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er, the first thing that catches their eyes is the headline. A bad headline will make the readers’ eyes glaze and drift immediately to another story on the same page or even to another newspaper. A good headline, however, can intrigue readers to read and invite them into the story. In this sense we say that headlines help to sell news and merchandize newspapers, which is very important in such a competitive media world.
1.3.2To Summarize the News Content
Naturally readers buy newspapers in order to keep posted on daily happenings, but to serve kinds of purposes, today’s English newspapers are getting fatter with a great number of pages. For example, a daily newspaper has ranged from about 20 pages to about 80 or 90 pages. And newspapers on Sundays sometimes include more than 200 pages. Literally no one can read all the stories processed every day. Therefore, many readers have formed the habit of scanning headlines, which makes possible rapid news comprehension. Thus one of the most important purposes of headlines is to inform readers quickly, which means that a well-designed headline immediately tells them the gist of the accompanying story.
1.3.3To Facelift the Newspaper Format
Nothing is more important than packaging the product. A piece of news and its headline resemble the product and the packaging respectively. Only when the headlines grasp the attention of the readers, the whole page can obtain vitality. So we say a final requirement of headlines is to stimulate the reader’s artistic sense. A dull head makes a dull page. But when heads are well written and well placed in forms that have been thoughtfully designed, the pages are clean and good looking. Therefore, news people need to make sure that English headline forms are set to beautify the layout of the newspaper and thus to interest readers in the stories.

All of these requirements, in general, must be handled in a maddeningly small amount of space, with additional restrictions placed by the size of the type used for the head. Obviously not all headlines can achieve all the three objectives, but they are always worked towards these objectives.

2. Grammatical Characteristics of Headlines
English news headlines cover a wide range, for example, politics, economy, military, culture, technology, medicine etc. Any topics in any field could be reported. Due to different purposes, some news headlines just summarize the news briefly and seriously, and some have an artistic flavor and act as lures to attract the public. Therefore, on the one hand, to achieve the purpose of highlighting completely the points of a piece of news in limited space, headlines not only choose words for their brevity and dramatic quality but apply very condensed structure which has been described as “headlinese” (张健, 1994: 2). On the other hand, since a headline is both to inform and entertain readers, skillful application of active rhetoric to headlines can help achieve the headline functions.
Therefore, an English news headline distinguishes itself from other styles of writing by its special characteristics on the grammar level.
2.1 Conciseness of Tenses and Voice
With the competition today between advertisers and editorial for space in newspapers, every reported word involves a cost. Therefore, a headline should try to attract reader’s attention in a condensed way. It is supposed to tell the whole