Fragmentary narrative reasoning. On the enthymematic structure of journalistic storytelling

Abstract

Journalists worldwide conceive of their work mostly as writing stories, because the narrative mode is extremely effective in delivering information to all social categories. Nonetheless, journalists hardly ever tell a whole story that complies with the criteria contemplated by narratology. Instead, they tell parts of a story and let the audience supply the rest, an operation made possible by the fact that narrative patterns are culturally shared by newswriters and their audiences. In this paper, we investigate some examples of fragmentary narratives as well as the journalists’ strategic reasons for using them, combining approaches to storytelling and to argumentation. The case studies are taken from Corriere del Ticino, the main Italian-language newspaper in Switzerland.