Newspaper English
An excellent way for the English Language learner to increase his or her English proficiency is to read an English-language newspaper on a regular basis. Most people who read a newspaper do so selectively and skim through the pages looking for the most interesting-looking articles to read first. They usually make their choice on the basis of the headlines of the articles. And this is where the difficulty for the non-native speaker of English arises, since newspaper headlines are often extremely difficult to understand. There are two main reasons for this. The first reason is that newspaper headlines have to be brief and consequently use short words that are rarely used in everyday speech or indeed in the rest of the article itself. These short words have been called thinnernyms, and include probe for investigation, blast for explosion, and axe for abolish, etc. Newspaper English And the second reason why newspaper headlines are difficult to understand is that headli...