Maths Coursework

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Maths Coursework

        

Introduction

In this investigation I am going to find out the readability of three different types of newspapers: tabloid, broadsheet and quality.  To do this I will take the average sentence length and compare them with each other.  In my opinion, the shorter the average sentence length of the newspaper, the easier the newspaper will be to read.

Plan

This investigation will find the readability of the newspapers by comparing sentence length.  Four different categories will be used: news, entertainment, business and sport. These were chosen because all three different newspapers had a number of pages on these categories.  

At the moment by looking at the newspapers a number of problems have been found.  Firstly, all the different categories are not placed in order or together within the newspaper so to get completely random pages will be difficult.  To resolve this problem the pages in the same category that are not together in the newspaper will be numbered.  Then a random number chosen by using the calculator’s random button will find which page to use.  If the random number chosen by the calculator is bigger than the amount of pages, that number will be left out and another random number chosen.

The next problem that will be encountered when starting the investigation will be how to chose random sentences of a page.  This will also be resolved by using the calculator’s random button.  The number that comes up on the display will chose how many lines will be counted down on that page and then the next nearest sentence will be chosen to examine the sentence length.

The final problem that has been found is that many of the newspapers have large pictures in the middle of their pages with circular shapes.  The writing is then wrapped around these pictures.  This is not a problem when counting sentences but part of the investigation involves taking the area of the newspaper.  This will be resolved by drawing a box around the picture keeping the area of it as close as possible to the picture.

Headlines will not be counted because they are often not full sentences so do not represent the full number of words, which will affect the average sentence length.  Adverts will also not be counted, as they will have the same effect as headlines by not representing the true sentence length of the newspaper.  Hyphenated words will be counted as two as they are actually two different words.  Anything that falls into the category fashion will be left out as not all of the papers have this category.

   

The investigation will be split up into two different parts.  Firstly, there will be a pre-test that will help to form a hypothesis which will be done by getting twenty random sentences from each newspaper.  The calculator will be used as mentioned above to find completely random sentences.  The sentence length will be recorded by using a tally chart.  The average sentence length for each paper will then be found.

Next, for the final survey a stratified sample will be done on all three papers for all the different sections as this will represent the whole paper and make sure a sample is taken from all the sections.  Taking the total area for the entire paper will do this.  To do this the different categories will all have their own colour that will help when doing the stratified sample.  Then boxes will be drawn around the text that will be included which will be in different colours to identify different categories.  The results for the sections will then be divided by the total area of the paper.  These will then be multiplied by 65 for each paper to find out how many sentences will be taken for each section.  65 sentences have been chosen for each paper because the more samples are taken the more accurate the results will be.

Initial Thoughts

My initial thoughts are that the set task will be a very long and time-consuming job as it involves the counting of many sentences. I believe that it would be difficult when trying to find the area of the newspaper, as there are many circular shaped pictures.  I also think that the broadsheet newspaper will have the longest sentence length and the tabloid will have the least.  I think the pre-test will show this and these are the results I am expecting at the end of the investigation.

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Pre-Test 

The results from the pre-test: -

The Times:

Average number of words per sentence= total number of words/20

= 31.65                          

The Daily Mirror:

Average number of words per sentence= total number of words/20

=17.25                                  

The Guardian:

Average number of words per sentence= total number of words/20

=32.05

The results from my pre-test show that the broadsheet paper has a longer average sentence length by only a small margin compared to the quality.  The broadsheet has a longer average sentence length to the tabloid paper ...

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