Publicistic Style.

Publicistic Style

Relations to Other Styles

- developed from the scientific style

- still shares many features with the scientific style: coherent and logical syntactical structure, careful paragraphing, expanded system of connectives

- also shares features with the style of belles-lettres: words with emotive meaning, imagery (x but not fresh or genuine)

Publicistic vs. Newspaper Style

- the goal of the publicistic style: ‘views’, i.e. to form the audience, to influence public opinion, to make the audience accept the speaker’s point of view

- the goal of the newspaper style: ‘news’, i.e. to inform the audience

Forms

- both impersonal (articles) and more individual varieties (essays, speeches)

- both written (essays, articles) and spoken varieties (speeches)

Substyles

- oratory: speeches, orations, radio and TV commentaries

- essays

- newspaper and magazine articles

Syntactical Features

- coherent and logical syntactical structure

- careful paragraphing

- simple rather than complex sentences

- expanded system of connectives

- brevity of expression

- abundant use of modifiers (adjectives, adverbs)

Lexical Features

- emphasis on accessibility and easy understanding > paraphrases rather than special terms

- only established and generally understood terms (e.g. Cold War)

- evaluating adjectives (e.g. the strongest pressure, growing menace, elementary blunder)

- euphemisms (e.g. ‘defence’ = war, ‘special purpose weapons’ = mass destruction weapons, ‘development areas’ = poor areas)

- traditional, unoriginal metaphors and similes

- newspaper clichés

- words with emotive meaning

- numerals, abbreviations, symbols

 

Oratorical Style

Forms

- speeches on political and social problems

- orations on solemn public occasions (public weddings, funerals, jubilees)

- radio and TV commentaries

- political speeches (parliamentary debates; speeches at congresses, meetings, election campaigns)

- speeches in courts of law

- sermons

General Characteristics

- direct contact with the audience > uses syntactical, lexical and phonetic devices

- direct address to the audience (e.g. ‘ladies and gentlemen’, ‘honourable members’; the use of the 2^nd person pronoun ‘you’)

- special obligatory forms opening (e.g. ‘My Lords’, ‘Mr Chairman’, ‘Your Worship’) and closing an oration (‘Thank you for your attention’)

- parallel constructions, anaphoric repetitions, synonymous phrase repetitions (to enable the audience to follow the speaker and retain the main points of the speech)

- rhetorical questions, questions-in-the narrative (to promote closer contact with the audience, to break the monotony of the intonation pattern and revive the attention of the audience)

- traditional metaphors, similes and parables (original images are more difficult to grasp and would divert the attention of the audience from the main point)

- sometimes colloquial words and contractions (e.g. I’ll)

- appeals both to the reason and emotions of the audience

 

The Style of Essays

Oratories vs. Essays

- oratories: seek an immediate effect > use simple, straightforward devices to communicate the main point to the audience at once

- essays: seek a lasting effect > use complex, elaborate devices to develop a depth of meaning discernible on close reading or rereading only

Shorter Forms

- on philosophical, social, aesthetic or literary subjects

- no deep examination of the subject, only touches upon the surface

- rather a series of personal and witty comments than a finished argument

Longer Forms

- incl. reviews, memoirs, treatises

- exhaustive studies rather than actual essays

General Characteristics

- 1^st person singular > personal approach to the subject

- emotive words

- abstract words of logical meaning

- connectives (to illustrate the correlation of ideas)

- similes and sustained metaphors (to help the cognitive process of the reader)

- epigrams, paradoxes, aphorisms

- brevity of expression, even epigrammaticalness

 

The Style of Articles

- articles = compositions of moderate length bringing attractive information with a commentary

- the use of stylistic devices varies depends on the character of the newspaper (tabloids x quality newspapers) or magazine (popular x scientific) and on the subject

Political Articles

- trong reliance on the extralinguistic context

- rare and bookish words

- neologisms

- epithets (e.g. Elizabeth I of England, ‘The Virgin Queen’)

- puns (e.g. ‘Pie in the sky is too colourless a phrase to describe his final speech. It was more like caviar in the stratosphere.’)

- alliteration (e.g. ‘the gap between promise and performance’)

- irony

Literary Articles

- abstract words of logical meaning

- original expressions

- emotional language