Impacts Of Thought Patterns On Journalistic Writing Styles

With the intensification of globalization, interpersonal exchanges have become increasingly frequent and the world has been turned into a global village. However, the cultural identities between people from different cultural backgrounds, including their value systems, social conventions, thought patterns, can widen the gap between them and make them feel puzzled at each other's behavior, among which thought pattern is the most important factor. Thought patterns, as the total reflections of cultural mentality, refer to people's ways of thinking over the objective world. For years, scholars at home and abroad have conducted research into the major differences of Chinese and Western thought patterns. For example, Chinese thought pattern tends to be more synthetic whereas the Western one is more analytic; Chinese thought pattern is circular while the Western thought pattern is linear. Basing on these research, linguists have further investigated the impacts of thought patterns on language use.It is observed that Chinese reporters and their Western counterparts tend to use different writing styles even when they report the same event. Although news writing follows some certain standards, it can also be influenced by thought patterns like other discourses. Thus, the thesis is intended to make a contrastive analysis of English political news selected from China Daily and The New York Times to reveal how Chinese and Western thought patterns influence the writing styles of English political news. Something worth mentioning is that in this thesis, political news includes political news reports and opinions on political issues. Political news reports refer to reports on political events. Opinions, including editorial, columns, etc, are articles illustrating the author's views over political issues. Besides, English political news from China Daily are written by Chinese reporters, not from foreign media.The thesis attempts to make a comparative analysis of English political news reports from the perspective of news leads and the coverage of background information and for opinions on political issues, the analysis is conducted from the angle of the position of the theme summary. After a detailed analysis of the sample news, the thesis concludes that thought patterns play an important role in influencing the writing styles between Chinese reporters and their Western counterparts, resulting in different styles of English political news they write. For example, in terms of news leads, Chinese reporters tend to write general news leads while Western reporters are more likely to write specific news leads; in terms of the coverage of background information, Chinese reporters are inclined to cover less background information in their news reports whereas their Western counterparts prefer to give more background information; for opinions, Chinese reporters are more likely to put the theme summary at the end of their opinions while Western reporters have a tendency to place the theme summary at the beginning of their opinions.This thesis has proved the results in the previous studies to some extent. At the final part of this thesis, some suggestions are provided, which are supposed to offer implications for English news writing and cross-cultural communication.