A Comparative Study On The Stylistic Features, Readability And Human Interest Of China's Business News Coverage

The linguistic study of news discourse,mainly from the perspectives of discourse analysis,genre analysis,and stylistic analysis,has obtained many glorious achievements.The study of news from the mass media field has also yielded plenty of fruits.This thesis,thus,attempts to combine the theories from the two fields to make an interdisciplinary study of news discourses.Theoretically,the approaches of stylistics have been applied in this research in a process of analytical study of stylistic features on China economic news reports in China daily(CD) and the Wall Street Journal(WSJ) respectively.Meanwhile measurements of readability and human interest of the two newspapers are conducted by employing the theory of Rudolf Flesch's readability and human interest as a focus of this study.The entire corpus comes from the economic news about China in CD and WSJ out of three consecutive months in 2006.A quantitative analysis will be carried out to compare their differences in the selections,sources,genres and structures of China economic news.Among these news,34 pairs of the same themes will be singled out as cases to study their news headlines,leads,bodies(the usage of numbers,graphs and quotations,etc) and to measure their readability and human interest respectively.Through the comparisons,the author gains the following major findings:●In regard to new sources,WSJ is much more diverse and stronger in editing competence●In regard to content selection,CD gives priority to the political economic news whilst WSJ focuses on corporate,financial and investment news;●In regard to news balance WSJ keeps the balance of positive and negative news to maintain its authority,justice and objectivity;whilst CD,affected by domestic media practice,tends to select the positive news rather than negative ones;●In the application of numerals,photos,tables,charts and graphs,CD has an obvious preference in using more of photos whilst WSJ tends to have a broader application of all of these.●In readability and human interest of economic news the CD and WSJ share something in common.However the former lacks personalizing their business reporting stories as WSJ often does.After the study of stylistics,readability and human interest in the two newspapers, the author concludes with some tentative proposals on how to optimize China economic news reports toward overseas readers:(1).weaken the government's propaganda tastes and strengthen the voice from common people and the society;(2) globalize and localize the economic news reports toward overseas markets;(3) increase the readability and human interest of economic news reports.