Longer Sentences In Some Of The Sections example essay topic

Conclusion From the analysis of my graphs, my results show that although there were various observations, the main one was that The Times in most sections had the longest sentences, and the Mirror had the shortest. This means that my first hypotheses of: 'The Times will have longer sentences than The Daily Mail, which in turn will have longer sentences than The Mirror' was proved correct. You can see this from my comparison of the three graphs, in 'Entertainment', 'News' and 'Sport'. In all of these sections, The Times had the biggest number of longer sentences, sometimes by vast amounts such as in the Entertainment section, where the Times median was higher than the upper quartile of The Daily Mail and The Mirror showing that the top 50% of the Times newspaper was higher than the top 75% of the other box plots (The Daily Mail and The Mirror) - shown on the left. These box plots and the cumulative frequency graphs that can be found with it, show that The Times had much longer sentences in some of the sections, providing further evidence for my hypotheses. However, there was one anomaly in the 'Sports's ection, where it was shown that it was The Daily Mail, in fact, that had the largest number of long sentences and although this showed I did make a misjudgment that 'The Times' would 'have longer sentences than The Daily Mail', it still backed up that 'The Daily Mail' would 'have longer sentences than The Mirror'.

This was shown in all my results, where The Mirror had the biggest number of short sentences. One can observe this judgement more closely on the cumulative frequency graphs of the three newspapers, where The Mirror is shown to go up the most steeply in the first square, showing that there were a lot of short sentences prevalent. My second hypotheses of: 'The 'News's ection of The Times will have longer sentences than the 'Entertainment' and 'Sports's ection,' was proved wrong after I had analysed my data. My results showed that the Entertainment section of The times in fact had the longest sentences, and this proved many peoples' thoughts that Entertainment has got an 'easier readability' wrong, as it showed that it had the longest sentences prevalent. One can observe this below, where The Times' entertainment section is shown to go up to 51-60 words, when the other sections of the newspaper (News and Sport) only went up to 50 words.

News actually had the shortest sentences out of all the sections in The Times, meaning that my hypothesis was not correct at all. It showed that the news section had the largest number of short sentences, and the smallest number of long sentences. To prove this point further, I chose to work out probabilities: If I picked one sentence at random from The Times, News, the probability it would have more than 31 words is 22/50, compared to the Entertainment section's probability of 25/50 and the Sports section's probability of 23/50. This goes to show that there is a larger number of sentences over 30 words in the Entertainment and Sport sections of The Times, in comparison to the News section. I know that my conclusion is reliable because my whole investigation was fair and tested accurately, and if my method was correct then my results must be too. I chose 50 sentences from each section of the newspaper, meaning the data should be reliable enough and also I picked different articles in order to make sure I was comparing various journalistic styles.

The stratified sampling I carried out before I started my investigation ensured that my results would be reliable as there was no bias on which journalist's writing I was choosing. Evaluation When investigating my different hypotheses, I encountered many different problems, most of which I overcame very easily. Some of these were that AutoGraph, the programme I used to draw my graphs on the computer, did not label my graphs and these had to be done by myself afterwards by hand. Another problem encountered was that at times the samples I chose did not have 50 sentences in them for me to choose, but I overcame this by taking smaller samples, ensuring my data was still reliable and fair. AutoGraph also created another problem, which was that it treated the data I typed in as continuous when it should have been discrete, meaning that the bars on the histogram were drawn touching eachother, when there should have been a gap but nothing could have been done about this and I had to leave it as it was. At the beginning of the investigation, I pointed out the problem of hyphens being counted as words and football scores, and by doing what I wrote in the plan; I managed to carry on my investigation as normal, without too many difficulties.

My plan did work as it should have, and everything that I did was correct meaning that all my results were reliable and legitimate as the tally charts I took of the three newspapers, after having done the stratified sampling, ensured that the whole process was dependable. I feel I could improve if I had more time, by investigating further on aspects such as word size, other newspapers, size of photographs compared to number of words (to see if whether there was a correlation between the size / number of photographs to the number of words), and there were many more possibilities. I also feel that sentence length may not mean that the newspaper is easier to read, so my observation in my plan of longer sentences being more difficult to read may be false, meaning my conclusion is not definite as to 'The Times is harder to read', especially the 'Entertainment's ection.