Language and style of reporting

In language and reportage style there can be two linguistic beginnings: documentary and artistic, they should be in perfect balance, if artisticity prevails, then the reportage will be fiction, and if documentary, then dry and uninteresting.

The language of the report should be more figurative, not conceptual. Imagery serves to achieve clarity and concreteness. “Write a“ glass of beer ”is better than writing“ 300 ml of beer ”. The requirement of clarity implies flexible language, images, comparisons, known initial values, short sentences, precise word selection. In order to understand special expressions as clearly as possible, the reporter himself must know what they mean. “The reporter's vocabulary and the penchant of the pen determine the impression of the event that arises from the perceiver.”

It is also very important to give the floor to the participants of the event themselves, using quotes, elements of an interview. “Accurate, as direct as possible quotes from witnesses or interested persons are invaluable, as they give the report an impression of immediacy (colloquial expressions, dialect).”

The reporting language is not peculiar to the inner, “linguistic” wit, as in feuilleton, and jokes in the text are allowed only as a retelling of a comical situation. But the emotionality of style in the subjective genre of reportage is welcomed: expressing their own feelings, the author thereby awakens the feelings of the reader.

After discussions in the State Center for Political Education in 1990, not the topic of what is entertainment in journalism, the group “Projektteam Lokaljournalisten” brought out text formulas for journalists. The textual reportage formula is as follows:

1. collect information on site

2. make the strongest image face and then use as a “red thread”

3. search for facts not only on site, but also by phone and in archives

4. images, experiences and facts interspersed at an exciting pace

5. submit information is clear.

We believe that this is an incomplete and insufficiently professionally composed manual, which was given a concise form to the detriment of its practical applicability. However, in Germany, a sufficient number of practical manuals on writing a report has been published and is available on the Internet.

A favorite thought, carried out in each of some detailed training manual on reporting: “Reporting cannot be written at the desk! A reporter needs all his senses: sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. ” He must make the reader believe that he has seen and felt everything personally; he must speak visually about things, and not analytically — about concepts.

A German reporter should be able to find an unknown side of the topic. For example, if the topic “Intensive Care” is given, then instead of quoting the testimony of doctors and nurses, it is better to stay on night duty as an orderly.

It is emphasized that the first sentence of the report is of paramount importance - it determines whether the reader reads further or scrolls with boredom. The beginning of a typical reportage is “a picture or a scene from the thick of an event,” as well, they also take an image that has a clear relation to the initial image.

We mention two more interesting concepts developed by the theorists of the genre.

Haller offers four factors that ensure the existence of a reportage :

· Print media that allow subjective journalism and themselves are willing to provide a place for colorful material on the topics of mediated relevance;

· Topics that are designed so that from their specific, particular aspects arise human experiences, to which readers may be implicated;

· Journalists who draw accurate pictures and want, and can give the reader to experience with them what happened;

· Readers who are ready to read long and more difficult texts, which accept the restriction of the topic to only one aspect and understand the subjective, full of feelings language.