examine how conventional uses of journalistic language affects the presentation of news stories. The most important concepts in this section are emotive language, euphemism and vague language and you will also learn about the distinctions between broadsheet and tabloid journalism.
Have you ever wondered why only bad news gets reported? Or why some bad news gets more coverage than other bad news? Learn the criteria by which analysts agree the news is ‘selected’ or chosen.
Learn some underlying theories of the news (whether print, online or televised) which will teach you to be critical about the information you receive via news media and ‘official’ outlets like mainstream newspapers, BBC, Sky or Fox news. You will learn the key concepts of bias and how the news is narrativized – turned into stories for public consumption.
You can think of a speaker as an artist or craftsperson and ethos, pathos and logos as the framework upon which the artisan works. Hone your own knowledge of these rhetorical tools, and how to recognize and appreciate them in speeches you study.
Propaganda can be dangerous when it is used on an uninformed public: people are easily persuaded because they do not have counter-arguments to the information they are being given. You may think you are immune to propaganda – but living in a digital age does not always make it easier to detect the techniques involved. It requires a conscious effort to be critical, work on your media literacy, and to stay alert for argumentative fallacies.
In the advertising world, images of men and women are used to promote products of all kinds. You arguably might expect images of the body to be used in advertisements for, say, beauty products or cosmetics. But the bodies of men and women are used to sell a far wider range of items, from alcohol, to cars, to household appliances.
English has no masculine or feminine forms for words (unlike, say, French, in which the gender of words is marked by ‘le/la’ and masculine/feminine endings). But does this mean that the English language is inherently non-sexist?
Are words simply tools that we use to communicate meaning, or do the words contain meaning themselves? We have a book dedicated to the meaning of words – the dictionary. It outlines in unambiguous terms the meaning of each word. But what happens when a word changes its meaning? This happens more often than you might think.
The word “Jargon” is derived from the fourteenth century term for “twittering or warbling of birds,” which in turn has the root ‘garg’ from which also stem such words as “gargle,” and “gurgle.” In this section you can find out all about this use of language and ask the question, is jargon a way to unite members of the same group, or a way to divide and exclude through language?
IB Language and Literature 2.0 