• tal@lemmy.today
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    9 months ago

    Headlines grammar. Doesn’t work like regular English. It’s designed to be especially concise.

    https://englishlessonsbrighton.co.uk/8-grammar-rules-writing-newspaper-headlines/

    Replace conjunctions with punctuation

    • Police arrest serial killer – close case on abductions

    • Fire in bakery: hundreds dead

    As with reporting speech, commas, colons, semi-colons, hyphens and so on can replace all conjunctions, or some joining verbs, to join clauses. Commas may also be used to join nouns (more common in American English).

    • Man kills 5, self

    I’ve seen a lot of English-as-a-second-language Europeans puzzled by it on Reddit. I don’t know of a single, comprehensive resource that defines it; I just grabbed the above link as an example that lists some differences, and the bit talking about the peculiarity here.