《新闻英语与范文评析》笔记

《新闻英语与范文评析》理论题笔记

1. The Function of Headlines

A: Five main functions.

First, a headline summarizes a news story with the most important and attractive words. A reader usually doesn’t have time for every piece of news that’s printed. With the guidance of terse headlines, readers can quickly find the parts they want to read.

Second, it sparkles the whole page. One can imagine how suffocative a newspaper could be if there were not a single headline and dozens of news stories just piled up. Third, it beautifies the form of edition. Headlines are good decoration to the page as they appear in various sizes and typefaces.

Fourth, a headline sometimes is used to attract the readers’ attention.

Fifth, a headline can be used to make some comment.

2. Grammatical features of headlines

First, there are omission of article, conjunction, pronoun, link verb and auxiliary verb. It is used to summarize and highlight the content. For example, “China sees housing as (an) engine to drive (the) economy.”

Second, present tense is used to show things that happened in the past.

Three reasons:

First, it saves space. In most cases past tense is longer in space than the present tense, with an “ed” in extra. So present tense can save some space for a headline. Secondly, present tense is active. It puts the reader into action and gives him a

feeling of participation, so that it attracts readers’ attention.

Thirdly, a present-tense emphasizes the timeliness of the news. It gives the reader a sense of freshness and immediacy, although he might well understand that a head in the present tense in today’s newspaper is presenting yesterday’s news. More:

First, use “be to do” instead of “will do” to present the future tense, and “be” is often omitted in order to save space.

Secon d, use “be doing” to present things that are happening, and “be” is often omitted in order to save space.

Thirdly, sometimes present tense can also present things that are happening or will happen, for example,”Labour plans BBC shake-up. ”

Third, active voice is more often used. It is more colorful and appealing, more forward and powerful in transferring meaning than passive voice. The word ”be” or “by” are often omitted only use past participle to express passivity. Fourth, punctuations are used sometimes in headlines. English headlines are known for its terse structure, and punctuations are used in much rarer cases than in the text. Punctuations only appear in the head for two reasons. First, they are used to save space. For example, comma is used to sub stitute “and” only to save space. Secondly, they are used to show the relation between two groups of words. For example, a dash is used to connect a quotation and its attribution.

3. Why sometimes in headlines, “and” ,“the” or “to be” are not omitted? A: They are not to be omitted in two occasions. One, when they are in set phrases,