The Wall Street Journal: Does Language Exclude Others?

Extract

[...] Though this publication does not intend to write poetically, some of the alliteration and assonance are so consistent that one may mistake some of these articles to be taken from an artistic journal. The WSJ aims to keep people aware of not only the marketplace, but national and international news as well, and at times the WSJ will deviate from its normal path of targeting readers interested business, by producing articles that have no focus on markets or business, such as baseball. [...]

[...] The Wall Street Journal: Does Language Exclude Others? The assignment states that “language use in discourse communities functions (in part) to exclude others”. While this is true in many cases, sometimes language use in discourse communities actually functions to include others. After all, the goal of any publication, be it a newspaper, a science journal, or a magazine, sets forth the goal of maximizing its readership, not excluding any potential subscribers. In attempts to include others, a publication must use non-exclusionist writing, so that a person who does not belong to the discourse community can easily digest and comprehend the writing. [...]

[...] Evidence for this lays in the fact that this publication cannot legally offer any sort of advice, and we can define instruction to be a subset of advice. Likewise, persuasion is as well a type of advice, and thus is not likely to be one of the purposes. The purpose of this collection is to inform, argue, and evaluate. When there is ever a dissemination of information of any kind it is a way of informing. In supporting or providing evidence for this, we attempt to argue one side or provide arguments for multiple sides. [...]