OK! vs The Daily Telegraph

We all love a good bit of gossip here and there but we always need some sanity from the world at one point of another, don't we?

But, you can never read something that is not only juicy with the celebrity gossip but also contextual with the daily welfare of the world, whys that you ask. It's because of the two different types of language used to differentiate them from one another.

OK! Magazine was first launched in April 1993 and the headline for that was "HELP ME, I'VE MADE A HORRIFIC MISTAKE" using a quote from a very famous Kerry katona about her life. The original writer also used capitalization, not only to make the headline to stand out more to its target audience but to also imply that whatever has happened in Kerry's life is tragic as its presented to us as if she is shouting.

This British magazine specialising in celebrity news also uses, dare I say it, a lot of taboo language which could get some into trouble.  But, giving them their credit they do tend to use a couple of asterisks in the slang words, for example one headline was "Helen blasts aisleyne as a 's**g'" this is something that catches the audiences eye as it will be more interesting to know that taboo language has been used in an article.

OK! Magazine is an informal magazine is it based on celebrity gossip rather than news on the physical and more local world such as the daily telegraph which is the UKs English language broadsheet.

In the daily telegraph there is a lot more serious news that is enquired, very formal indeed. Its first issue in May 2012 was an imperative sentence of "Cameron, MP" very short and snappy; this is a form of getting a message straight across as there is not much need to leave a cliff hanger for a headline for a newspaper based on such serious events where as OK! Will either use a quote from a celebrity who will be featured in the article, or will start with a cliff hanger.

The telegraph will more likely stick to what's safe and only use certain nouns as they would need to keep their audience safe as over 50% of the time is their news about politicians. The phonology used in the daily telegraph will also be very contextual with all diphthongs and vowels using the 'queens English' which would have no elision or ellipsis where as in OK! It would be filled with abbreviation. The telegraph will also tend to use more Latinate lexis to be able to appeal to the older people with more knowledge of more complicated noun phrases and clauses.

But OK! Will probably use borrowing words more often as they are more likely to abbreviate words such as 'LOL' and 'OMG' to make their articles more gossipy and will use more conjunctions rather than prepositions as the more conjunctions used the more chatty the article will sound.

These two types of news resources use different styles of language to make them appear differently to their different genres of audience, coming to the conclusion that a celebrity magazine will be informal and a local newspaper will be intellectually formal.

By Jade Hendy

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