ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the language of fake news, the ABCs of journalism, a word on jargon, good writing practices, transitions, cliches and sensory language. In 2018, a team of MIT media and management researchers found a few worrying things in their often-cited study. Style is a lot more than just creating graspable images in storytellers readers’ heads. The frequencies of certain pronouns, conjunctions and negative-emotion words are one approach to test texts automatically for being fake news, although they admit that approach is limited. Journalism commits its very own word crimes that are known as “journalese”, which is “the death of freshness in anybody’s style”. Illustration of the ladder of abstraction, that shows words and concepts in descending order of abstraction.
