chapter Three: Sourcing News
Chapter Four: Conveying Meaning through Design
These two short chapters (each is 10 pages long) briefly review the
information gathering stage of news production and the visual layout of a
newspaper page. Chapter Three starts by making a distinction between on-diary
sources (i.e., regular contacts of journalists) and off-diary sources (i.e.,
contacts reached by journalists when unanticipated events happen). The chapter
then reviews general issues regarding interviews and how information gathered
by journalists is used in news stories: attributions, anonymous sources, and
quotations. Following the above discussion, Chapter Four focuses on print news
and analyzes how page design (e.g., the position of headlines, pictures, body
copies, etc.) represents a powerful form of non-verbal communication.
Chapter Five: Structuring the Story
Chapter Six: Head, Lead and Proper Story
These two Chapters examine news story structures and the linguistic features
of news headlines, leads and the body copies. To be specific, Chapter Five
deals with three basic features of news stories: story structure, impersonal
language, and coherent texts. The chapter starts with an overview of three
common structures of news stories: the inverted pyramid, narrative
storytelling, and the hourglass (i.e., a combination of the previous two).
Then, the chapter goes into an exploration of impersonal writing and how
certain linguistic rules (e.g., the avoidance of first- or second-person
pronouns and emotive words or expressions) maintain the objectivity of news.
The chapter concludes with a brief explanation of coordination and
subordination and their function in language coherence.
By comparison, the focus of Chapter Six is on the components of news stories
(e.g., headlines, leads and body copies) and their grammatical features and
embedded rhetorical strategies. The author first discusses the synthetic
language of news headlines and how such linguistic characteristics lead to a
nominalization tendency in news headlines. Then, the discussion of news
headlines shifts to their rhetorical features (e.g., intertextuality, word
association, and metaphor), followed by an overview of informative headlines.
Finally, the chapter explains two types of news leads (i.e., direct leads and
delayed leads) and offers an example of how information is structured in the
body section.
Chapter Seven: The Tools of the Trade
Chapter Eight: Reporting Information and Evaluation of Likelihood
Chapter Nine: The Power of Words
The final three chapters are the most linguistic-centric ones, as they offer
an overview of linguistic strategies used in news discourse. Chapter Seven
examines the linguistic strategies used by journalists to compact lots of
information in short texts, such as nominalization, brevity (e.g., using
“although” instead of “despite the fact that”), and the passive voice. The
chapter then reviews some general syntactic issues in news writing: verbal
structure, voice, and thematization.
Chapter Eight discusses how journalists use various linguistic choices to
convert news sources into news stories. The Chapter explores two aspects of
information reporting: the use of reported speech (e.g., direct quote,
indirect quote, paraphrase, etc.), and the use of modality (e.g., epistemic
modality versus deontic modality).
Finally, Chapter Nine explains the “power of words” and how newswriters can
exploit the expressive potential of language to convey particular stances on
news topics. The primary focus of the chapter is the English language, and the
author demonstrates how careful word choices influence readers’
interpretations of the same news event, reinforce society’s perception of
certain groups, and promote particular ideologies.
EVALUATION
Overall, this book presents a concise but well-organized introduction of news
production and discourse. Covering a wide range of topics in only 164 pages,
the book can serve as a good complementary reading for ESL/EFL learners
interested in English news. As mentioned earlier, the student exercises at the
end of each chapter make the book ready-to-use for ESL/EFL instructors. In
addition, the book’s language style is straightforward and succinct, which is
another advantage for its usage in ESL/EFL settings.
Meanwhile, there are two minor limitations within the book, which might be
addressed in its further editions. First, the book may consider re-organizing
certain chapters to make its presentational logic more coherent. Chapter Three
(Sourcing News) can be combined with Chapter Eight (Reporting Information and
Evaluation of Likelihood), as many linguistic details of the former are not
properly explained until the latter. Similarly, Chapter Five (Structuring the
Story) and Chapter Six (Head, Lead and Proper Story) can be combined, since
both chapters deal with the structuring of news texts. Second, although the
book’s simplicity is a desired design for its primary readers (ESL/EFL
learners), it would still be beneficial if more theories regarding news
discourse were introduced in the book. In the current version, the critical
analysis of news discourse is only introduced in the very last chapter and
several key texts within the field (e.g., Fairclough, 1989; van Dijk, 1988)
are not discussed. In the discussion of the media industry (Chapters One &
Two), some additional reviews of the political economy of communication would
also be beneficial (e.g. Mosco, 2009; Wasko, Murdock & Sousa, 2011).
Overall, the book is a good reference for intro-level courses on language and
communication, especially for ESL/EFL learners who want a concise overview of
English news discourse.
REFERENCES
Busa, M. G. (2013). “Introducing the language of the news”. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Fairclough, N. (1989). “Language and power”. London: Longman.
Mosco, V. (2009). “The political economy of communication” (2nd ed.). London:
Sage.
Wasko, J., Murdock, G., & Sousa, H. (2011). “The handbook of political economy
of communications”. London: Sage.
Van Dijk, T. (1988). “News as discourse”. Hillsdale, NJ: L. Erlbaum
Associates.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sibo Chen is a PHD student in the School of Communication, Simon Fraser
University. He received his MA in Applied Linguistics from the Department of
Linguistics, University of Victoria, Canada. His major research interests are
language and communication, discourse analysis, and genre theories.
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