Compare the ways in which the writers have made their presentations of the problem of sweatshop labour effective

        This evidence comes from several sources. There are interviews with the workers at the factory, facts about the wages and working conditions and quotations from people involved in the industry, such as Van Sou Ieng, the head of the Garment Manufacturers Association. She also cites evidence that cannot be argued with such as quotations from ‘economists’, who are not biased in favour of either side. Helen Storey does not use facts to back up her arguement. Her view comes completely from her own personal experience and she uses phrases such as ‘I think’ to convey her opinion strongly throughout.  

        The language used in Strickland’s article is quite powerful and many of the phrases have a strong emotive force, such as when she describes a worker’s home as a ‘damp, one-roomed hovel’. Strickland gives individual words and phrases extra impact by placing them at the end of a sentence or paragraph, separated from the other words, for example when she is describing the way women are treated in the factory, the words ‘exhaustion’ and ‘heat’ come on the end of the sentence to give them extra impact.

         The author also uses euphemisms such as ‘bad apples’ to imply something that is worse than what is said. In this case it means that the textile industry bosses the writer is talking about are behaving disgracefully. At the end of the article the author quotes a single untrue fact by itself in a paragraph. This has extra impact as it is obviously not true. The article uses a third person narrative throughout which makes it seem more like a story that a report. However, it is probable that Sarah Strickland has interviewed the people in the article and been to the places mentioned as it states that she is ‘in Phnom Penh’, Cambodia.

        Helen Storey’s article is written in the first person and there is no doubt that she has experienced the things she is writing about. There is less use of euphemisms and emotive language in this article, probably because more of it is devoted to the author’s opinion on how to deal with the problem of sweatshops. The second part of the article does give a good insight into how the British textiles industry works, which the other article does not. However, a big similarity between the articles is that the first half of each is dedicated to describing the subject and putting in details about sweatshops, whereas the second half focuses more on facts and dealing with the problem at hand.  

        Sarah Stricklands’s article is able to make more of an immediate impact than the other because it includes a picture and a large headline. The photograph shows a policeman and a young girl- probably a factory worker, holding a placard. It symbolises the idea of vulnerability and oppression because the policeman is very imposing and is holding a large riot shield, whereas the girl is very young and small and is only holding a flimsy placard. The headline reads, ‘Gap shorts cost $28, but the hard labour of women who made them costs just 20p’.The is an antithesis- a contrast between the two parts of the sentence. The first part of the sentence gives a price, which may seem quite acceptable, until one reads the very low price in the second half of the line and realises that this is the meagre wage the Cambodian workers are being paid.

        There is less visual impact in Helen Storey’s article. It is compacted into a single page and the headline is simply a statement, ‘We must act to shut down the sweatshops’. However, there is a short summary of the article in larger font at the beginning which encourages the reader to look at the article. The summary gives two horrific facts about sweatshops. There is also a line at the end of the paragraph explaining that Helen Storey was a fashion designer, which makes it clear why she knews so much about the textiles industry.

        In conclusion, I think that these articles are very different. The article by Sarah Strickland is more of a report and is very poetic in its use of language, particularly imagery. Helen Storey’s article is very informative and also makes it clear that the situation really is as she writes because she actually says that she has visited the places she describes. However, they both share a common theme, sweatshop labour.