THE STRUCTURAL COMPLEXITY OF SELECTED NIGERIAN NEWSPAPER EDITORIALS

Abstract

The newspaper editorial is a special journalistic form. It deals with contemporary topics and is concerned with communicating and shaping the lives of the readers. In fact, the information function of the newspaper is vital for the meaningful existence of the people in their society. It is what they need so as to react appropriately to conditions and take appropriate decisions (Okunna; 2002). The theoretical framework that holds this study is the Readability Theory, according to Bailing and Grafstein (2016). A theory of readability would account for the aspects of written texts that enhance or impede comprehension and fluency. A readability theory deals with the approaches that measure readability and the theoretical bases of each approach. The approach used in this study is analytic or formula approach. It is a simple ordered steps that measure text readability based on sentence length and word length (Crossley, Allen and McNamara, 2011). The formula approach measures the readability of a text using readability formulas. Readability Formulas are mathematical techniques employed to find out how easy or difficult it is to read and comprehend a piece of writing. The readability formulas used in this study are: (a) The Flesch Reading Ease Formula which is used to assess the readability level of twenty samples of the national newspaper editorials (b) Flesch – Kincaid Grade Level Score to relate to the education level required to understand the editorials. Finally, a critical examination of the Structural Complexity of the texts was carried out go ascertain the readability of the texts. A true newspaper is seen as a paper that among other things is readable to people of ordinary literacy (Abiodun; 2004). Unfortunately, Nigerian newspapers have been accused of using "incomprehensible', 'bizarre', 'over pretentious' language and bombarding the reader with 'bombast.... It is also argued that the papers are not sensitive to the varied composition of the audience in terms of educational level, linguistic competence and level of awareness (Unoh; 1996). If the accusation against Nigerian newspaper is true, the implication would be that a good percentage of the literate readers does not benefit from the all-important information from the newspaper editorial. This paper therefore, analysed the level of readability of our national newspaper editorials by examining the structural complexity of the newspaper editorials, using Flesch Reading Ease Formula to test its readability level and Flesch – Kincaid Grade Level Score to test the level of education required to read the text. It was found out that the editorials were difficult to read to the average and low literacy readers but easy to the highly educated. It was observed that our media writers used complex structures which made the texts difficult to comprehend for the low literate readers. Suggestions for improvement of the language of the editorials were made.