headline bbp

CHAPTER 1

For Chapter 1 I will be giving you short news articles to read. I will then ask you to provide a Headline and a BBP (bare-bones paraphrase) for that article, and perhaps an item of Padding to label.

That’s it! You will find the examples to work on together in the discussion section.

HEADLINE

For our purposes, a headline is not what you think it is. It’s a technical term for us, much like “argument” and “conclusion”, which have different meanings for us than you’re probably used to. We think of headlines as attention-grabbers, right? They are supposed to make us want to read the article to find out more. But that isn’t the purpose of a headline in this course. In fact, it’s the opposite. We want to give the reader (the person we’re translating for) as much information as possible in as few words as possible. We want to do as much of the work for them as we can, so they won’t have to read the article.

A headline cannot be more than 5 words.

These words have to make sense, it can’t be word salad. The person you’re translating for has to be able to understand what you mean. So, your task is to determine what the most important information is so that you can figure out your 5 words. But that’s a little vague, don’t you think? “The most important information”? Is that the same as the most interesting? How can we be objective about those things? What if we disagree on what is most interesting, or even most important? Stop and think for a second – can you figure out what the answer is? I’ve already told you (if you’re reading these in order), you just need to put it together. It’s because it isn’t about us. It doesn’t matter what you think or how you feel or what you know or don’t know – we’re translating. So it doesn’t matter what you think the most important thing is, it matters what the author thinks. If the author could only tell us one thing, what would it be? That’s your headline. You have to get out of your head and into the head of the author.

How are you supposed to know what the author thinks? The answer is surprisingly simple: read carefully!! When someone writes a news article, they are writing to share some news, some new information. That’s what should be in the headline. Again, what if ALL the information is new to you, but you only have 5 words, what do you do? You know the answer now. It doesn’t matter what information is new to you, it matters what the author is trying to say. Just pay attention to the wording. If the article says, “researchers have long wondered why…”, whatever comes next is NOT the news. Typically, the news will be whatever they’ve discovered that explains this thing they’ve been wondering about. A discovery is news. A history of racism is not. *You can tell by the word “history” that it isn’t news. A new occurrence of racism could certainly be news.*

READ CAREFULLY!

BARE-BONES PARAPHRASE

Once you have the Headline, this one is easy.

BBP is the information in the headline expanded into a complete sentence. One normal, grammatically correct sentence. Note that the headline has to be part of it as well. So here you can add whatever you had to leave out of the headline because you couldn’t use more than 5 words. With a little bit of practice this is no problem.

PADDING

I’m not going to worry too much about padding, but you can go over the categories in the text. At most I’ll ask you to provide some information that you left out of the BBP and tell me what kind of padding it is.