Categorising texts #1

Text 1: National Trust leaflet

Text 2: Weetabix competition on Disney website

Text 3: Mr Men competition

I am grouping these three texts because what they they have in common is mainly the fact that their audience is children, and they all have the primary purpose of persuading them to enter their competitions. Text 1 is a National Trust leaflet entitled "50 things to do before you're 11 3/4". It has a rhetorical question at the start, to get the readers thinking, and to give a feel of what the rest of the page is about, as children need to be able to understand what they are reading or they will lose interest. As with all three texts, it is informal, calling it a "wild-time challenge" and saying "we'll kit you up with your own flip camera" which is ideal when persuading children because they don't always understand more formal, complicated language. 

The Disney/Weetabix competition advertisement (which is on the internet) also understands the importance of maintaining the children's interest, by keeping what they are saying short and sweet, simply saying "play our sporty games for the chance to WIN great prizes!" and there are pictures to tell the rest of the story, a graphology feature that all three texts have chosen to use. Pictures will mean there is something for the children to refer to, so they can make sense of the information being given to them, and also it makes it more interesting. 

The third text is a competition to win Mr Men etc goodies, again on a children's radio website. Like the other two texts, graphology has a big part, as the colours are bright, there are lots of pictures of Mr Men as well as the products that you can win. Showing the children what they can win gives them more incentive to enter the competition because they want the goodies they can see. This text also uses lexis of Mr Men, talking about names such as "Mr. Bump" and "Little Miss Sunshine" and places like "Nonsense Land".

Studies about dialect

Peter Trudgill, Norwich 1970s

What did he investigate?: People that dropped the 'ng' at the end of 'ing' words, e.g. goin' instead of going.

Who did he investigate?: Differences between men and women in different classes of society.

How did he do it?: Talked to people from different areas of society.

What did he find?: The higher up the classes you go, the more results there were of the people using the proper 'ng' instead of missing it out, however higher up the classes the men tended to miss it less than the women, whereas lower down the women missed it out more than men.

Labov, 1960s

What did he investigate?: How people pronounced the 'r' at the end of words like 'floor', saying it how it looks or like 'flo-ah'

Who did he investigate?: Staff in three different New York department stores, Saks (upper class), Macy's (middle class) and Klein's (lower class than the other two).

How did he do it?: He went into the stores and asked a question to get a response of 'fourth floor'. He would ask a second time, and compare their spontaneous speech with the way they repeated it.

What did he find?: Staff in Saks used it more the first time, and Klein's the least, and in Macy's there was a bigger shift in how they pronounced their 'r' when asked the second time.

Tidholm, Yorkshire

What did he investigate?: 'Definite article reduction' which means a thing that Yorkshire folk do where they miss out words like 'the' and say 't' instead.

Who did he investigate?: People in Yorkshire of all ages, class and gender.

How did he do this?: He interviewed them

What did he find?: That it occurred more with older speakers, and that in a couple of generation's time it will have disappeared! He also found that upper working class women tended to use it the least, who spoke more in an RP way.