I put The Sun at the bottom, because from what I know about The Sun it tends to have more pictures than the broadsheet papers, so I thought that it might not have as much text, where pictures are taking up the space.
Finally, I thought that the Daily Mail would be more in-depth than The Sun but not as much as the broadsheet The Daily Telegraph, I thought that it was in between tabloid and broadsheet in terms of readability.
Sampling Method
When studying word length I will take a 15% systematic sample from the articles, starting at a randomly chosen start point to avoid bias. I chose to use 15% because it is a good amount to provide me with enough data to analyse, and wouldn’t take excessive amounts of time to collect.
For sentence length I will take a 50% systematic sample of sentences, this is because it also provides me with a good amount of data to work with.
Finally, for article length, I am going to be taking a census. This means including all the data available to me in my study. I will be doing this because there aren’t many sentences in a whole article and sometimes only 5 sentences. So taking a %50 sample for example wouldn’t be appropriate.
Pre-test
I have done a pre-test to see if there are any problems that could occur.
During my pre-test I found there were a few issues which could cause problems.
- Hyphenated words
- Abbreviations
- Acronyms
- Numbers
I have decided to include hyphenated works as two separate words, abbreviations will be counted as they are seen on the page, acronyms too, and numbers will be counted as one word.
For example if there was a sentence:
“The 86 year-old OAP …”
I would count “86” as 1 word and 2 letters. I would count “year” as 1 word and 4 letters, and “old” as 1 word and 3 letters. With “OAP” I would count it as 1 word and 3 letters.
Results
Article Length
Here, I have chosen articles about the same events, so to keep it as un-biased as I can. Although it does show how different papers prioritise different matters.
Sport: “Chelsea boss won’t deny meeting Cole over transfer”
Front Page: “SAS feared dead in Iraq air crash as millions of voters defy terrorists”
Mid-Paper: “REVEALED: The secret evidence that Jacko hopes will save him from a prison cell”
Sentence Length
These are the sentence lengths that I collected, they have been ordered.
Word Length
Sport
Front Page
Mid-Paper
Analysis
Word length
Here I will be displaying and analysing some box and whisker diagrams comparing word lengths from the three different papers.
Sport
From the box and whisker diagrams I can see that the Daily Mail seems to have the longer words in general. As you can see the median word length is higher than the other two and the spread between the quartiles stretches further into the high numbers.
The mean for the Daily Mail is also higher than the rest of them (as displayed on the box and whisker diagrams).
The Daily Telegraph and The Sun compare very closely on the box and whisker diagrams, though The Daily Mail shows a significantly lower mean word length.
Front Page
The box and whisker diagrams show me that The Sun obviously has the longer words in general. This also shows through in the mean.
On The Daily Telegraph plot, it doesn’t look like there is a median; this is because the median is the same value as the lower quartile, so they are on top of each other.
I think that by comparing the Sport and the Front Page plots, I can see that in general the Front Page articles seem to have significantly shorter words.
Mid-Paper
I can see that the Daily Mail has a wider spread of word length, but still its mean word length is lower still than The Sun, who has the longest mean word length of the three in mid-paper articles.
The mid-paper articles tend to have longer words than that of the front page articles, but I think shorter than the sport ones.
