Analysis of a Newspaper Article: Much Ado About Mousing
This piece is in the format of a newspaper article in the broadsheet
‘The Independent Review’. Styled as a critical review, the piece is
intended to inform the reader about an episode of ‘Tom and Jerry’, a
cartoon aimed at young children. However, I decided to imitate the
verbose style of a broadsheet critic, and I also aimed to mock the
overly analytical, presumptuous tone that the media often exudes, by
relating every minor incident of ‘violence’ in the cartoon to extreme
cases of brutality in society.
I chose to implement the typical discourse structure of a newspaper
article, with short, bold introductions and a succinctly clear
headline. I chose the headline “Much Ado About Mousing” as it is
wordplay on the Shakespearian play “Much Ado About Nothing”, and the
readership of ‘The Independent Review’ would most likely realise the
pragmatic meaning of the pun. It also raises the question whether the
satirical style of the article really is much ado about nothing, and
analysing the content of ‘Tom and Jerry’ in too great a depth.
I used complex lexis, to appeal to the more refined audience:
“unashamed trivialisation”, “sadistic depravity” and “ferocious
contempt” are a few examples. In many cases, I used words that would
not be found in typical tabloid newspapers; I would have incorporated
more simple synonyms if I had written the article for ‘The Sun’. The
language is Standard English, with a formal register to add gravitas
and sincerity to the article.
I have mostly used compound and complex sentences, as these are
flowing and add diversity to the article. However, I did include some
simple sentences to create impact: “Yet the plot thickens.” In the
style of broadsheet newspapers, I included semi-colon usage for an
intellectual effect. Rhetorical questions involve the reader,
encouraging them to process the information they are reading and think
about it in greater detail; however, they are leading questions, which
direct the reader to the same conclusion that the author of this
In the story, “The Killing Game”, Joy Williams, uses several diffenent types of writing skills to presuade the reader to see her views.
"Unit 2: Reading & Writing About Short Fiction." ENGL200: Composition and Literature. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2011. 49-219. Web. 19 Apr. 2014.
above all their new album ! They tell us how it was almost never made
In sandra cisneros’s novella The House on Mango Street the author uses many rhetorical strategies to capture her audience's sympathy for Esperanza. These strategies include assonance, consonance, alliteration, and syntax.
In response to James Fallows’ four premises in his “Learning to Love the (Shallow, Divisive, Unreliable,) New Media,” April 2011. I must say that while I want desperately to argue against his fears, as I am an optimist at heart, I cannot. I have turned this over and over and I have to say that with only a few points of specific contradiction, as a whole I agree. I believe that this is becoming an age of lies and idiocy. I agree that already there is a tendency for media to follow dollars instead of issues. I believe that we Americans are becoming more isolated. Finally, our ability to concentrate is not only undone by technology, but also by our own expectations to be entertained by the media. However, I do not think that the responsibility lies totally with the Gawker.coms of the world, but within ourselves. This is a trend that has been a long time coming. And, like a train down the track, it cannot be easily stopped.
In the past few days, we have read a lot of short stories, and we have learned different rhetorical devices, how to make the story more vivid. This essay will be based around some short stories we have read, they all used the irony of the narrative and the authors use it as a euphemism to express their discontent or to the irony of the characters. The use of irony can use indirect ways to make the reader realize the disadvantages from another perspective.
L’Engle, L'Engle. “Focus On The Story, Not Readers…” Writer Apr 2010: p. 24-25. MAS Ultra-School Edition. EBSCOhost. Web. 25 Feb. 2014.
Reinert, Otto. (1956). Satiric Strategy in the Importance of Being Earnest. College English, Vol. 18, No. 1.
The fear of reading literature and not being able to comprehend the ideas presented forces readers to create a deeper meaning through annotations, as expressed through Billy Collins’ use of comparative imagery and aggressive diction in “Marginalia” and “Introduction to Poetry.” Collins’ choice to
Its rigorous yet mocking mimicry of both Victorian and contemporary philosophies, genres and styles, its abundance of narrative parody and pastiche, and the unashamedly flaunted parallels of story and time all serve to foreground underlying questions of narrative playfulness and (meta-) historical representation and suggest strong- if perhaps suspiciously blatant- allegiances to the critical ideas concerning fiction, history and identity so fashionable in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The effective use of rhetoric can spur people into action for worthy causes, bring about positive health changes, and even persuade one to finish a college education. In contrast, like most things in life, what can be used for good can also be used in a negative way to elicit emotions such as outrage, fear, and panic. This type of rhetoric often uses fallacious statements in an appeal to emotion which complicates the matter even more as the emotions are misdirected. Unfortunately, the daily newspapers are filled with numerous examples of fallacious statements. Within the past week, the following five examples appeared in the New York Times and USA Today. The examples included statements that demonstrated scapegoating, slippery slope, ad hominem, straw man, line-drawing, arguments from outrage, and arguments from envy.
Newswriting, as it exists today, began with the adoption of the telegraph, which roughly coincided with the start of the American Civil War. The necessity of getting at story through before the telegraph’s occasional malfunction forced a radical change in the style of writing used in reporting. Before the telegraph, much of writing news was just that: writing. News was reported much like books were written. The reporter would set the scene with a detailed account of the setting or the mood and tell the tale just like any other narrative that one might read simply for pleasure. Since the telegraph made it possible for news to be printed the day after it happened; it was immediately adopted as the preferred method of getting news to the newsroom. Occasionally, however, the telegraph line would go down. Often this happened during a transmission, and the remainder of the message could not be sent until the line was repaired. Since a detailed description of the setting and the mood are useless without the actual piece of news, the system of writing, now known as the inverted pyramid, in which the most important items are written first in a concise manner, was born. The inverted pyramid system, born of necessity, was absorbed into newswriting over the proceeding century, and exists today as the standard style for reporting news.
Newspapers have allowed for such a freedom in our everyday lives, and most have not even realized this fact. They have provided us with an outlet to speak our mind about politics, societal issues, public differences, and religion and cultures. Searching online to find such knowledge can be extremely challenging; moreover, newspapers always seem to be a place to find valid information. Newspapers have started to come off the printer more slowly over the past decade. More people are turning to electronic ways to find information rather than going to the direct source where that electronic media got their information. Most reliable information comes from newspapers where high up and educated citizens or leaders speak their mind on certain and important topics. The reason newspapers should stay a part of today’s society is because they offer a way for people to speak freely about what they please and get their voice heard, they are always credible, and they help us hear the problems of the world openly from different perspectives.
‘Fashion Hits’, is a magazine article for females (14-30) on the history of fashion and how it can be styled in modern society.The description of the clothes is highly important, the overall look stated in the article, shows it is clear that the target audience is young females interested in fashion and celebrity lifestyle. My primary objective was to entertain the reader, but to inform the reader of how fashion trends have developed to fit the modern world.
The newspapers that I am going to analyze are The Guardian and The Sun. Both of the papers represent different approaches to news presentations; different ideologies, and therefore different potential reader groups. The Sun is a tabloid newspaper that reports news that is sensationalised and also takes a subjective angel. Whereas, The Guardian is a broadsheet which reports serious news that are quite detailed and balanced. Broadsheets are often called the ‘quality newspapers’ and therefore is aimed to readers that want more in-depth news.