by Open Science Repository Communication and Journalism
(December, 2012)
Abstract: English Language has been an important medium of the press for nearly 400 years. It is used not only in Nigeria as a second language, but in most countries of the world, and a quarter of the world’s periodicals is published in English. A speaker of English who hears or reads a passage of the language which is more than one sentence in length can normally decide without difficulty whether it forms a unified whole or it is just a collection of unrelated sentences. That a text is unified is achieved by the use of cohesive devices. Cohesion, therefore, is the glue that holds words that make a text together. This paper examines the use of cohesive devices in the editorials of Nigerian print media to achieve a meaningful whole and for effective communication. The paper derives its theoretical framework from Halliday and Hasan’s theory of cohesion. The data used for the analysis are editorials of Newswatch Magazine. The choice of the editorials of the Newswatch Magazine is informed by the ingenuity of the editors. The paper concludes from the findings above that Newswatch magazine tends to enjoy wide patronage from readers because of the fluent and lucid use of language by the editors. The editorials are highly coherent texts, as the Editors tend to make judicious use of all cohesive devices in hanging sentences together at varying frequencies of occurrences. It could, then, be suggested that teachers of English composition should encourage their students to read good magazines, and Newswatch should be one of them.
Keywords: cohesion devices, text, editorials, tie, magazines, linguistic features, sentences.