I’m assuming that you’re not a native speaker, as I’ve seen many people in a Europe subreddit have difficulty with US headlines having different grammatical rules from non-headline text. They complained about them being not understandable; it’s apparently not something that English classes cover.
Said forum also had people complain about title case use in headlines (the norm in American English, though not British English) and use of some words like “slams” that are a common convention in headlines.
EDIT: Here’s a British English source listing some of the other grammatical rule differences for headlines.
I’m kind of surprised that nobody’s done a Wikipedia page on headline grammar rules (or at least hadn’t last time I looked, for people on that Europe forum), or I’d link there. It seems to me to be a common-enough issue that someone would have summarized them there, but apparently not.
EDIT2: It was a grammar difference that I wasn’t even aware of until I saw it brought up there. I mean, if you’d asked me, I could have told you prior to that that headlines looked different, could have written text that “looked like a headline”, but you learn grammar differently when learning a language as a native speaker – you use articles and conjunctions and such before you’ve learned what they are, so you don’t think about grammar the same way. As a second language, you already have parts of speech and grammatical rules under your belt, so the mental representation is different.
When I first ran into this, there was some guy, who I think was maybe German, insisting that a headline was incorrectly-written. I took a look and was equally insistent that it was not incorrectly written. He hadn’t specified was was wrong about it, because to him it was so obvious that it was wrong, and to me it was so normal that it wasn’t wrong and I couldn’t even guess what he was talking about, so it took a couple rounds of back-and-forth before we even understood what the other was talking about. My English classes had never covered headline grammar (people in the US had been probably reading headlines for a long time before they were taught grammar in a school), and it sounds like his hadn’t either, so neither of us had been consciously aware of the existence of a different set of grammar for headlines. But he was sort of doing the mental grammar diagramming that I would for Spanish, which I know as a second language, but don’t do for English. The headline didn’t diagram out at all using normal English grammar rules.
I’m a native english speaker who understands it perfectly. I still think it’s stupid, there is nothing wrong with throwing an “and” in there. If space is a concern just use an ampersand(&), it’s literally one more space than using a comma.
100% native English speaker here and I also think headline compression has become problematic. ocassionally I will read a headline as diametrically opposite to its supposed intention. :-/
I’m not a native speaker no and it was never covered in english class.
I know it’s a news grammar thing and probably comes from wanting to save space in papers, I still find it very silly and much less readable.
I also find title case pretty annoying but I think I’ve become more used to it since youtube videos are titled that way too and I spend way too much time on youtube.
To be fair, I imagine those rules were developed for use with physical writing, when minimizing space used up was more important. Nowadays, even as a native speaker these headlines just take extra effort to parse without much of a point.
When poorly written or complex, maybe. I don’t know how often I’ve had to focus on a headline.
Headlines are also written to be attention grabbing. I’d rather headline-specific grammar over clickbait. Maybe there’s a different attention grabbing technique, but for now I’ll gladly settle for headlines if given a choice.
Some other quirks I ran into – native speakers who don’t read much often confuse “their”, “they’re”, and “there”, because they’re homophones. They learn the language as speakers years before they learn to write or cover grammar, and in that environment, it’s easy to mentally treat the words as one. The people on that Europe forum virtually never did that.
But one error that did come up – in languages in Europe, there is often a “Romance” word and a “Germanic” word and they translate directly into each other when you move across languages, whereas in English, sometimes both of the words exist as loanwords and have different meanings. Examples are “manikin” and “mannequin” or “block” and “bloc”. I especially saw “block” get used to refer to a political group, whereas normally in English, you’d use “bloc” for that.
One that I’d been aware of for a while that Russians have trouble with is use of the definite and indefinite article. So, in English, you have the definite and indefinite article, “the” and “a”. In English, you are required by the language to always indicate whether a thing is a specific thing or an example of a type. I didn’t realize until listening to a series of linguistic lectures that that’s actually an unusual property for a language to have – English does that, but most languages do not. In English, you must have “the cat” or “a cat”; you can’t just say “cat drank milk”. But it was so embedded into my thought process that I hadn’t realized that I just always do that. Russian, as well as most languages out there, doesn’t work like that.
I’m assuming that you’re not a native speaker, as I’ve seen many people in a Europe subreddit have difficulty with US headlines having different grammatical rules from non-headline text. They complained about them being not understandable; it’s apparently not something that English classes cover.
Said forum also had people complain about title case use in headlines (the norm in American English, though not British English) and use of some words like “slams” that are a common convention in headlines.
EDIT: Here’s a British English source listing some of the other grammatical rule differences for headlines.
I’m kind of surprised that nobody’s done a Wikipedia page on headline grammar rules (or at least hadn’t last time I looked, for people on that Europe forum), or I’d link there. It seems to me to be a common-enough issue that someone would have summarized them there, but apparently not.
EDIT2: It was a grammar difference that I wasn’t even aware of until I saw it brought up there. I mean, if you’d asked me, I could have told you prior to that that headlines looked different, could have written text that “looked like a headline”, but you learn grammar differently when learning a language as a native speaker – you use articles and conjunctions and such before you’ve learned what they are, so you don’t think about grammar the same way. As a second language, you already have parts of speech and grammatical rules under your belt, so the mental representation is different.
When I first ran into this, there was some guy, who I think was maybe German, insisting that a headline was incorrectly-written. I took a look and was equally insistent that it was not incorrectly written. He hadn’t specified was was wrong about it, because to him it was so obvious that it was wrong, and to me it was so normal that it wasn’t wrong and I couldn’t even guess what he was talking about, so it took a couple rounds of back-and-forth before we even understood what the other was talking about. My English classes had never covered headline grammar (people in the US had been probably reading headlines for a long time before they were taught grammar in a school), and it sounds like his hadn’t either, so neither of us had been consciously aware of the existence of a different set of grammar for headlines. But he was sort of doing the mental grammar diagramming that I would for Spanish, which I know as a second language, but don’t do for English. The headline didn’t diagram out at all using normal English grammar rules.
I’m a native english speaker who understands it perfectly. I still think it’s stupid, there is nothing wrong with throwing an “and” in there. If space is a concern just use an ampersand(&), it’s literally one more space than using a comma.
Yeah in a day where the majority of news is not parsed through physical media, the whole “limited space” concern is kind of moot.
It’s just shitty writing
100% native English speaker here and I also think headline compression has become problematic. ocassionally I will read a headline as diametrically opposite to its supposed intention. :-/
I’m not a native speaker no and it was never covered in english class.
I know it’s a news grammar thing and probably comes from wanting to save space in papers, I still find it very silly and much less readable.
I also find title case pretty annoying but I think I’ve become more used to it since youtube videos are titled that way too and I spend way too much time on youtube.
Thanks for this. As a native speaker, it never occurred to me that headlines had separate rules that would be hard to parse as a non-native speaker.
To be fair, I imagine those rules were developed for use with physical writing, when minimizing space used up was more important. Nowadays, even as a native speaker these headlines just take extra effort to parse without much of a point.
Well, there aren’t paper costs, but now there are smartphone screens.
When poorly written or complex, maybe. I don’t know how often I’ve had to focus on a headline.
Headlines are also written to be attention grabbing. I’d rather headline-specific grammar over clickbait. Maybe there’s a different attention grabbing technique, but for now I’ll gladly settle for headlines if given a choice.
Some other quirks I ran into – native speakers who don’t read much often confuse “their”, “they’re”, and “there”, because they’re homophones. They learn the language as speakers years before they learn to write or cover grammar, and in that environment, it’s easy to mentally treat the words as one. The people on that Europe forum virtually never did that.
But one error that did come up – in languages in Europe, there is often a “Romance” word and a “Germanic” word and they translate directly into each other when you move across languages, whereas in English, sometimes both of the words exist as loanwords and have different meanings. Examples are “manikin” and “mannequin” or “block” and “bloc”. I especially saw “block” get used to refer to a political group, whereas normally in English, you’d use “bloc” for that.
One that I’d been aware of for a while that Russians have trouble with is use of the definite and indefinite article. So, in English, you have the definite and indefinite article, “the” and “a”. In English, you are required by the language to always indicate whether a thing is a specific thing or an example of a type. I didn’t realize until listening to a series of linguistic lectures that that’s actually an unusual property for a language to have – English does that, but most languages do not. In English, you must have “the cat” or “a cat”; you can’t just say “cat drank milk”. But it was so embedded into my thought process that I hadn’t realized that I just always do that. Russian, as well as most languages out there, doesn’t work like that.