First article
The article in the broadsheet was titled “EU set for troublesome week ahead” and contained twenty paragraphs.
The article in the tabloid was titled “EU better not” and contained nineteen paragraphs.
The table below is a tally chart for the above articles showing the frequency of each word length between 1 and 12.
This table shows the averages for both the broadsheet and tabloid.
* Rounded up from 3.9
Second article
The article in the broadsheet was titled “Man suffers lucky escape at supermarket car park” and contained eleven paragraphs.
The article in the tabloid was titles “Not so Happy Shopper” and contained twenty-there paragraphs.
The table below is a tally chart for the above articles showing the frequency of each word length between 1 and 12.
* Rounded up from 4.6
** Rounded down from 4.4
Again, the averages are very similar.
Third article
The article in the broadsheet was titled “Potter’s magic spell turns boys into bookworms” and contained twelve paragraphs.
The article in the tabloid was titles “Potter coins it like Beckham” and contained fourteen paragraphs.
The table below is a tally chart for the above articles showing the frequency of each word length between 1 and 12.
*Rounded up from 4.9
Fourth article
The article in the broadsheet was titled “United let fly with seven past Roma” and contained fourteen paragraphs.
The article in the tabloid was titled “United in Seventh Heaven” and contained nineteen paragraphs.
The table below is a tally chart for the above articles showing the frequency of each word length between 1 and 12.
* Rounded down from 4.1
** Rounded up from 4.6
Summary
Each article on its own does not give a final result because it is only a small sample. To get a more accurate picture of what word lengths the articles use I decided to total the individual results and create the graph shown on the following page.
The overall word length comparison appears to show that the newspapers word length use is similar which was not my expected result.
As a final step, I totalled the use of words with length between 1 to 6 and 7 to 12 and produced a summary word length comparison graph. This showed that the broadsheet contained more of the shorter words than the tabloid and the tabloid contained more of the longer words.
This was completely opposite to my prediction. This could be for a variety of reasons including my selection of articles, my choice of newspapers, the size of the sample taken (i.e. only taking thirty words from articles that contained around six hundred words or more) and using Sunday papers that may be aimed at a different audience than the daily papers.
The table below shows the averages for the summary of the broadsheet and tabloid articles.
*Rounded down from 4.4
** Rounded up from 4.5
Improvements
If I did do it again I would probably look at something else. I would maybe even use the reading age formula, to find out the reading age of each article ad paper. I think using that method would get a more accurate and definite result than the method I used this time.
I could also use more than one of each paper therefore giving me an even accurate result and maybe adding more tests in like the sentence length etc.
Conclusion
I concluded that the broadsheet had the best readability. This is because it uses more, shorter words than the tabloid. The tabloid uses more of the longer words as shown by the Summary Word Length graph.
This means that my hypothesis was incorrect because I predicted that the tabloid would use more of the shorter words even if the results were only marginally different.
I was quite surprised by theses results because the broadsheets are read more by professional people and the tabloids more by manual workers.
The reasons for these results may be the type of words that some newspapers have e.g. Wright-Phillips could be classed as either one word or two words. Also, I wasn’t sure whether to use numbers e.g. 2007.
I wanted to make different types of graphs but because of the type of investigation I am doing it limits it, e.g. I couldn’t use a stem and leaf diagram as the chances are it wouldn’t work.
