Hypothesis - The average word length in Broadsheets will be longer than that in tabloids.

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A newspaper is a daily or weekly publication composed of folded sheets containing news advertisements, topical articles, correspondence, etc.

There are several different variations of newspaper, examples of these are Tabloid, Local, Broadsheet etc. For my hypothesis', I will be comparing a Broadsheet and a Tabloid newspaper.

Examples

Broadsheet

Tabloid

Guardian

The Sun

The Times

The Daily Mirror

The Daily Telegraph

News of the World

Hypothesis'

* The average word length in Broadsheets will be longer than that in tabloids.

* The higher the average word length, the more words per sentence, therefore the average words per sentence will be higher in Broadsheets.

Plan to Collect Information

* To make sure that the data collected from newspapers is fair I must buy the newspapers on the same day; this means there will be similar articles for comparison

* I will compare similar articles from 2 different newspapers: Broadsheet: The Times and Tabloid: The Daily Mirror.

* For the first hypothesis I am going to look at 20 articles, and analyze 100 words, this is a suitable amount and will hopefully give me accurate results.

* For the second hypothesis I am going to look at 30 sentences. This is a reasonable amount as there will easily be 30 sentences in both articles.

Hypothesis 1

The average word length in Broadsheets will be longer than in Tabloids

I predict that in this investigation the average word length in Broadsheets will be longer than the average word length in Tabloids. This is simply because of my prior knowledge of the two formats of newspaper, that Broadsheets typically use longer words than Tabloids because of their varying audiences.
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In this investigation I am going to exclude the following things from my counting:

* Names (places, people)

* Headlines

* Acronyms or abbreviated words

* Numbers

* Symbols

Results

Article 1

After counting all the words I then used the standard deviation formula to exclude any extreme results, this will enable me to create more accurate results overall.

The formula for standard deviation is,

I have now created a table so that it is easier for me to calculate the standard deviation of my results

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