To work out and measure the readability of the newspapers we will be considering the following techniques:
- Number of letters in a word
- Number of words in an article
- Font size
- Number of words in a sentence
2. PRE –TEST
3. DATA COLLECTED
The following data was collected from the various selected Newspapers listed and using the techniques described above. The data was then tabulated in the following charts:
3.1 THE TIMES NEWSPAPER
3.2 THE SUN NEWSPAPER
3.3 DAILY MAIL
3.4 STANDARD DEVIATION FOR THE SUN
3.5 STANDARD DEVIATION FOR THE TIMES
3.6 STANDARD DEVIATION FOR THE DAILY MAIL
3.7AVERAGE WORD LENGTH FOR THE DAILY MAIL
From my Pre-Test, the average length of a word in an article in The Daily Mail is 5.125 letters long. To find the average length of a word I found the mean by, multiplying number of letters by the frequency.
3.8 AVERAGE WORD LENGTH FOR THE SUN
From my Pre-Test, the average length of a word in an article in The Sun is 4.95 letters long. To find the average length of a word I found the mean by, multiplying number of letters by the frequency.
3.9 AVERAGE WORD LEGNTH FOR THE TIMES
From my Pre-Test, the average length of a word in an article in The Times is 5.275 letters long. To find the average length of a word I found the mean by, multiplying number of letters by the frequency.
4. PLAN / METHOD
When collecting results for this task it is important to take random samples. This is so that the results that are taken from the article are spread out and not just from the beginning part of the article. It is important that the results are from the whole article and not just the beginning because throughout the duration of the article the content may change i.e. become less complicated as the article progresses. This could result in the length of words becoming longer or shorter. It would also take far too long to count every word so it is easier to do random word selection throughout the article.
Random Samples: I will take one random article from each paper and take random samples from each of the articles. To do this I will count the number of words in each article. With this I will multiply this number by a number generated by RAN# on my calculator to get random words. I will then put the results in a table.
I will carryout a small initial random sample test to base my prediction on. I will do this in the same way as the stratified samples, but with random articles from each paper. The way in which I will do this is to count every 5 words, and count how many letters there are in those words, then collect the data in a tally chart.
The above reasons show why it is important for random sampling to take place. The way in which we as a group will take random samples is:
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On a calculator, we use the random number generator (2ndF Random) which gave us a number e.g. 0.345
- We will then use the first number after the point, for examples sake 3, and then count the length of every third word in the article.
- This will be repeated until we have 80 results.
- We will then put our results into a table that will have the following headings: Number of Letters, Tally, and Frequency.
- We also took into count hyphenated words, and whenever we came across a hyphenated word we would us the word after and continue.
To attain our results as a group we will read through a gossip article from a tabloid newspaper and count the length of every fifth word. We will count every fifth word because our random number generator gave us the number 5.
STRATIFIED SAMPLING
The Pre-test results did show a difference in length of the average word between the tabloid and the broadsheet papers. However they did not show a substantial difference. So I will now test readability by seeing what area of a newspaper is taken up by different categories. The 3 categories will be news, gossip and sport the three most popular categories.
I will then take a selective sample from these articles e.g. mail
- 10% News – 20 words sample
- 16% Gossip – 32 words sample
- 39% Sport – 78 words sample
Total Sample for Mail = 130 Words
I will check the length of every 5 words for each samples e.g. News for The Mail will be 20 results every 5th word.
This will show me the average amount of words on the area of a page for each category i.e. News for the mail is 20% divided bi the average amount of words 5.125 = 3.9 words.
5. STATISTICS / DATA ANALYSIS
From the results we obtained from our investigation, I am able to interpret these results into different types of diagrams and charts. It is important to use different types of diagrams/charts because they can be used to compare the different types of newspaper. I chose to use bar charts, cumulative frequency graphs, box and cumulative step polygon diagrams. I chose to use bar graphs to see what initial impressions I had of the newspapers. The bar graphs show in general the length of words. When I look at the bar graph for the tabloid paper, I can see that the lengths of words used most often are: 2, 3 and 4. When the bar graph for the broadsheet paper is looked at, I can see that the lengths of words used most often are: 2, 5, 8 and 9. Finally, when I look at the bar graph for the quality paper, I can see that the lengths of the words used most are: 2 and 3. This suggests that the broadsheet paper uses longer words.
I chose to use cumulative frequency polygon diagrams because it can be of assistance when creating box diagrams for the different newspapers. In addition, the cumulative frequency polygon shows the median, lower quartile and upper quartile. It is important to have box diagrams because I can see the range of the whole data and I can compare the range of words on the different types of paper.
When we compare the means of the three types of paper, we can clearly see that the paper with the longest word on average is the Broadsheet paper as it average word length is 5.275. We also see that the tabloid paper has the shortest word, as its average is 4.95. This is what I expected as the readability of the broadsheet is more than that of a tabloid and quality. This suggests that what I expected was correct concerning the readability and word lengths of papers.
From comparing the results from the two articles and using them to see whether or not my expectations were correct I have come to the following conclusion. The broadsheet paper has the highest readability; this is what I expected as my introduction states. I also see that the broadsheet does not only have the highest readability for one article.
6. CONCLUSION
In conclusion, I can say that tabloid and quality and tabloid papers more often use words that have 4, 5, 6 and 7 lettered words. In addition, from investigations, I have found that headlines take up space in tabloids more so than the other two types of paper. This may be due to the papers target audience, as the audience may prefer shorter articles and may be attracted to the large headlines. The headlines for quality and broadsheet papers are considerably smaller as their article content is more thorough.
The fact that broadsheet papers are more expensive suggests that they have more to offer their readers than tabloid and quality papers do. We can see that as broadsheet use words, which lengths are usually about 7/8 letters on average. In addition, I have seen from my investigations that broadsheet papers devote less space to advertisements than in particular broadsheets. I suggest that the reason for this is that tabloids target audience pay more attention to advertisements than broadsheet audiences.
In this investigation, I have explored reasons as to why words in different newspapers on the same article have different lengths. To further investigate I considered another article that being news, to see whether my findings were the same throughout the remainder of the paper. I came to the result that the broadsheet paper has a higher readability, as I found that in both articles the broadsheet paper had longer words on average. This was what I had expected as in my introduction I referred to the fact that the readability is in conjunction with the target audience of the paper.
7. EVALUATION
From my investigation, I have gathered the following answer to the aims of the investigation. I found through collecting data and portraying them via a variety of diagrams, that the broadsheet papers have a higher readability and longer words on average, in comparison to the quality and tabloid paper.
This investigation was carried out as well as possible. There were few mishaps that occurred but those that did occur, involved miss calculations and not including names or numbers e.g. 9am or Peter. The random number generator was used to its full potential to assist us in achieving our results.
I would also not only use one day’s newspaper. I would most likely use perhaps a week’s collection of papers. This would be more effective as my results were lucky as major events were happening at the time my results were taken. For example, I was fortunate that Tony Blair was ill and that David Blaine was leaving his Perspex box. The next day or week’s articles may not have had the same types of articles that I had, therefore the results are not 100% reliable.
I do not think that my results were precisely accurate- I think that I could have made them more accurate by changing my strategic methods. I could have counted every single word and recorded them in my tally, but I felt that it was less efficient. However, had I done this, I would have obtained more accurate results. In any case, this would not have effected my results that much as one just assumes that the longer the word is, the more difficult its meaning is, and therefore mainly intelligent people could use it, and this may not be strictly true. I think I should also take into account that there would be different news everyday - therefore the coverage would be different on each day. Maybe I should have found the percentage of subject coverage on different days and compared them, or maybe I should have found out how much coverage there was on every single topic covered and I could have acquired more data to compare and analyse. This could have altered my results a lot.
However, my prediction is correct. In the conclusion the results suggest that The Times has more letters per word on average than The Mirror, but this does not mean that this is conclusive. There is only a small sample that has been taken. If I had more time, greater, more wider investigations could have been taken. For example, other newspapers could have been investigated. The other contents of the papers could also have been examined. The size of photographs printed in the papers should be analysed also to see if there was a correlation between the size and number of pictures to the size of the words.
However, it is important to point out that Word size may not mean that the paper is more profound or easier to read. The assumption I made concerning this may be false and invalidate the investigation, which means that my conclusion is not definite and I cannot take it far.
Finally, in my case, a detrimental factor for losing much needed time was that I originally collected the results with a group but then these results were lost or misplaced by someone. I, therefore, had to start on my own results by getting hold of some old newspapers from a month ago, which were available to me and restart the investigation.
