新闻英语与范文评析-笔记.doc

The Function of HeadlinesA: Five main functions.
First, a headline summarizes a news story with the most important and attractive words. A reader usually doesn’t have time for every piece of news that’s printed. With the guidance of terse headlines, readers can quickly find the parts they want to read.
Second, it sparkles the whole page. One can imagine how suffocative a newspaper could be if there were not a single headline and dozens of news stories just piled up.
Third, it beautifies the form of edition. Headlines are good decoration to the page as they appear in various sizes and typefaces.
Fourth, a headline sometimes is used to attract the readers’ attention.
Fifth, a headline can be used to make some comment.
2. Grammatical features of headlines
First, there are omission of article, conjunction, pronoun, link verb and auxiliary verb. It is used to summarize and highlight the content. For example, “China sees housing as (an) engine to drive (the) economy.”
Second, present tense is used to show things that happened in the past.
  Three reasons:
  First, it saves space. In most cases past tense is longer in space than the present tense, with an “ed” in extra. So present tense can save some space for a headline.
  Secondly, present tense is active. It puts the reader into action and gives him a feeling of participation, so that it attracts readers’ attention