Introduction
I am going to mathematically compare the different types of newspapers. These are:
- Broadsheets
- Type one tabloids
- Type two tabloids
Some examples of these are:
Broadsheets: The Times, The Independent
Type one tabloids: The Daily Mail, The Express
Type two tabloids: The Sun, The Star
I am going to compare the newspapers in terms of readability, how easy they are to read. This is because the other factors in a newspaper are mostly either difficult to fairly mathematically compare or to inaccurate for use.
The differences between the papers are many, broadsheets are aimed mainly at intelligent, good readers while tabloids are aimed at people with worse reading skills who do not want to read much or as complicated things. Therefore broadsheets will have more words and probably longer ones.
Some of the differences I have chosen not to do are:
- Amount of colour
- Amount of text
- Type of language
- Font size
- Ratio of words to pictures
- Words in a sentence
I predict that the broadsheets will have a wider range if words per sentence because of a wider range of vocabulary. I also think they might have more words per sentence because tabloids tend to have less words per sentence top stop their readers becoming bored.
Plan
I am going to measure the amount of words in a sentence on random page numbers on the top left article. I count everything separated by spaces as a word. This means that abbreviated words like NASA will be counted as one as well as hyphened words. I will not count sub headings because I decided they were not part of the main article. This will be my pilot. The lowest amount of sentences from each article will be how many results I take from each. I chose the random page numbers because it rules out the possibility of choosing the articles you have preference to which would make the sample unfair. I will take the random number from the 1st digit other than 0 that comes up on the calculator using the random function.
