The article has a good deal of emotive words and the use of them gives you the impression the article is serious and that bullying has to be stopped, it also grabs the readers attention. Some of the emotive words are very strong and powerful e.g. the headline “Suffering In Silence” is a very dominant headline because if the headline wasn’t powerful it wouldn’t interest as much people into reading the article as it would if it had a strong headline. The headline also sticks in your head and the meaning of the headline is to basically not suffer in silence by keeping the bullying to yourself and tell some about the bullying and maybe they can help you.
The article describes the different types of bullying saying “Anything that makes a child unique is a provocative reason for bullying – accent, colour, family, religion, even being unable to afford the trendiest trainers”.
Parts of the article are very disturbing like the interview of a boy being bullied called Stephen Farrow. He was bullied between the ages of 11 and 18 because he was overweight. People would call him names, hit him and even fill his locker with rubbish. The bullies followed him around and Stephen quoted “I used to get literally paralysed with fear – sometimes I couldn’t walk”. The article was very upsetting and it goes on explaining his worse incident of bullying, which was dreadful and embarrassing for him. The effect of having a real person describe his emotions affects the article in many ways. The readers find out how severe bullying is now a days and how it’s affecting the bullied children. Stephens experience was outrageously shocking and the bullying really affected him in a lot of ways. He said he stood out because he had a different accent and the fact that he was overweight. He said, “It destroyed me. If you are told with constant repetition that you are fat, useless and nobody likes you, then you really begin to believe it. It messes you up a lot.” this statement shows that he was really finding it hard to cope and that and when people kept saying he was fat he began to believe it himself which shattered him. He wasn’t coping with the bullying and has been in counselling ever since the bullying. The language Stephen used a great deal of was emotive and loaded words. He also used very powerful and strong words like “destroyed, paralysed etc”.
David Wirth a language teacher in Tolworth School made an anti bullying campaign. He made and survey and ran it on 1,000 girls between 11 and 18 the results showed there was bullying in the school. The school after knowing there was bullying in the school opened a bully helpline to try help the people being bullied. After the action taken to try cut down the bullying it was successful and as a result the bullying had cut by 80 per cent in three years. This was a main improvement made by the school. David uses facts like “bullying has been cut down by 80 per cent in three years”, which proves to the reader that something can be done to reduce the bullying in schools if you try hard. He also uses opinions; he tries to make the opinions facts. Overall David uses a lot of different ideas to stop the bullying.
The overall purpose of the article is to try and get the point across to the readers that bullying can be fixed and advertising the campaign to put a stop to bullying. The mail purpose of the article is to decrease the bullying across Britain. Rebecca uses facts to show how bad the bullying is becoming and wants the reader to do something about it, perhaps something like David Wirth. Why I think Rebecca is trying to do this is because the way she has laid out the article, she’s also given information of the telltale signs children might give for bullying.
