The Essay

This genre in English literature dates from the 16"' century, and its name is taken from the short "Essays" (= experiments, attempts) by the French writer Montaigne, which contained his thoughts on various subjects. An essay is a literary composition of moderate length on philosophical, social or literary subjects, which preserves a clearly personal character and has no pretence to deep or strictly scientific treatment of

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the subject. It is rather a number of comments, without any definite conclusions. See an extract from Ben Johnson (16^lh century):

Language most shows a man; speak, thai I may see thee. It springs of the most retired and in most parts of us, and is the image of the parent of it, the mind. No glass renders a man's form or likeness so true, as his speech, and, as we consider feature and composition in a man, so words in language. Some men are tall and big, so some language is high and great. Then the words are chosen, the sound ample, the composition full, all grace, sinewy (жилистый) and strong. Some are little and dwarfs; so of speech, it is humble and low; the words are poor and flat; the members are periods thin and weak, without knitting (связь) or number.

Nowadays an essay is usually a kind of feature article (те­матическая статья) in a magazine or newspaper. It is characterized by clarity and brevity of expression, by the use of the first person singular, by expanded use of connecting words (to express clearly all the logical relations in the development of thought), and abundant use of emotionally coloured words, of metaphors and other figures of speech.

Newspaper Speech

English newspaper writing dates from the 17"' century. First newspapers carried only news, without comments, as commenting was considered to be against the principles of journalism. By the 19^lh century newspaper language was recognised as a particular variety of style, characterized by a specific communicative purpose and its own system of language means.

The content of newspaper material is fairly diverse, it comprises news and commentary on the news, press reports and articles, advertisements and official announcements, as well as short stories and poems, crossword puzzles and other such like material for entertainment of the reader.

Newspaper style includes a system of interrelated lexical, phraseological and grammatical means serving the purpose of informing, instructing, and, in addition, of entertaining the reader. As a result of this diversity of purposes, newspapers contain not only strictly informational, but also evaluative material — comments and views of the news-writer (esecially characteristic of editorials and feature articles).

As the newspaper seeks to influence public opinion on various social, political or moral matters, its language frequently contains vocabulary with evaluative connotation, such as to allege (theperson who allegedly committed the crime), or to claim (the defendant claims to know nothing about it), which cast some doubt on what is stated further and make it clear to the reader that those are not yet affirmed facts. A similar idea is expressed by special grammar structures, e.g. The man is said to have taken part in the affair, or The chief of the police is quoted as saying... Evaluation can be included in the headlines of news items (Government going back on its own promises) and in the commentary on the news, in feature articles, in leading articles (editorials), where emotionally coloured vocabulary is widely employed. The characteristics mentioned are common to different genres of publicist style. Nevertheless, the informative content generally prevails in newspaper material as compared with purely publicist or oratory works.

On the whole we may single out the following features typical of newspaper style:

in vocabulary — the use of special political or economic terminology (constitutional, election, General Assembly of the UN, gross output, per capita production):

the use of lofty, bookish vocabulary, including certain cliches (population, public opinion, a nation-wide crisis, crucial/pressing problems, representative voting), which may be based on metaphors and thus emotionally coloured: war hysteria, escalation of war, overwhelming majority, stormy applause/a storm of applause, captains of industry, pillars of society (столпы), the bulwark of civilization (оплот; букв, бастион).

frequent use of abbreviations — names of organizations, political movements, etc.: UN (United Nations Organization), NATO {North Atlantic Treaty Organization), EEC (European Economic Community), UK(The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland), FO (Foreign Office), PM (Prime -minister), MP (member of Parliament), etc.

the use of neologisms, since newspapers quickly react to any new trends in the development of society, technology, science and so on: sputnik, a teach-in (the form of campaigning through heated political discussions), black Americans/Afro-Americans (= Negroes), Latin Americans (emigrants from South America), front-lash (a vigorous anti-racist movement), stop-go politics (= indecisive policies), a shock announcement, to work flat out(= to work very hard), a frosty reception.

in grammar — the use of complete simple sentences, of complex and compound sentences, often extended by a number of clauses:

The Secretary to the Treasury said he had been asked what was meant by the statement in the Speech that the position of war pensioners would be kept under close review.

On the other hand, in newspaper headlines we find elliptical sentences, with the finite verb omitted or replaced by a non-finite form, and the grammatical articles also often omitted:

Price rise expected (=A rise in prices is expected); Witnesses silent in court (= The witnesses are silent during the court trial); Prime Minister on new tax (= What the Prime Minister said about the new tax).

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