修辞在媒体英语新闻标题中的应用(3)
To Lie or Not to Lie——The Doctor’s Dilemma
2.8 Repetition
(1)Definition
A word or a phrase appears over one time in the beginning or the ending of a sentence, or appears in several continuous sentences. Repetition emphasizes the subject or demonstrates the emotion in headline.
(2)Examples
Blood Must Atone for Blood
Cold, Cold Heart
2.9 Parallelism
(1)Definition
Parallelism uses several sentences that are same or similar in structure to form a complete segment. Parallelism is clear in both structure and connotation, and it is commonly used in news headlines.
(2)Examples
To Work Is Human, To Slack Divine
The World Listens, the World Watches
3. Functions of Rhetoric in English Media News Headlines
Some say that the competition for number of readers between different newspapers is the competition of news headlines. The sentence shows the importance and the function of news headlines. (Yao Jianjun, 1997: 151) Some say that a good headline is half the story. Except the exaggerating part in this sentence, it clarifies the significance of news headlines. In order to make headlines the “eyes”, “advertisements” and “essentials” of news, authors of news employ various kinds of rhetoric in the creation of their works. Generally speaking, there are three functions of rhetoric in English media news headlines: rhetoric helps to make headlines more vivid; rhetoric helps to express authors’ positions; rhetoric helps to guide readers in newspaper reading.
3.1 Rhetoric Helps to Make Headlines More Vivid
Rhetoric is a packing process of plain words. Plain words are more attractive to readers after this packing process. Rhetoric could make plain words alive and monotonous description vivid. An English newspaper includes tens of pages; nobody could read every word in it like reading a novel. In 1990, a joint research made by the Poynter medium institute and the Gallup showed that 56 percent of readers had read news headlines in newspapers, but only 25 percent of them would read the content of the news (Dorothy. A. Powers, 1996: 258). This research proves that every reader would like to get information as fast and accurate as possible, and headlines are their first-hand source of information. So the most important function of rhetoric in news headlines is to concisely and accurately pass information to readers, which will help the readers to get general understanding of the content of the news. If news headlines do not employ proper rhetoric to guide the readers for reading, the readers may skip the news and miss the information they are looking for. This is one of the reasons why so much rhetoric is used in contemporary English news headlines.
3.2 Rhetoric Helps to Express Authors’ Positions
Rhetoric in news headlines often conveys some hiding information; this information is a tactful expression of the opinions and positions of the authors. In some degree this could be a spin control. Rhetoric is in some way like condiment in cooking, different rhetoric will make different taste of the news. The value and nature of news is to help readers understand the meaning of facts and then accept a proper position. News headlines contain either praise or criticism; this makes headlines windows of the news.
At the same time, rhetoric covers the spin control; it makes headlines seemingly in accordance with the objective regulation to the news report. Except containing objective content, however, rhetoric in news headlines should also be as accurate as possible. Only by this way can readers establish correct understanding of the facts. Strictly speaking, a misuse of rhetoric in news headlines should be regarded as an inaccurate news report, which could contribute nothing good to the newspaper but only damages the reputation of the newspaper.
3.3 Rhetoric Helps to Guide Readers in Newspaper Reading
As a member of mass media, newspapers have a reader group which contains readers from different knowledge level and different background. So language used in news is always in accordance to the need of the public. This determines that news in some professional fields (e.g. technology news, financial news) could be understood by readers only by employing rhetoric, for instance use some simple metaphor to explain a piece of news about a failure in a rocket launching.
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