The Peroration Revisited

This chapter addresses two of the main functions of newspapers – reporting news facts and commenting on them. Through the comparison of specific linguistic features of newspaper reports and comment articles, differences between reporting and commenting are pointed out and documented. Secondly, we consider comment articles at closer range, dividing them into editorials, and signed comment articles, often called op-eds (an abbreviation of opposite the editorial). While similarities in the function of these two discourse types are undeniable, it is equally observable that there are notable differences along linguistic parameters, making their distinction something linguistically necessary. In the third part of the chapter, we put these two discourse types back together again and consider the similarity between the final moves of these articles and what is known in the field of rhetoric as the peroration. Through a quantitative analysis of certain linguistic features, we establish that as comment articles draw to a conclusion, their endings typically resemble the climax of a speech, and so they can be legitimately described as finishing with a peroration.