Language of Magazines

Linda McLoughlin is a part-time lecturer in English language at Edge Hill College, Ormskirk, Lancashire. She has designed and taught BA and MA courses in English language, specialising in language and gender.

'This book is a helpful textbook for students of language and linguistics ... it is very easy to read and as such also a useful and entertaining book to everybody who wants to view his or her magazines a bit more critically.' - Irmeli Helin, Linguist List

• Introduction Unit one: What is a magazine? What is a magazine? What types of magazines are there? Who produces magazines? Unit two: The wrapping: front covers; Ideal-reader images; What’s in a name?: magazine titles; Visual images; Layout and graphology; The front cover as preview; Putting words together; Creating variety: sentence types; Sentence functions; Problems and solutions; Tricks of language; Unit three: Leafing through: the composition of the text; Front of house: the contents page; The composition of pages; Unit four: In-house: magazine contents; Horoscopes; Readers’ letters; The problem page; Magazine narratives: readers’ true stories; Dialogue within the text; Unit five: Who am I?: the relationship between the text producer and interpreter; Constructing subject positions; The ideal-reader; The identity of the text producer; The relationship between the text producer and reader; The editorial; Resisting subject positions; Unit six: The discourse of magazines; Discourse; Linguistic determinism: ideological Viewpoints; Text; Tracing patterns in language; Lexical cohesion; Grammatical cohesion; The discourse of magazines; Patterns of word choices; Unit seven: Representations of women and men: constructing femininity, masculinity and sexuality; Femininities and masculinities; Constructing femininities and masculinities: the advertorial; Constructing sexuality