What is the journalistic style?


Publicistic style performs several functions at once. First, the texts written in this style serve to inform the reader (listener, viewer). Secondly, the author of the text expresses an emotional attitude to what is happening and tries to captivate, to infect this audience with this emotion. Thirdly, journalistic texts are the strongest means of ideological and propaganda influence.

From the tasks performed in the texts of the journalistic style, logically the main features of the style. Informing readers as quickly and easily as possible is carried out in the media – newspapers, magazines, on television and radio, in the Internet media. The texts of this sphere are characterized by clarity, consistency, and standardization. To formulate the news quickly and clearly, journalists use speech standards (commercial structures, law enforcement agencies, budget sphere, etc.). They need to be distinguished from clichés. Standards express the idea concisely, but clearly. Clichés,

on the other hand, blur the essence and interfere with the perception of information.

The second side of the journalistic style is its emotionality. The author needs to convince the reader of his correctness, do not remain indifferent to the problem. For this, the texts are filled with artistic means, borrowed from the literary language, spoken and officially-business speech.

For the texts of this style, general accessibility and targeting are also characteristic. Since the subject of the speeches in the media is very broad, almost unlimited, the journalist mediates between various spheres of life and the reader. Therefore, any complex topic he needs to uncover is understandable for a wide range of readers, but without losing the semantic load. Even if there are complex terms in the text, their meaning is deciphered. At the same time, when composing a speech, the author focuses on a particular segment of the audience, so he selects a vocabulary that will be understandable to this particular audience.

For word-formation in the publicistic style, the use of suffixes of foreign origin (-izm), Old Slavic

prefixes (inter-, pro-, co-), foreign prefixes (post-, trans-, counter-, hyper-) is characteristic. From the point of view of morphology, style differs by a large number of nouns in the singular, which acquire collective significance (the reader, the viewer), verbs in the present tense. The syntactic constructions in such texts are simple, clear. Rhetorical questions and exclamations are often used.

Together with the general features of the journalistic style, the author’s style is of great importance. Depending on the purpose of publication, the topic of the speech and the intended audience, the author selects from among all the variety of means of journalistic style a combination of those that will solve the task facing the creator of the text.


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What is the journalistic style?