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ELA Drills, Intermediate: Textual Analysis 3. Which of the following best summarizes the author's feelings about welfare?
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Description:
Ready to build that bookcase? Looks like you might need an explanatory essay... or five pages of vague instructions in Swedish.
Transcript
- 00:00
when you hear the names Charles Dickens and Jack London
- 00:06
you probably think novelist rather than journalist. or maybe you think [Dickens and London pictured]
- 00:10
motorcyclist. yes it depends how well you know them .but while it might be hard to
- 00:15
imagine any of the author's 800-page monsters being published in broadsheet.
- 00:20
their careers can definitely help us when it comes to understanding the
Full Transcript
- 00:23
development of journalism. over the 19th century what we now know as modern
- 00:28
journalism started to take shape. cities were growing and literacy rates were [hands throw a clay pot]
- 00:32
rising so editors were racking their brains trying to come up with ways to
- 00:36
reach a broader cross-section of this suddenly more literate society.
- 00:40
well since chocolate newspapers never really took off editor's ended up going
- 00:44
with sensationalism. that his stories about scandals and crimes that appealed
- 00:50
to readers as a sort of guilty pleasure. sound familiar?
- 00:53
yeah good news is no news. in the u.s. cheap newspapers called penny presses [man reads newspaper]
- 00:58
were founded. and they covered the sensationalist stories that more
- 01:02
established news outlets wouldn't touch with a 10-foot Pole.
- 01:05
the British weren't left out of this sensationalist craze. on the other side
- 01:09
of the pond people like William Thomas Stead covered such lurid subjects as
- 01:14
child prostitution. well it's important to keep in mind that even though the [Stead shown in front of Big Ben]
- 01:18
subject matter was sensational it wasn't necessarily bad journalism, although
- 01:23
there were certainly some sickos reading Stead's work to lap up holographic
- 01:27
detail. that was pioneering investigative journalism- deeply investigating single
- 01:32
topics bringing them to a wider public understanding. well the fact that these
- 01:36
articles were published under sensational headlines like the violation [cows in a field]
- 01:40
of virgins and a child of 13 bought for five pounds
- 01:44
didn't make it any less serious. the dawn of investigative journalism for people
- 01:49
like dickens in london come in. they too were interested in exposing social ills
- 01:53
through deep investigations. though they fit right into this emerging
- 01:57
journalistic scene like a hand into a glove... anyway so maybe Dickens would have [crowded room in dim light]
- 02:03
put it more eloquently. anyway Dickens and London elevated writing styles that
- 02:07
wouldn't fly in contemporary newsrooms. although narrating in first person with
- 02:12
ornate complex language was par for the course among 19th century journalists,
- 02:17
temporary journalists strived for objectivity and prefer to go light on
- 02:21
all those adjectives and adverbs that novelists tend to like oh so very much.[man frowns from newsroom]
- 02:26
well, sure Dickens in London might be literary luminaries but hey, style guides
- 02:30
are style guides.
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