How Does the Language of Headlines Work? The Answer May Surprise You.
there’s a long history to how humble copy editors have developed the weird linguistic tricks that intrigue, shock, and amuse an otherwise cynical audience. What you’ll learn may surprise you (or not).
.. By the end of the 19th century, editors had started playing around with the language of headlines, switching over to using the present tense in headlines, even for events past, and promoting verbs, making action seem more immediate and palpable.
.. tabloids often make liberal use of “headlinese” to sensationalize stories. This means using an expressive, “connotation-rich” vocabulary that is attention-grabbing and promotes curiosity and a strong emotional connection for the reader, unsurprisingly, similar to advertising language, since “the average newspaper is simply a business enterprise that sells news and uses that lure to sell advertising space”
.. No one likes clickbait, and for good reason, but it’s surprisingly effective at generating viral interest, fast, which is exactly what news publications like.
.. in a clickbait headline the experiencer of emotions becomes us, which is as close to the news as you can get: “you won’t believe what happened next,” “…you may never have heard of,” “… will surprise you…” The news builds a relationship directly with the reader, by anticipating how we might feel or what we might know about a situation and giving us a personal stake in the story.
.. one of the ways this is done is very simply through forward referencing to lure in readers. For example when we use a pronoun likehe or she, it usually refers to a noun that’s been mentioned before, such as John or Mary (Mary read a book. She liked it). But for successful clickbait headlines, it’s reversed to great rhetorical effect (She did it, she read a book).
Forward referencing is a cataphoric concept that promotes the mysterious, in which pronouns and pointers are mentioned in advance, and we only find out later what they refer to, adding to the suspense through a simple act of language. One of the main ways clickbait does this is to refer to words like “this“: “This is what racism looks like. (It will shock you).”