A recognised 'High Quality' Magazine will have longer words than a recognised 'Low Quality' Sunday tabloid newspaper. Hypothesis The quality magazine will have longer words than the tabloid newspaper.

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Scott Thompson MR Don

Maths coursework

Comparing a magazine to a newspaper.

I am comparing A magazine to a newspaper.

Introduction two publications that have been chosen are the Hello magazine and The News of the World.

The 'Hello' magazine is currently the International magazine of the year. It has become highly popular on the coffee tables of hairdressers or with the aspiring housewife. Features include high society parties and exclusive celebrity wedding coverage.

In contrast, 'The News of the World' is a high selling Sunday tabloid newspaper. The publication has become extremely popular with undercover reporting on celebrity scandal and kiss and tell stories. The paper would be mainly aimed at the middle - lower classes with manual or semi-manual professions.

Different publications aim at different target markets and are written to suit these preferences. We could suggest that both the selected magazine and tabloid are a light read in comparison to more descriptive broadsheet papers and specialist magazines. However, I believe that tabloid papers wording would be less profound and therefore more easily understood in relation to a high quality magazine.

Hypothesis & Objectives

A recognised 'High Quality' Magazine will have longer words than a recognised 'Low Quality' Sunday tabloid newspaper.

Hypothesis

The quality magazine will have longer words than the tabloid newspaper.

Objectives

i. To collect data on number of letter per word in two publications.

ii. To present data in a meaningful way.

iii. To interpret and analyse results and diagrams.

iv. To draw conclusions on analysis, and state whether the hypothesis is correct.

The hypothesis and objectives will be the focus of the investigation and data collection.

Methodology

The publications of Hello and The News of the World (NOTW) are both published on a weekly basis and the data was collected from the publications of January 7th 2006 and January 5th 2006 respectively.

In order to make it a fair test I randomly chose both articles out of each publication by closing my eyes and randomly selecting a page.

The first 100 words from each publication were then counted to record the number of letters in each word for the collected data. The statistical analysis will follow three stages of sorting and grouping, illustration and statistics. The findings are presented firstly in table format to show the obvious differences between the two publications. Further to this, the results will be analysed in the form of the following:

* Pie Chart

* Bar Chart

* Frequency Polygon

* Cumulative Frequency Curve

* Overall Media, Mean & Mode

Results and Analysis

The collection of the raw data for Hello and NOTW has been formatted into tables . As shown, the words have been inputted into the tables so that the words would be represented in numerical order, the stated word, and the word length. The table was produced so that the information was easily and readily available to refer to throughout the investigation.

The data was then grouped by word length for each publication. After grouping the data into individual categories, the raw data has been represented in Table 1.5 for both publications, simplifying the total collection of data of 200 words that will be analysed in the investigation.

Table 1.5 Shows the tally for both publications.

Number of letters

in a word

Hello

The News of the World

Total

% Total

letter

4

5

9

4.5

2 letters

7

5

32

6

3 letters

7

23

40

20

4 letters

4

6

30

5

5 letters

7

9

26

3

6 letters

3

7

20

0

7 letters

7

4

1

5.5

8 letters

5

8

3

6.5

9 letters

4

9

3

6.5

0 letters

3

4

2

3 letters

2

Total

00
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00

200

00

From table 1.5, the first piece of data that has been interpreted is that both publications share the same range of letters per word (LPW). The range is between 1-12, however both publications do not provide words with 11 or 12 letters.

The second observation from this table is that the highest percentage of letters in a word for the publications combined is 3 with 20 per cent. This was followed with 2 LPW with 16 per cent.

5.1 Results and Analysis

From the 'Hello' magazine data collection ...

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