Journalists rarely agree that their profession is as much a craft as an art, that mastery of the technique of creating text is as necessary as creative inspiration and intuition. However, practice convinces us that in a situation where there is very little time for reflection and polishing what is written, when the flow of essentially the same type of texts is very large, unwillingness to meaningfully relate to the laws of the craft, to "fill your hand" leads to results that are often far from the author's intention.

What is especially dangerous, oddly enough, is not the lack of knowledge of speech tools and compositional techniques that help the author "pack" information in different ways, with the best result, but half-knowledge, an approximate idea of what he is doing.-

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use the token in your text, or how it should be done. If in a newspaper or magazine text the author still has the opportunity to look from the outside at what he creates, then in the case of a radio or television program, even "home preparations"do not always help. In an untrained phrase born at the moment of utterance , just as in a text written when there is a lack of time, we often see certain failures that are considered by the general rhetoric.

In journalism, the comparison of various situations, events, and objects is widely used. The evidence-based power of such a move is small, but in the media it is the most natural way to learn and evaluate. It is clear that in the communicative sense, you can achieve a comparison in different ways. The most well - known tools are comparison, metaphor (as a collapsed comparison), and syntactic parallelism. The comparison can also be built on the basis of compositional techniques-analogies, allusions, prospectuses, and retrospection,

Let's see how comparisons and metaphors are used, and do journalists always achieve the results they want? For this purpose, we will take the texts of newspapers and television programs, as well as educational texts written by students of the Faculty of Journalism, and give them with small comments:

1) "Today exhibitions are an attribute of statehood" (ORT. Morning. 1998. 20 Jan.) - the exhibition is not an attribute (sign) of statehood; "Luzhkov is many-faced, like Janus, and many-armed, like Shiva" (Megapolis-express. 1997. N 18) - god Janus is not many-faced, but two-faced; "I think it's better not to rattle either words or weapons" (NTV. Today. Interview with a politician. 1998. 17 Jan.) - it is impossible to imagine the rattling of words; "the soul can be covered with vanity" (Red Banner. 2001. March 16; Syktyvkar). Such comparisons and metaphors can be called unfounded, "false", they assert what can not be. 2) "The announcement, like a dead man's electric shock, tries to revive the faded interest" (Showcase. 1997. N 12) - bad word order in comparison creates ambiguity; "And behind her, little by little, the little sisters and brothers, similar to each other, like mushrooms-sturdy, white, walk around the spacious hut in identical knitted socks" (Sarov. 2000. N 45; Sarov, Nizhny Novgorod region) - for a successful comparison in meaning and imagery as mushrooms the wrong place in the sentence is chosen, as a result, knitted socks become a proof of comparison; "It is difficult to convey the explosion of emotions that ran through the crowd of people when Oleg Gazmanov and his Squadron group appeared" (Ibid.). To run in the figurative sense means "to appear and quickly disappear, to flash", the basis of this meaning is "movement", and an explosion in the figurative sense means " a sudden strong and noisy manifestation of what-

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either", the basis of this meaning is "strength and volume", there is no "movement" here, so you can not say "an explosion that ran through the crowd"; "In general, the lid of that very chest will slam me. Lightly... " (Sarov. 2000. N 37); "Perhaps Vasily could not get out of these "tight gloves" (Ibid.); classic paintings "The Queen of Spades", "Othello" (Red Banner. 2001. March 16). Such errors occur because we do not think about the feature that underlies the metaphor and that makes up its essence, and as a result we get either incorrect lexical compatibility or incorrect (usually ambiguous) syntactic construction; such comparisons and metaphors are incorrect from the point of view of their linguistic mechanism.

3) " In the grandeur of railway stations, high-rises, vistas, bridges and crossings, these three seemed like fleas, ladybirds "(Tomorrow. 1997. N 16); " Alexey Ilyich leaned back wearily in an uncomfortable hard chair. It looked like a big heavy bag, so I put down the protocol and carefully examined it" (Mir Novostei. 1997. Jan 27); " Looking at the giant giant that appeared before us, as if from the depths of time, in the twilight of the outgoing day, covered with a virgin forest like bristles, each of us involuntarily experienced some incomprehensible pinching feeling "(Info-panorama. 1997. N 49; Izhevsk) - these comparisons cause the addressee inaccurate associations, unnecessary reflections in this text, such comparisons can be called inappropriate. The metaphor may also be inappropriate: "A portion of hot information is expected after the TV series entitled "elections to legislative and representative bodies of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation" ends in Russia "(MK. 1997. November 27) . The proximity of the words portion and hot leads to the fact that they have a direct, rather than a negative, meaning. hyphenated value; similar examples: "If you eat a package , you look a year younger" (advertising "Live bread - food of the XXI century"); " He believes that they (hockey players. - N.M.) have not lost their patriotism across the ocean and will not hit the ice with their face" (TV-center. Navigator. 1995. February 5); "Hangover and taxes - two burdens in one New Year's bottle" (Moscow. the outskirts. 1997. N 21).

Here are some more examples of an inappropriate metaphor: "The Duma is the same people: from the color of science to mediocrity. A cast from the big All-Russian boiler" (Mir novostei. 1997. 27 Jan.); "And the most exciting thing about all this is an attempt to penetrate the secrets of the past, which are stored in antediluvian time boxes. As if by chance I found myself in a strange attic of a dilapidated old house, I came across a chest that someone had forgotten, just opened the lid a crack and ... " (Sarov. 2001. N 37) - suseki-attic-chest-a chain of words of the same thematic series in direct and figurative meanings creates unnecessary ambiguity, ambiguity; in all the latter cases, it is not necessary to use a single word.-

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tafors could be used separately, but their combination creates an absurd picture.

Failure to use metaphor and comparison suggests that journalists have a poor understanding of the basic conditions necessary for their expectations associated with these expressive means to match the results. What does a journalist who uses a language metaphor in his speech or dares to create his own contextual one need to know and be able to do? First of all, of course, you need to understand what a metaphor is, how it works. However, this is not enough. "Metaphor is fraught with various dangers: it either spreads the stench of banality, or leads to absurdities; it takes a lot of tact, intelligence and taste to maintain measure and grace in relation to these insidious verbal ornaments," wrote Jan Parandowski, a well - known Polish philologist, writer and translator. - It's hard to do without a metaphor... It seems to meet the innate need of the human mind, and it is better to use it consciously than instinctively "(Ya. Parandovsky. Alchemy slova, Moscow, 1972, p. 160).

Proper use of metaphors is impossible without an accurate knowledge of three points:

1) What is the similarity of the object whose name we take to name the object we are writing about; how accurate and clear is this similarity?

2) Is this similarity important for the content of our text, what characteristic of the "attracted" object will "work" in the text?

3) What feelings and ratings are evoked by the object "attracted" for comparison, and are these ratings necessary in the text?

If it is these characteristics and assessments that are needed, the metaphor will be valid and appropriate. In addition, if we want to use several metaphors in the text, we must take care to somehow relate them to each other, and the smaller the amount of material, the more this is necessary.

And what is the proper use of comparison? For an answer and examples, you should refer to our classics: "The air there is clean, like a child's prayer" (Lermontov); "The sorrowful emotion aroused in him by Tatiana melted away like snow on fire" (Turgenev); "The smoke from the shots, like milk, was white on the green grass" (L. Tolstoy); "He turned pale as a sheet, grabbed a glass, poured it out and handed it to her "(Lermontov); " It was wonderful to see the forest from above, its bristly back lit by the moon. He seemed like some huge, sleeping animal and accompanied us with a wide, incessant rustle, like an inarticulate grunt" (Turgenev).

So, the main conditions for a competent journalistic comparison are as follows::

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a) correct, clear juxtaposition: the reader understands exactly what the similarity of two situations or objects is, and by what sign they are compared;

b) a reasonable, convincing comparison: the reader actually finds the sign that situations or objects are presented as similar in reality;

c) appropriate, non-random juxtaposition: the reader can relate the juxtaposition to the general content of the text in the way that the journalist intended; we will also add the rule that Cicero pointed out - that it is unacceptable to use ugly and immoral objects for juxtaposition and thereby draw the attention of listeners and readers to them.

As you can see, any verbal means of expressing thoughts has its own "secrets", without which journalists and television presenters doom themselves to rhetorical failures:"The first person who compared a woman to a flower," said Heine, " was a great poet, who did it second, was an ordinary blockhead." The ability to constantly find new comparisons and metaphors is no less important for a journalist than for a writer. Probably, a special dictionary would be useful for media workers - a collection of banal comparisons and metaphors. Of course, the speaker and writer may not use rhetorical means and techniques at all, but then they will have to convey their thoughts without much gloss, in a colorless, simplified, "bare" verbal shell. But will the media audience agree with this choice?

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