Stylistic Analysis Of English Editorials In China Daily And New York Times

Editorial is the spirit of mess media. It is the most formal writing in news argumentation. It reveals the ideas of the general office of a newspaper that stands for the organ of authority. Good editorials are considered some of the best examples of persuasive writing in all countries; they set standards for written persuasion. However, English texts under different cultural backgrounds also maintain their own writing traditions. Do the English editorials in Chinese newspapers share similar stylistic features or differ much from those in foreign newspapers? Thus a stylistic analysis has been attempted in the present thesis to compare the language features of English editorials between China Daily and New York Times. With the facility of computer software and programs (FOXPRO), two corpora— each about 100,000 words— are built in order to make objective and convincing analysis. The materials are all collected from the official websites of the two newspapers on the Internet from all kinds of fields, including politics, economy, law, society culture, education, environment and sports. Through comparison, it has been perceived that many similarities as well as some differences exist between the editorials in China Daily and New York Times. The research is not only necessary for English learners, but also meaningful for news writers and scholars. Keeping those similarities and differences in mind, they will be more efficient in their learning and understanding of journalistic English.