The Language of Magazines (review)

In this short work, part of the Routledge Intertext series, Linda McLaughlin looks at the semiotics of British popular magazines. She focuses on textual analysis, graphic design, and gender and social identity in men’s and women’s magazines, specifically the British versions of such magazines as Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health and on British magazines like Bliss, Diva, FHM (For Him Magazine), Tattler, and Viz. Ch. 1 (1–4) asks what magazines are. Ch. 2 (‘The wrapping’, 5–24) deals with magazine covers and how title selection, graphic design, and ‘tricks of language’ (5) are used to both attract the reader’s attention and to create a self-image for the reader. Ch. 3 (‘Leafing through’, 25–38) treats the contents page and the general page composition (top/bottom and center/periphery oppositions). Ch. 4 (‘In-house’, 39–66) deals with the contents of magazines and with illustrations drawn from horoscopes, letters columns, advice columns, and reader narratives. Ch. 5 (‘Who am I?’, 67–80) is concerned with the establishment of a reader’s identity through the language of the magazine’s writers. Ch. 6 (‘The discourse of magazines’, 81–93) introduces the ways in which patterns of lexical and grammatical cohesion establish an ideological stance. And Ch. 7 (‘Representations of women and men’, 95–109) deals with construction of gender and sexuality in magazines.

The chapters, or units, as McL calls them, have a more-or-less standard format consisting of sections on ‘The aim of the unit’, ‘Commentary’, ‘Activities’, and in some cases a brief ‘Summary’. Interspersed among these are cursory introductions to linguistic and cultural studies themes and medium quality reproductions of pages from target magazines. McL also provides a number of practical exercises for students, an index of terms, and a page each of further readings and references. At just 115 pages, about a third of them reproductions of magazine pages, The language of magazines is a disappointingly quick read and rather limited in scope. But there is enough here to stimulate further independent analysis by an interested reader. So it may be a book worth trying in courses on linguistics, discourse, and style, particularly with the idea of adapting the approach to other types of periodicals (such as news or commentary magazines) or mass media (web pages, for example). Browsing the magazines at my local bookstore this weekend, I find myself looking differently at the covers and thinking now about how we are what we consume.