Week 7

Activity One

Tolsen (1991) states that chat based programs is a term used to describe speech genre associated with television programming. Its initial attention to the genre focused on talk shows involving a host and guests. Ames (2016) explains that the type of talk that is heard on these shows is light hearted banter and is also important as the talk helps to construct some kind of community amongst its audience. Tolsen (1991) states that chat based programs revolve around three factors which include; personal, wit and humour and the risk of transgression underlies talk. The program featured above showcases Karl and Lisa (the hosts) interviewing Hamish and Andy. The 5 minute video is about the hosts asking what Hamish and Andy did over the summer break and what they will be doing this year when they get back to work. The whole video is very laid back and seems to be like a normal conversation occurring between the four people. Most comments are some form of banter and provide wit and humour. The conversation touches on more private and personal topics such as what the pair did in their Christmas break. In order to be an effective host on TV, I believe it is important to be natural and laid back to a certain extent. It is also important to have banter and be somewhat humorous to keep the audience interested and entertained. 

Activity Two

Below is the link for the piece-to-camera.

https://vimeo.com/165737125

In regards to the piece-to-camera activity, it was a bit nerve wrecking at first. It took a couple of takes until I was completely happy with the result. In the first few takes, I was moving unnaturally and in the last couple of takes, I didn't like my hair. How typical! Writing the script and remembering most of it was difficult and took a few readings out loud to get it into my head. Yin (2015) supports this by stating that piece-to-cameras take good memory and are not as easy as everyone expects it to be. I hate seeing and hearing myself on video, and especially uploading it on the internet! However, I overcame the issue and just did the best I could. 

Activity Three

The aim of this paper, according to Clayman (1990) is to find out what makes a question quotable, and to specify the impact that quoted questions have on the sense and import of subsequent political speech. He also argued that exhibiting interactional conduct through such quotation sequences, rather than describing it in vernacular terms is one means by which reporters can maintain a formally objective stance. Clayman (1990) states that news stories are assembled in big measures from the observations and accounts of legitimated institutional source. However, the study finds that source accounts are frequently produced through forms of spoken interaction. The paper tries to answer these questions:

• When do source quotations preserve the local interactional context in which a given statement was originally spoken?
• What additional information is made available to the audience, and how might it be used by them to make sense of the focal statement?

The author makes it clear that when news writers put together interview and press conference material into their stories, they both report only the public figure's remarks, even though these are frequently elicited by some of the reporter's questions. The article is split into a couple of different sections that include:

The structure of interactionally generated source quotations

Clayman (1990) points out that television news stories and newspapers usually contain verbatim from a variety of sources. Some of these come from written texts, many of them come from interactional situations. These include:

• Interviews
• Press conferences
• Public speeches
• Congressional hearings

The author also states that reporters have two options for incorporating interjectionally generated statements into their stories. These are:

• Using quote single statements in isolations from the ongoing stream of interaction in which they were produced
• Including aspects of the interactional context of source statements

Finally, an important aspect of this section is that rather than taking statements out of context and perhaps distorting them, reporters should keep the context of talk to give a more complete image of what was said.

Some functions of quoted questions

Clayman (1990) argues that forms of talk such as interviews and press conferences consist largely of questions and answers that are allotted to reporters and their sources. However, newspaper accounts of these encounters often quote answers of their components without the question that elicited them. Clayman found that in Schegloff (1984) statements can be semantically unclear when considered apart from the interactional contexts in which they were originally spoken. An interesting point is that paraphrased questions serve a variety of more specialised communicative functions that can hard to perform. The section discusses the following topics:

• The statement as an 'answer': exhibiting an external impetus for its occurrence
• Relating the answer to the preceding question: the reply as prompt or delayed, confirmatory or rejecting
• Non-answers

The article concludes that embedding practices constitute fundamental journalistic tools-of-the-trade, for it is through them that reporters and their audiences together build the sense and import of reported speech. In conclusion, the article has supplied many tools and tips to constructing a political speech. These tools and advice can be used in regards to the final assignment. 

Source: Just Jared, 2013

References:

Ames, K 2016, Study guide lesson 7 - genres of speech - media, course notes, COMM12033: Speech and Script, CQUniversity e-courses. 

Clayman, S 1990, ‘From talk to text: newspaper accounts of reporter-source interactions’, Media Culture & Society, vol. 12, pp. 79-103.

Just Jared 2013, Megan Fox news reporter on teenage mutant ninja turtles set, digital image, viewed 27 April 2016, http://www.justjared.com/photo-gallery/2914715/megan-fox-news-reporter-on-teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-set-01/

Schegloff, E 1984, 'Sequencing in conversational openings', American Anthropologist, vol. 70, issue, 1, pp. 1075-1095.

Stefanovic, K 2016, Hamish Blake and Andy Lee - Today Show, video, viewed 27 April 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypyI5r5QsiA

Tolson, A 1991, ‘Televised chat and the synthetic personality’, Broadcast Talk, pp. 178–200. 

Yin, Z 2015, 'The use of cohesive devices in news language: overuse, underuse or misuse', RELC Journal: A Journal of Language Teaching and Research, vol. 46, issue 3, pp. 309-326.