Linda McLoughlin is a part-time lecturer in English language at Edge Hill College, Ormskirk, Lancashire. She has designed and taught BA and MA courses in English language, specialising in language and gender.

• Introduction Unit one: What is a magazine? What is a magazine? What types of magazines are there? Who produces magazines? Unit two: The wrapping: front covers; Ideal-reader images; What’s in a name?: magazine titles; Visual images; Layout and graphology; The front cover as preview; Putting words together; Creating variety: sentence types; Sentence functions; Problems and solutions; Tricks of language; Unit three: Leafing through: the composition of the text; Front of house: the contents page; The composition of pages; Unit four: In-house: magazine contents; Horoscopes; Readers’ letters; The problem page; Magazine narratives: readers’ true stories; Dialogue within the text; Unit five: Who am I?: the relationship between the text producer and interpreter; Constructing subject positions; The ideal-reader; The identity of the text producer; The relationship between the text producer and reader; The editorial; Resisting subject positions; Unit six: The discourse of magazines; Discourse; Linguistic determinism: ideological Viewpoints; Text; Tracing patterns in language; Lexical cohesion; Grammatical cohesion; The discourse of magazines; Patterns of word choices; Unit seven: Representations of women and men: constructing femininity, masculinity and sexuality; Femininities and masculinities; Constructing femininities and masculinities: the advertorial; Constructing sexuality

'This book is a helpful textbook for students of language and linguistics ... it is very easy to read and as such also a useful and entertaining book to everybody who wants to view his or her magazines a bit more critically.' - Irmeli Helin, Linguist List