Part A) Text A is a website, YouGov is to inform the public about the government affairs and seek the public's opinions on such topics. The purpose of the website could be to engage people who are part of the younger generation with the use of affordances such as the line that goes down the whole page and links all the information together. This 'tech savvy' website may attract those who are interested in finding out a range of information within one website. However, there are slight constraints with the fact that those under 18 may not feel like they can take part in the website due to voting age being 18. This may mean that the websites ultimate aim to get clicks on their website may not be achieved due to it not appealing to those of all ages.
The website starts off with an interrogative asking the audience 'what would you like to do?', this could suggest that they are trying to mitigate their language due to the fact that the person has had to come to a website to find out the information they need. This could be seen as face threatening as they cannot do it face to face, so they have mitigated their language to show the audience that they are respect and important. It is an interrogative that offers you options and allows you to make your own decisions.
Part B) Text B is on the BBC online news page informing people about the recent mayor elections.
Compare) Text A is from the YouGov website and it talks about what is available within the website and gives you lots of options to search around and find what might interest you. The purpose is to not only inform but to educate both the reader and the creators of the website. Text B is from the BBC online news page and it is being very concise about the results of the mayor elections and focusing on the Labor party. The purpose of the article is to inform people about the election results in a way that is going to get them more clicks as it is an online article.
As text B is the BBC people would expect it to be to be very formal yet they use hypercorrect grammar, such as saying 70 instead of seventy. However, this may just be to help make the text much easier to read and it goes with the almost summary style that it is written in. Text A is written quite formally despite it being short sentaces that are straight to the point. The formality would be almost expected as it is a political website however they put it in a way that may appeal to young people. This being that they split the paragraph so it is much shorter and does not seem like it would be as much effort to read as a whole paragraph.
The first text focuses more on the synthetic personalisation whereas the second text is all about the statistics. The first text uses the repetition of 'you' and focuses on getting you interactive with the website which could show that they are looking for more than clicks, they are there to help and the most interesting way they can and this is through things such as questionnaires.
Some very perceptive comments.
ReplyDeleteQ1 Apply more terminology to the quote - you could look at the use of 2nd person direct address in the pronoun "you" and the synthetic personalisation created by the adjective "welcome" which implies you are known and trusted, which will make individuals feel as if the web page is greeting them personally even though it is a mass-media text. This also clusters quotes (and techniques) that work together to achieve something, which is a top-two-bands skill.
Q3 Make connections and contrasts much more explicit with discourse markers e.g. In terms of purpose, both A and B... Because they are both... Where they contrast is...
When you are talking about hypercorrectness, you need a clear explanation - I think what you are trying to get at is that when the BBC article is discussing descending numbers, they get down below 10 and switch to words instead of numerals, so you get "11" contrasted with "eight", which is standard grammar but looks odd and confusing for those who don't know those rules, so I would label that as hypercorrect, which might seem an odd choice, however it is well suited for the more conservative (small c) audience who expect high grammatical standards of the BBC and may trust the institution to provide them with their news only while those standards are maintained. I would argue, in contrast, that the splitting of aspects of the story into one-sentence paragraphs is not standard as you should only change paragraph for changes of time, topic, place or speaker and so there is no need to split paragraphs 7&8. This seems to be done to try and make the text easier to access for the BBC's wide audience - they are meant to serve the widest audience-base possible and they must need to compete with easily-read tabloids who employ the same strategy of single-sentence paragraphs, so this convention is significant in terms of the text's appeal.
Prove PEE that A has more synthetic personalisation whereas seemingly unbiased facts are presnted rather than relationship-building in text B. Always support your points with close PEE or they don't get credit.
Don't forget to use the term 'represent' as often as possible - practise the skill of summing up how something in the text is represented.
Even more on the subtleties of the GRAPE - and how that is tied to techniques - to improve