Q1 Analyse how text A uses language to create meanings and representations.
Text A is an interactive website about the government, politics and current affairs in the world. It is used to inform, educate and also entertain to an extent. The purpose of the website is to create an interesting way to learn about politics etc. It also uses quiz's to gain statistics on current affairs. An affordance of the website is that it is anonymous so people can give their honest opinions and this may maximize the amount of people using the website and giving honest opinions. However, a constraint is that as the questionnaire and website in general is not face to face, questions can be misinterpreted and therefore answers are not reliable. This is due to lack of paralinguistics features and being unable to explain meanings.
The website appeals to young people as it has a modern design and layout. It has been made as interactive as possible to make the topics seem more interesting. As politics is not a topic young people usually have a strong interest in, the website makes it more engaging. Some of the time teenagers under the age of 18 may feel that they can not get involved in politics but YouGov contradicts this by the first option on the page being 'Take Part'. Although this grammatically is an imperative it is not a command as there are other options to choose from and it has no instrumental power. By giving three main options on the main page, 'Take part, 'see results' and 'solutions' represents YouGov as a place for interacting an getting involved.
The interrogative on the home page, 'what would you like to do?' makes it seem as though you have the power although they are using constraints by only giving you three options. However they use the interrogative to meet Goffman's face needs, they have to mitigate their language as they can not talk to the audience face to face.
Q3 Compare and contrast Text A and Text B , showing ways in which they are similar and different in their language use.
The two texts have different purposes, text A is to educate and involve the audience where as text B is to inform. Text A discusses events happening in the near future e.g the Presidential elections in the USA. Text B is informing on the events that have already happened in the Bristol City Council election.
Text A uses many imperatives such as 'Take Part', 'Find Solutions' and 'login' although these are options they are grammatically commands. This is because the website is for interacting therefore they want the audience to take part and by using imperatives it encourages this. Text B however, uses mainly declaratives such as 'Labour has won a majority on Bristol City Council after gaining seven seats'. These are used to inform readers. The verb 'has' in this is used to show the event has already happened therefore they do not want the audience to do anything, they're only letting us know past events.
A similarity between the two texts is they both use statistics. In text A an example of this is 'Boris Johnson's trust on the issue of the EU has fallen by six percentage points, from 36% to 30%.'. In text B an example of statistics being used is 'Turnout was 44.76%, with 141,790 people casting a vote.' By using quantitative data it can make the information given more reliable. This is often necessary in an article like text B and I found the text A statistics on an article within the website. By using statistics the articles can make their arguments more c convincing and educate the readers.
A difference between the two texts is Text A uses interrogatives such as 'What would you like to do?' and the questionnaires. This is because text A tries to create a two way conversation by getting the reader involved in actually answering questions on the topics which adds entertainment aspects because it keeps he audience interested. Text B however does not use interrogatives as it is not trying to create a conversation, there is not even a comment section.
Overall Text A is much more interactive then Text B. It is trying to get its audience involved. YouGov uses synthetic personalisation and interesting its audience in 'boring' topics. The BBC article is more about facts and statistics.
Some very perceptive analysis. Very promising.
ReplyDeleteQ1 Check the formation of the plural inflection - quiz to quizzes not quiz's which means belonging to the quiz, as small slips can lower your AO1 mark. You've considered a range of purposes but not 'persuade' which is very significant - the use of influential power to encourages visitors to add their data and to "join".
You might want to address the idea that YouGov has a wider audience but the people it most needs to attract are those who might stereotypically by less motivated to participate, so it appears to be aimed at them but is just as clear and useful for older users.
I assume you would have gone on to do the close analysis that supports the mitigation point, which is very promising.
Q3 If you have quick differences you want to deal with, consider using the 'although' structure e.g. Although the content of text A relates to what is going to happen in the future in terms of political policy and text B refers to the recent past in current affairs, both texts...
Use a topic sentence that indicates the point of comparablity e.g. In terms of dominant sentence moods, text A... whereas text B... Good clustered quotes - plan to do this at least once in every essay.
Try and dig into the subtler aspects e.g. look at the hypercorrectness of the BBC using descending numbers of seats in an early paragraph and, when they get under ten, switching from numerals to words - explore how that might suit the audience. That is far better than generalising about what techniques do: "By using statistics the articles can make their arguments more c convincing and educate the readers" is dangerous because it suggests what the technique does generally but isn't supported by close analysis and the specific GRAPEs using specifics from the quotes.
A real danger is using the smae area of comparablity more than once. You have already compared on imperatives/declaratives so you mustn't do another grammatical focus, let alone another sentence mood one! Try Hudson's dimensions of mode or a lexis or discourse point. Or a GRAPE point - pick one aspect e.g. audience expectations.
Once you have a well-planned range of points of comparison and you have supported points well with subtle and developed discussion of how techniques link to the GRAPE, you will really improve.