Features of Newspaper Language

Newspaper language: Political science researchers usually work on two resources; Academic
journals, and Primary resources (which include newspapers, magazines and articles).
Kinds of Newspaper Text: Newspaper material covers all kinds of texts; economic, political,
social, historical. It can also be art, sports, etc.
Audience: Everyone; experts and average people. In many cases, especially in American
newspapers (Brits are doing the same recently), the language tends to be almost a spoken
language rather than formal language.
Newspaper text:
I – Editorial ‫افتتاحيات‬
II – Opinion pieces ‫مقاالت الرأي‬
III – News ‫أخبار‬

Types of news stories:

1) Is what is called in newspaper jargon “Hard news”. Another term for it is “Timely news”.
In this type, headlines are short and attractive. A lead sentence which is usually in a
different font has the most important info in the article. Then the rest is elaboration and
details and a short conclusion.
2) What is called “soft news”. It includes emotions, ironies and sometimes humor. Here,
the lead is a full paragraph, not a sentence or two and does not necessarily come in the
beginning of the article, it could be second, third or even the last paragraph.
Features of Newspaper Language:
Headlines: Generally speaking, space is a concern in newspaper writing. In headlines, shorter
words are used to save space. Longer synonyms are used in the text.
Example: quake (Headline) earthquake (text).
Punctuation Marks: In all the above types, punctuation marks such as colons, apostrophes,
commas, semicolons, exclamation marks, hyphens, dashes parentheses, periods, question
marks and quotation marks are used extensively. Other Languages such as Arabic were
influenced to insert some features like quotation marks, even though they don’t exist in Arabic.
Graphology: Fonts have direct impact and readability, capitalization, bold and Italics are used
for emphasis. Bold is used to drive attention and it acts as speaking in a loud voice. Italics is
used for emphasis. Acronyms are also used throughout the text.
 Lexically: The language depends on the audience, but everything is acceptable in news
language, except profanities. You may also find words from French like déjà vu, or German like
Blitzkrieg.
Syntactically: Short forms, such as (it’s – hasn’t) are also acceptable in newspaper language.
Direct quotations are also used.
Figurative Language: Is also one of the features.