| The China Daily represents a high proficiency of the English language written byChinese news writers. Widely accepted as an important national voice to other nationsand regions, this newspaper has formed its unique features in news reporting in astrife to keep itself abreast the norms of western journalistic practices.The present study has focused on the effectiveness of quotes as found in ChinaDaily news reports, in comparison with those from two major American newspapersof The New York Times and The Washington Post. Fine quotes in news stories are usedto make news reports more authentic, vivid, and objective, while improper quotesmake a piece of news choppy and loose, and sometimes lose authenticity. Quotes arenow becoming an indispensable part in modern Chinese news writing. The presentstudy is qualitative in nature, with close-reading analysis of samples of quotes in newsstories, with vast reference made to principles and rules advocated by news writingexperts, western scholars in particular.The three general types of quotes – complete, partial, and paraphrase – should beused properly in news stories so that their functions could be fulfilled fully. Specialattention should be placed between balancing complete quotes on the one hand andpartial quotes and paraphrase on the other to fulfill both the informative andcommunicative functions of the quotations. The informative function refers to thepassage of message from the news story to the readers, while the communicativefunction to the creation of a comfortable feel by the writer on the part of the readers.Informative functions of quotes highlight conciseness and economy of expression,contrastive comparison of ideas of the people involved in the report, and spotlightedperspectives of the speakers in the news. Communicative functions, on the other hand,highlight a sense of liveliness and a sense of authenticity that the readers obtain fromthe writer.More microscopically, effective quotes, unique and interesting in both contentand form, render credibility instead of dubiousness of the news story with a sense ofcommonality and dull tediousness. Ineffective quotes suffer the pitfalls of quoting forthe sake of quoting, of inaccuracies in citing the speakers' exact words andexpressions, of rambling quotes, and of incomprehensibility.Analysis of quote samples in the present study corresponds to the two majorfunctions of quotes in news writing: 1) Analysis of informational effectiveness ofquotes as are found in China Daily points to whether those quotes fulfill theinformative functions of news writing to lead to clear and efficient delivery ofinformation or message to the reader;2) Analysis of communicative effectiveness ofquotes as also come from China Daily news stories points to whether those quotesfulfill the communicative functions of news writing to foster communication betweennews-writer and reader and between the subject in question and the reader.Proper handling of the density of information as conveyed by the news stories is amatter of importance in terms of informational effectiveness. Over-density ofinformation presented in direct quotes is still common in China Daily news stories,where over-dense information is often caused by quotes too stiltedly translated intoEnglish to appear naturally occurring utterances both regarding language form andcontent, and by quotes with indigestible figures or heavily jargoned specialknowledge concerning a certain topic. On the other hand, the other side of the issue ofthe density of information is over-redundancy in informational management in ChinaDaily news stories, which is reflected more in content than in language form. Withregards to language form, many stories together with their quotes remain on theformal side especially if the subject matter has a rather serious political or economicsuggestion. In terms of ideas expressed, however, quotes are very frequently seen ascontaining habitual inertia on the reporter's part to quote for the sake of quoting. Theyforget that reporters are supposed only to quote key things, to quote those short butnewsworthy words.In terms of communicative effectiveness, liveliness and authenticity are the twokey words together with the notion of human interest. Communicatively effectivequotes are lively for the writer to breathe life into the writing, lends credibility to thereport, makes a potentially dull story interesting, and gives life to people in the story.More importantly, communicatively effective quotes sound authentic by making apersonal connection between readers and the subject to provide them with a highsense of on-the-spot realness. Communicative effectiveness actually will also involvethe conveyance of information, but passage of information should be combined withreadability to attract the readers to read the story in the first place. Communicativeeffectiveness and informational effectiveness are the two sides of the same coin.Over-density and extreme redundancy of information as demonstrated in some ChinaDaily quotes already affect readability of the news stories.However, communicative effectiveness has more to do with the handling oflanguage itself with the reporter's sensibility to dig out what is interesting in what thepeople interviewed have said, and less to do with whether the quoted material hasinformation value. Human interest is a covering term for both liveliness andauthenticity regarding communicative effectiveness. This is a notion that concernsthose elements that involve, and are characteristic of, the multifold facets of humanactivities and personal behavior. Even very serious topics concerning politics,economy or military affairs may have highly human aspects, and this is very oftenreflected in news writings by western news writers and less mirrored by Chinesewriters, unfortunately. This study proposes that China Daily news writing mayconsider further increasing the dose of human interest by handling quotes in a morelively and authentic way to boost readability.
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