Emotive Language

Emotive Language is an important part of the English syllabus.
It is relevant to our understanding of advertising, cartoons, the tone of a written text and newspaper articles.

There are articles that have very little emotive language in them, such as this one in the Mail and Guardian newspaper. This is a highly respected South African newspaper that prides itself on its exceptional standards of journalism.

This is an article from the Sun newspaper in the UK. This article provides a sharp contrast to the previous article as it has a high number of emotive words in it. In addition to considering the language used, please also take a careful look at the visuals that accompany the text. Why have these pictures been chosen and what impression are they meant to give us of James Holmes?

As sensitive and critical readers we need to be aware of the emotive language in a text and we need to consider what response the writer is hoping to get out of us.
Can you identify the emotive language in the texts and can you see how we are expected to respond to this language?

Update to this post: Read this article about how criminals can be classified as "legally insane." Do you agree with the ideas put forward here?