XPost: alt.usage.english, alt.english.usage
On Fri, 6 Oct 2017 12:11:37 +0200, occam <[email protected]d>
A while ago in a.u.e. we discussed the special language of "headlinese", >>where punctuation marks and other linguistic niceties go out of the
window for the sake of brevity. I hope this print vs. online schism will >>not be the end of "headlinese".
"Tony Cooper" <
[email protected]> wrote in message news:
[email protected]...
In discussions about "headlinese", the difference between a web news
headline and a print news headline is often disregarded. A web
article view may expand to fit the space, but a print news article has
a fixed width to contend with. More, or longer, words can be used in
a web news article.
British and American newspapers developed 1900-1950 fairly exact
(but nonidentical) protocols for how headlines should be written (and
almost anything else) and both schoolroom and on-the-job journalism
training taught those protocols for several decades.
Besides the technical difference TC mentions, journalism schools
no longer teach the 20th century formal rules of print journalism: the
market has changed, now demanding (its owners believe) sound-on-
film rather than words. (Perhaps it is just because I learned the old
rules on the job in Toronto in the 1960s, but I believe today's senior
editors do not check their juniors' copy the way they used to, and
themselves know less than was expected in the 1960s -- or perhaps
what they know is less job-specific than was then normal.)
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
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