Understanding Text Structures: Journalism & Literature

Newspaper Articles

Newspaper articles organize information to allow for selective reading, enabling readers to choose their preferred order.

Structure of Newspaper Articles

Newspaper articles typically consist of two main parts:

• Headline/Lead: This summarizes the central theme of the text, sometimes accompanied by a subtitle. It serves three key functions: opening, summary, and reminder.
• Body Text: This section develops the subject matter in detail.
• Lead Paragraph (Entradilla): This summarizes key data, aiming to answer the fundamental questions: what, who, how, when, where, and why.

Main Structural Approaches in Journalism

Journalistic texts often employ distinct structural patterns:

• Inverted Pyramid Structure: Contents are arranged with the most important information presented at the beginning, followed by less crucial details. This structure predominates in informational genres.
• Chronological Structure: Ideas within the text are arranged in the order of events. This is prevalent in chronicles.
• Dialogue Structure: The text's development is divided into turns or dialogue, commonly found in interviews. Interviews themselves can be factual or interpretive.
• Free Structure: Some genres, particularly opinion pieces, are characterized by a more flexible arrangement. However, they often still follow a general pattern of introduction, development, and denouement.

Characteristics of Journalistic Language

Journalistic language is characterized by the use of an impersonal style and neutral language (neither overly colloquial nor excessively formal), as it aims to reach a very broad audience.

Literary Texts

Literary texts can explore any topic. However, certain themes, known as literary topoi (or motifs), recur across different eras and literatures, many originating from Greco-Latin literature. Examples include Carpe diem (seize the day) and Tempus fugit (time flies).

Literary Genres

Literary texts are broadly divided into those with a plot and those without:

• Texts with a Plot (e.g., narrative, drama): In these, a story develops with characters performing actions in a specific space and time.
• Texts without a Plot (e.g., lyric poetry): In these, the description of places, people, and feelings predominates.

Characteristics of Literary Language

The most important feature of literary language is the predominance of the aesthetic function (where the reader's attention is directed toward the language and form of the text itself) and the poetic function. This dominance is evident at various linguistic levels:

• Phonic Level: Such as alliteration.
• Semantic Level: Such as metaphors, hyperbole, etc.
• Morphosyntactic Level: Such as parallelism, enumeration, etc.