?What is a headline

The headline is the first part of the news story and serves several purposes. First it summarizes the whole story. Second, it advertize the story. Third, the headline beautifies the newspaper page. Headlines could appear in all the page of a newspaper but when it appears in the front Page attracts the reader to the newspaper. Good headlines are excellent advertisements for the stories. They attract attention, arouse interest and lead the reader into the stories. Headline writing is one of the most difficult parts of the newspaper editor’s job.  

We have four types of head line.

First straight headline: they are easy to understand for readers.

Second is question headline: actually they are not question they are statement with a question mark.

The third is quotation headline: usually we use this form for an authority in a field for example AIDS Expert: Many kids at Risk  

The forth one is feather headline: in this type we must read all the story to understand the feature headline.

Now it is time to talk about the linguistic structure of headlines. The big concern of newspapers is space. There is a lot of news and the pages are limited and since headline are often printed in a large font they must be not only attractive but also sums up the story. For these reason the language of headlines is so different that understanding the headlines is difficult even for native speakers. I mention a summary of this feature:

Deletion: in deletion some parts like article and pronouns are removed.

Special vocabulary: words that are short and effective.

Special tense and verb form: the tense that are used in headline are different from the standard form for example simple present tense mostly refers to the past time or infinitive to the feature.

Using acronym and abbreviation: like us as United States.

Premodification: in this method the writers change the order of words and phrases for example blue sky is premodification for sky blue.

Space saving punctuation is another one that replaced comma, dash and semicolon instead of and, says and but.

The last one is action deletion: in this kind of headline the writer use a sentence without verb.

Stylistic devices: in this way writers use an especial structure in their headlines to influence the reader’s feeling. It consist rhyme, alliteration, ambiguity, homophony, homonymy, metaphor and intertextuality.

In conclusion the size of headlines is larger than the size of the texts that they refer to. The larger the headline, the more important the story.