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I think that Broadsheet newspapers are harder to read than Quality newspapers and I think that Quality newspapers are harder to read than Tabloid newspaper. My main reason for thinking this is Broadsheets tend to have more serious articles on topics such as politics. Tabloids tend to have less serious articles on topics such as celebrities. Quality newspapers have a mixture of the other two. For example, when the boat crashed near Branscombe. The Tabloids commented on what was in the barrels and what looters were taking. The Broadsheets commented on the environmental issues and the Quality newspapers reported on a mixture of both aspects.
There are many different factors that affect readability. These different factors include number of pictures, ratio of text, to pictures, number of letters in words, sentence length and number of sentences in an article. I have decided to base my study on word size and sentences length. This is because I believe that they are the most significant factors.
I am going to begin my study by doing a random sample for sentence sizes on each article. The random sample will give me 15 numbers from each article. These are the sentence numbers e.g. 3 = 3rd sentence. I will then count the number of words in that sentence e.g. 3rd sentence = 17 words. I will then put the amounts of words in a sentence into a stem and leaf diagram. I am going to do a random sample so that I get fair results because the number of sentences in an article ranges from 16 to 34.
After I have collected my data, I will group the data into groups of 10 at regular intervals. So the groups will be 0-9, 10-19 etc. Then I will put the results into a frequency table. Drawing the frequency table will allow me to draw a cumulative frequency table. Once the Cumulative Frequency Table is done, I will have the correct data to plot a cumulative frequency graph. Cumulative frequency graphs are useful because they allow you to easily find the interquartile range. The interquartile range is better than the normal range because it doesn’t include extreme values.
As well as the interquartile range, I am going to find the range so that I have a good indication of whether my hypothesis is right or wrong. I will also find the mode sentence size group so I know how long the typical sentence is. I will also find the median sentence size because it is also likely to be the length of the typical sentence.
After I have finished the sentence size investigation, I will start to investigate word length. I am going to do a stratified sample for word length. I will count the number of letters in every fourth word. I will record the number of letters in a tally chart. The sample size will be a lot larger for this investigation.
