Investigating Readability and Grammaticality of Newspapers Headlines , A Case Study of the Telegraphic and The New York Times

Abstract

This study is divided in to two sections the first one investigates the use of tenses in English newspapers' headlines of the Telegraph and The New York Times. As one of the main objective of this study is to observe which tenses are more frequent than others, the researcher statistically analysed 100 headlines from both newspapers. After analysing the corpus of these two journals, the researcher has come up with some results that the present simple tense, whether conventional or historic, is the most frequently used tense as it gives the Journalists an opportunity to make the story more fresh and more vivid and hence attract readers' attention as part of manipulative media. The second section is about media language . A questionnaire held in November 2015, was distributed on line to readers and social media users, 18 questions to determine readers reaction to media language, a 47 reader reacted to the questionnaire, then data was collected through Google docs. After analyzing the data it illustrate many things but what mater most is that readers in general believe that media is manipulative but unfortunately couldn’t make up their minds about media manipulative language and grammar, to solve this problem this study recommended using the term manipulative media more often among student and readers because this will encourage them to study it more often, and to perform more researches about it hoping for better media. The researcher recommends that media discourse needs more investigations in terms of sentence structure, passivation, the use of articles and conjunctions.