Starting at the top

The headlines and leads in the Bangkok Post each have their own special styles. As you will see in this lesson, becoming familiar with these styles, makes the headlines and leads much easier to read and understand. Let's begin with headlines.

A little grammar

Although they may not look like it, news headlines are usually sentences and they are almost always in the present tense. Look at the examples below and try to explain how both of these facts apply to each example.

Unfortunate taxi driver's wife gets help
Student gamblers warned
Schools to close for Asian games

The first example is clearly a present tense sentence. But what about the next one? It, too, is a present tense sentence, but only because something is missing. Can you see what it is? (Hint: It is in the passive voice). In the last example, there are two missing elements. (Hints: How do you talk about the future using the present tense? What do you need before most English nouns?)

You may wonder why headline writers use the present tense and not the past tense when they are usually writing about something that has already happened. The reason is simple. The present tense sounds "fresher" and we are in the business of selling fresh news.

A matter of space

Headlines are designed to give the story's main idea in an abbreviated (shortened) form. Since headline writers have very limited space, they use several tricks to fit everything in. You have already seen two such tricks, i.e., the dropping of articles and the dropping of the verb to be in passive voice sentences.

Another way to save space is to use short words instead of long words. For example, if there is not enough space for the word criticise, writers use words like rap or lash instead. Another advantage of using such words is that they often sound a bit stronger and livelier.

Here are a few of the most commonly used short headline words: graft (corruption); row (disagreement); back (to support); air (to make known); curb (to limit); poll (election); ties (relations); scam (clever but dishonest plan); opt (to choose); loom (expected in the near future); vow (to promise).

The Bangkok Post uses about 100 of these short words in its headlines, so you can learn them relatively quickly. But even if you don't know them, you can usually understand their meanings from context. Here is an example of what I mean. What does the word query mean in the story below?

Lawmakers query loan delay
Indonesian legislators questioned the IMF's top expert yesterday on why the Fund was delaying the disbursement of a further balance-of-payments loan to the country.

If you stop reading after the headline you might have a problem. But if you read the first sentence of the story, you can easily figure out that query means to ask a question. You can use this technique again and again with stories from the Bangkok Post. The headline and the lead contain essentially the same information and writers often use synonyms instead of repeating the same word twice to avoid sounding boring.

The first sentence

Like the headline, the first sentence - known as the lead - also has a style. I can illustrate this by taking the same basic idea and writing it in the various forms available to news writers. Let's begin with the simplest. (I hope you can see that the story is fictional - it is not true.)

A mysterious flying vehicle landed in a village near Khon Kaen yesterday.

This is typical of most leads in that the subject (vehicle) and the main verb (landed) appear at the beginning of the sentence. That is one reason most lead sentences are so easy to read. In a story like this one, however, the writer is likely to add some information - like I have done below:

A mysterious flying vehicle, said to be carrying people from the planet Mars, landed near Khon Kaen yesterday.

A mysterious flying vehicle, said to be carrying people from the planet Mars, landed in a village near Khon Kaen yesterday, causing widespread panic.

Notice that the above sentences are a bit more complicated to read because the subject and the main verb are separated. It is important that you can see this or you may misunderstand the whole idea of the story.

In particularly important or unusual stories - like the one I have written, for example - the writer may choose to make the story sound more dramatic by beginning the sentence with an introductory phrase.

Creating fears the end of the world was near, a mysterious flying vehicle, said to be carrying people from the planet Mars, landed in a village near Khon Kaen yesterday, causing widespread panic.

In each case, the key to understanding the idea is to first find the subject and the main verb. Then you can start filling in the details like why, when, where, etc.

Adding the source

It would be strange for a story like this one not to have a source. In fact, in this case, knowing the source is important to being able to evaluate if the "facts" are true. The source is usually found at the end of the sentence or at the beginning. Lesser known sources - like "a police official" or "villagers", for example, usually go at the end while well known sources, like "President Bill Clinton", "Alan Shearer" or "Michael Jackson" generally come at the beginning.

Which source below would make my story sound more believable?

A mysterious flying vehicle, said to be carrying people from the planet Mars, landed in a village near Khon Kaen yesterday, causing widespread panic, according to a famous fortune-teller who had visited the area.

Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai confirmed yesterday that a mysterious flying vehicle, said to be carrying people from the planet Mars, landed in a village near Khon Kaen yesterday, causing widespread panic.

The exercises in the middle section will give you practice in applying all of the concepts considered above.

Below are headlines which recently appeared in the Bangkok Post. Your task is to turn them into complete sentences. In other words, you need to add any elements (the correct form of the verb "to be" and articles) that may have been dropped. Be careful. At least one headline is already a complete sentence.

1. Interest rates may go up to support baht
2. Chuan determined to build new airport
3. Official accused of cheating students
4. Collapse of building in school feared
5. Thai students in Egypt need help
6. Airport taxi plan to be discussed
7. Lawmen confined to offices for negligence
8. Temples to introduce free food halls

Activity 2

The sentences below are all lead sentences that recently appeared in the Bangkok Post. Find the subject in each and circle it. Then underline the main verb. Put a box around the source if there is one. Be careful. Some of the examples are a little tricky.

1. Trackers are out looking for a number of crocodiles along Bang Pakong River after they escaped from a Muang district farm.
2. A recent decision by the Office of the National Cultural Promotion to scrap a proposal to set up a Muslim Consumer Protection Association has angered Thai Muslims who claimed it was unconstitutional.
3. Six people were killed and around 1,000 injured as a freak hurricane struck Moscow, uprooting trees and destroying buildings, including parts of the Kremlin wall.
4. A South African drug suspect who escaped during questioning was caught by anti-narcotics police yesterday.
5. Despite the existence of laws to protect children and youths from the danger of smoking, the government has not done enough to create public awareness, said Bang-on Rithipakdi of the Action on Smoking and Health (Ash) Foundation yesterday.
6. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad said yesterday his government is applying for a $700-million loan from the World Bank to aid Malaysians suffering from the regional economic crisis.
7. Two traffic policemen caught on film extorting money from truck drivers have surrendered and one has protested his innocence.
8. Two days after dramatically stepping into world currency markets to boost the sagging yen, American and Japanese finance officials yesterday vowed to intervene again if necessary, the Japanese finance ministry said.

Activity 3

Below are headlines and leads from recent stories in the Bangkok Post. Read them and answer the questions that follow.

PM tells navy to keep close eye on group
Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai has instructed the navy to keep a close watch on the movement of the so-called Free Vietnam Revolutionary Group which has reportedly used Thailand as a base for meetings and military training.

1. "To keep a close eye on" means to __________ something carefully.

   Israelis slam Hitler snack commercial
   The Israeli Embassy yesterday criticised the use of Adolf Hitler in an advertising campaign for the "X" brand of potato crisps.

2. In the headline above, the word "slam" means to strongly __________.

   B30 billion rise in 1998 budget gets cabinet nod
   The cabinet yesterday approved an increase of 30 billion baht in the 1998 budget, bringing total expenditure for the fiscal year to 830 billion baht.

3. If something "gets the nod" it means that it has been ________________.

   EU may slap ban on Thai orchids, fruits
   The European Union might prohibit the import of Thai orchids as well as vegetables and fruits soon if they do not meet EU standards, a Foreign Ministry official said yesterday.

4. If you "slap a ban" on something, you ______________ it.

   Scheme to woo rich foreigners falls short
   A scheme to attract wealthy foreigners by offering them permanent residency in return for foreign exchange injections is falling short of its target of 5,000 immigrants, with only 114 applications received in its first year.

5. What does the word "woo" mean in the above story?

   Official accused of cheating students
   Some 12 students yesterday lodged a complaint with Education Minister Chumpol Silpa-archa, claiming they were duped into paying almost 800,000 baht to an education official to book places at a technology institute.

6. What does the word "duped" mean in the above story?

   28 officials to face illegal logging probe
   The Forestry Department has set up a committee to investigate 28 officials implicated in illegal logging activities in the Salween national park and wildlife sanctuary on the Thai-Burmese border.

7. The purpose of a "probe" is to ______________ someone.

   End to martial law sought
   The National Security Council will ask the cabinet next Tuesday to revoke martial law in 16 districts of ten provinces.

8. In this story, the word "revoke" means to ___________.

Now you are ready to start reading the Bangkok Post itself. Look through news pages and quickly skim the tops of the stories. Try to find out what each story is about by reading the headline and lead (plus the captions beneath any pictures, of course). Then decide which ones interest you. Did you know that this is the way most good readers read. And did you know that most readers skip most of the stories and focus only on the ones they find interesting or useful?

Next look for headline words you don't know and see if you can figure them out by reading one or more paragraphs of the story. Then look at the stories one more time. Do most of them include a source? Can you find very many stories where the lead sentence begins with an introductory phrase?

Teacher’s Note

There is not a lot to explain this week. The lesson is packed with examples and exercises which should give your students a good idea of what to expect at the top of news stories. I usually spend a lot of time with headline and lead exercises because this is where the main ideas are. In fact, if your students can understand the top of the story, they have an excellent start towards understanding the rest of the story.

I would also emphasise another benefit of focusing on the headline and lead. These two elements normally give you more than enough information to decide whether or not to read the story. Students normally don't get much choice in an English class and I think they might like the idea of being "in control" for a change.

When you get to the newspaper lead, be sure to emphasise the importance of finding the subject and the main verb. Students often choose the wrong verb and this can cause them to misunderstand the story completely. Here's an example from my teaching experience in Thailand.

A woman, said to be despondent (very unhappy) over her husband's heavy drinking, jumped into a canal Friday night with her three children.

One of my students translated this as: "A woman confessed that she and her three children pushed her husband into a canal Friday night because he was a heavy drinker." The problem, of course, is that she mistook "said" for the main verb.

Actually, this is an example of what is known as "ellipsis", i.e., something has been left out of the sentence. The complete sentence would begin, "A woman, who was said to be despondent...."

•This lesson was prepared by Acharn Terry Fredrickson, BA Stanford, MA (TESL) University of Minnesota, Manager of the Educational Services Department at the Bangkok Post and general editor of this programme.