The Readability of Various Newspapers.

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Maths Coursework

                The Readability of Various Newspapers                James Hems

The Problem & Plan

I have noticed that when reading different newspapers that a newspaper can report on the same subject in many different ways. In this project I have investigated the difference between various newspapers which are dispatched around the country.

For the project I have chosen three newspapers from Monday to Friday to study. I took papers from Monday to Friday as it also gave a fairer investigation. Two of the newspapers are what are known as a “Broadsheet” and the other a “Tabloid” newspaper. The newspapers in question are “Times”, “Independent” and “Daily Mail”.

I feel that there is quite difference between a “Broadsheet” paper and a “Tabloid” one. In order to investigate the differences between the papers I will be using two different methods of readability.

The difference between different newspapers is called the readability. The readability is measured in many ways and gives an idea on how difficult or easy a newspaper is to read. However measuring the readability is very time consuming, especially if a good number of results are to be taken to provide conclusive evidence of the readability of a newspaper.

However there are many things which can be done to do this. For discreet data it is possible to measure either the number of letters in a word, the number of words in a sentence, how many sentences in a paragraph. How many words over ten letters long there are within one article. For continuous data there are also many ways in doing this. It is possible to take the size of font, the amount of text or images upon one page.

As it is a school project it means that there is a time limit. This means that it makes it difficult to collect sufficient data if this project was to be carried out properly. Therefore the amount of data has been greatly decreased from what I would like it to be to provide conclusive evidence on the readability of newspapers.

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The results which I do gather will help to provide evidence on which newspapers have a high or low readability.

I will be counting the amount of letters within one word to measure for readability. For continuous data I will be taking the size of images upon one page and finding the percentage which is used for images as apposed to text. The more images there are suggests that it is easier to read as there are fewer words on the article.

The samples for the investigation were taken at random by using a random number generator found on a ...

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