The discourse organization of Philippine university newspaper opinion columns

• Main Author: Wilfred Gabriel A. Gapas
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of English, Faculty of Arts and Letters, University of Santo Tomas 2016-12-01
• Series: Asian Journal of English Language Studies (AJELS)
• Subjects: written discourse; opinion articles; macrostructures; move analysis; campus journalism
• Online Access: https://ajels.ust.edu.ph/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/3-The-discourse-organization-of-Philippine-university-newspaper-opinion-columns.pdf

Recent studies on text organization have focused mostly on business documents, academic texts, and certain newspaper articles such as editorials and news stories. However, the organization of opinion articles found in university-level newspapers has not been formally investigated. Therefore, this study attempts to determine whether these articles are written in accordance to journalistic writing principles. A total of 45 opinion articles were taken and served as the study corpus. These articles were analyzed based on Ho’s (2001) framework, as supported by the principles of macrostructure and the features of editorials in journalistic writing. The findings indicate that the discourse structure of Philippine newspaper opinion articles employs the two-move pattern in the orientation, exposition, and summation blocks, where two frequently used specific steps are found in each block. The findings suggest that university students adhere to a prescribed journalistic text organization, although there is also a tendency to deviate from it. Furthermore, it is possible that their judicious choices in using a particular step may have been influenced by the writers’ objective of effectively communicating their opinion to a wide variety of readers.