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".
Hello Tash - nice texts and you've gone with the grouping here of AUDIENCE of children. In terms of developing this further, you need to:
ReplyDeleteAO1 - ensure that your examples are always the best ones for the technique you're identifying - I'm not sure "wild-time challenge" is particularly informal for example from the National Trust Leaflet. Similarly, I'd want a top student to be able to describe vocabulary with more precision than "simple" perhaps, though I do like how you've organised your response to move between the three texts here.
AO3 - make sure your comments about context (e.g. WHY a given feature is found in that text) are really specific - try to avoid comments like "makes it interesting" and look to pinpoint a precise reason why it might have been chosen.I'd also like you to be careful about generalisations like "children will have more incentive" - be really tentative with words like "could" and "might" to make sure you're not too bold with these comments!