Descriptive Language in Snow Fall by John Branch

This study examined several descriptive parts of speech (e.g., strong verbs, descriptive adjectives, and descriptive adverbs) and figures of speech (e.g., simile, metaphor, and personification) in The New York Times’ digital mega-story Snow Fall by John Branch.  A corpus-based approach was applied to examine the occurrences of each category hereof in the six-chapter multimedia presentation. The theoretical framework of the descriptive language list was based on Barcelona’s (2003), Strausser’s (2009), Mathis (2013), and Dunkelberg’s (2017) propositions. Results reveal the function of descriptive language is a means of cohesive and artistic devices in journalism writings and, in particular, online digital mega-stories in order to allure readers today. Hopefully, thefindings might be a parameter for skill-training for the future of journalism.