The advantages of applying the concept of rhetorical style in language-oriented Journalism Studies (original) (raw)
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This article begins with a delineation of the context of contemporary professional journalism, particularly its market-driven, technologically advanced and discursively diverse character. Journalism studies scholars trace media evolution with the aid of content analyses. On the other hand, linguists, including stylisticians, try to capture recent changes in media language with the use of qualitative methods, e.g., with categories derived from discourse analysis, which enable them to see how hegemonic discourses are (re)constructed in journalistic texts. This article elaborates on the category of rhetorical style and shows its applicability to the studies of various media “rhetorics.” Following a review of literature and of author’s own projects, the article illustrates possible applications of and results of the analyses with the use of rhetoricalstyle as a functional analytical category to delimit generic, register and stylistic variations of media discourse including its subgenres (e.g. headlines).
The Annales of Ovidius University of Constanța, Philology Series, 2013
The journalistic discourse is a rhetorical practice in which we observe elements of classic rhetoric, according to the thinking of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, as well as modern elements of the 19th and 20th century, according to the thinking of the new language philosophers: Jacques Moeschler, Anne Reboul, M. Meyer, M. Foulcault, Umberto Eco, A. Jaworski and N. Coupland, etc. In the journalistic discourse, we assist to a rhetorical construction2 by means of language, due to the descriptive technique. The resort to ration is focused upon the mass-media product3 and upon the atmosphere technique: the resort to emotion, pathos, the construction of political symbolics in order to obtain non-rationed reactions. The journalistic rhetoric dominates the reader by conveying emotions as well as arguments across several types of discourse, sometimes even opposed in colloquial, informative terms – official, pamphleteer (of opinion, with the related stylistic procedures: irony, sarcasm).Our theoretical demonstration is accompanied by applications in Constanta’s local media, through examples from publications on different political perspectives: Cuget Liber, Ziua de Constanţa, Independentul and Telegraf.
THE LANGUAGE OF JOURNALISM AND DISCOURSE
XORIJIY TILLARNI O‘QITISHNING ZAMONAVIY TENDENSIYALARI MASALALARI (MUAMMO VA YECHIMLAR), 2023
this article investigates journalism studies, its types and features, the language of journalism and its role in discourse and the importance of publicist style in journalism.
Telling Media Tales: the news story as rhetoric
The thesis explores the rhetorical properties of the modern news report. In order to account for the distinctive style of news reporting it extends Systemic Functional Linguistic theories of the interpersonal to develop new analyses of the semantics of attitude, evaluation and inter-subjective positioning. It applies these analyses to identify three distinct interpersonal modes of news reporting style which will be termed journalistic 'voices'. These analyses are used to explicate the rhetorical properties of the voice most typically associated with 'hard news' reporting, to be termed 'reporter voice'.
News Talk: Investigating the Language of Journalism
Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 2011
In speech and language communities with developed spheres of journalism, news talk functions as one of the most authoritative-and potentially influential-forms of linguistic action. How do journalists produce this authoritative discourse? Under what assumptions, ideologies, and constraints are they working on a daily basis? Research into the language of news journalism has blossomed over the past several years, but textual and formal linguistic approaches have tended to sideline the ethnographic attention that would answer these key questions. In this valuable and much-anticipated contribution to the burgeoning field of media anthropology, Colleen Cotter brings a practice-oriented ethnographic approach to investigating the language of traditional newspaper journalism in the contemporary United States and United Kingdom. As a linguist writing from the perspective of a native practitioner of the journalistic craft, Cotter regularly bridges journalistic practice and sociolinguistic analysis, drawing on her experience as a news reporter and editor to offer unusual first-person insight into the newsmaking process. In this monograph, she marries methodological approaches from interactional sociolinguistics with a linguistic anthropological emphasis on ethnographic context to examine production at newspapers of varying scope, from The Washington Post to The Irish Emigrant Newsletter. The result is an innovative contribution to sociolinguistics, media studies, studies of professionalism and professional socialization, and the growing anthropology of media. Within anthropology, it should benefit both specialists in media ethnography and ethnographers who might use journalists' work as primary data. Cotter provides not only a detailed production study for dedicated students of media language, but also a guide to news processes for anthropologists and linguists interested in, for example, how a lead is fashioned or what criteria place a story on page 3 rather than page 1. The reader is introduced to dominant practice traditions within the speech community of professional print journalists, including the "news values," "language attitudes," and emphases on "craft" and "community" that guide daily linguistic decision making. In the introduction and chapter 1, Cotter explains her intervention as one of attending to "the process and practice of everyday journalism" (p. 13), "including the norms and routines of the community of news practitioners," rather than exclusively to text (p. 21). Chapter 1 provides a useful overview of existing studies of media discourse, which, as Cotter points out, have tended to focus on its structure, its linguistic function, and/or the ideologies reflected within and spread by it, especially as developed in studies of linguistic variation, framing, and style and within critical discourse analysis (CDA). While sensitive to (and, indeed, drawing on) the insights generated by research within these frameworks, Cotter positions her work more squarely within the ethnography of communication in the Hymesian tradition. By the "news talk" and "language of journalism" referenced in her title, she thus means to include not only the texts of news stories, but also the "talk that occurs in the course of accomplishing communicative and discursive tasks, between and among members of a community," such as conversations between journalists and meta-discourse about newswriting (p. 23). The remainder of Part I details how journalists are socialized into the "primary values" of craft and community (chapter 2), reporting and editing standards, and news culture more broadly (chapter 3). Much of this is learned in university journalism programs, but Cotter also stresses that "[t]he 'apprentice model' is the operative learning format in the journalist's world," such that the newsroom is as much a locus of learning as the classroom (p. 63). These chapters could be read independently as an introduction to journalists' professionalization. bs_bs_banner E106 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
Mediatization and the language of journalism by Mediatization and the language of journalism
2015
At the intersection of applied linguistics and journalism studies lies media linguistics. This emerging subdisciplinary label is an umbrella term for the study of mass mediated language use, which, for the purposes of this chapter, is restricted to news media: public or private institutions of mass communication that produce and spread public information commoditized as news. Two issues stand out in the literature on media linguistics (and beyond). The first is the shifting ecology of contemporary journalism: in an always-on, digital mediascape, the craft of journalism is increasingly defined by screenwork. The second is the perspective of mediatization, which highlights the central role mediated communication plays in high modern societies. This chapter discusses two responses to the mediatization of society: the cultural authority of journalists as knowledge creators and knowledge brokers in fluid, heteroglossic media environments, and satirical responses to the proliferation of n...
Stylistic and Lexico-Semantic Features of Media Discourse
The American journal of social science and education innovations, 2023
The language of the media quite clearly reflects the changes taking place in all spheres of life in a particular country. At the same time, Internet communication as a special virtual information and communication environment creates new conditions for the implementation of the language and style of media texts. The diversity of media texts requires research not only into specifics, but also into analysis of stylistics and lexical-semantic features.
A Rhetorical Approach to Journalistic Writing
1992
Magazine writing courses lean heavily on a model borrowed from journalism, but this is not the only, nor the most advantageous, model to apply to magazine writing. Despite the differences between the constraints that magazine writers and news writers face, many texts on magazine writing are reminiscent of textbooks on basic news writing. However, the rich heritage of the discipline of rhetoric and its modern offspring, composition studies, offers the magazine writer a wide and versatile vocabulary, a long tradition of descriptive analysis and critical thinking, and an elastic notion of genre. Perhaps most important is the basic premise that writing is not about information processing; instead it is about writers and readers and the way they can connect. A rhetorically-minded magazine writing textbook would answer the interdisciplinary calls for critical thinking instruction, and it would give students a more coherent experience as they go from freshman composition and English literature to journalism. (RS)
Mediatization and the language of journalism
At the intersection of applied linguistics and journalism studies lies media linguistics. This emerging subdisciplinary label is an umbrella term for the study of mass mediated language use, which, for the purposes of this chapter, is restricted to news media: public or private institutions of mass communication that produce and spread public information commoditized as news. Two issues stand out in the literature on media linguistics (and beyond). The first is the shifting ecology of contemporary journalism: in an always-on, digital mediascape, the craft of journalism is increasingly defined by screenwork. The second is the perspective of mediatization, which highlights the central role mediated communication plays in high modern societies. This chapter discusses two responses to the mediatization of society: the cultural authority of journalists as knowledge creators and knowledge brokers in fluid, heteroglossic media environments, and satirical responses to the proliferation of news discourse.
At the intersection of applied linguistics and journalism studies lies media linguistics. This emerging subdisciplinary label is an umbrella term for the study of mass mediated language use, which, for the purposes of this chapter, is restricted to news media: public or private institutions of mass communication that produce and spread public information commoditized as news. Two issues stand out in the literature on media linguistics (and beyond). The first is the shifting ecology of contemporary journalism: in an always-on, digital mediascape, the craft of journalism is ncreasingly defined by screenwork. The second is the perspective of mediatization, which highlights the central role mediated communication plays in high modern societies. This chapter discusses two responses to the mediatization of society: the cultural authority of journalists as knowledge creators and knowledge brokers in fluid, heteroglossic media environments, and satirical responses to the proliferation of news discourse.