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Language Variation: Register
Task C - our answer Text 2
This extract is from the beginning of an article in a broadsheet, page
1 of The Independent for Monday, September 9, 2002. The graphological
style of the headline is less striking (lower case apart from the acronym,
no white on black background effect) and the letters are smaller. In contrast
with the Sun, grammatically, this headline is an elliptical simple sentence
(and the semantic relations within it are clear from the headline alone),
and the lexis is considerably less emotive, even though 'strike' and 'crisis'
occur. Instead of the 'bosses' and 'workers' in The Sun, we get the more
abstract and more formal nouns 'employers' and 'employees', and similarly,
'wave of strikes' in The Sun becomes 'prepared to take industrial action'
here. In speech act terms the employers are not 'threatened' but merely
'put on alert'.
This sentence is twice the length of the one in The Sun, and also a bit
more complex grammatically. Overall, then, the writing in The Independent
is more formal and less emotive than in The Sun, assuming a more educated
readership, and a situation in which the newspaper does not have to work
so hard to keep its audience reading.
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