Newspaper commentaries on terrorism in China and Australia: A contrastive genre study

Newspaper articles are a common genre that has been examined in contrastive rhetoric research to explore its rhetorical and linguistic patterns. However, this chapter aims to go beyond this and to explore how the writers position themselves, manipulate the topic and address their readers by the use of various linguistic strategies and devices. This chapter illustrates the key findings by examining two newspaper commentaries, one Chinese and one Australian. The analysis indicates that the Chinese writer tends to avoid personal voice by the use of more facts and evidence to establish arguments, while the Australian writer shows personal identity clearly by presenting his viewpoint. These findings are discussed in relation to the respective sociocultural contexts in which the texts were written.