Newspaper Comparison

Essay by PaperNerd ContributorCollege, Undergraduate February 2002

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It has often been said that the styles of writing used in Tabloid and Broadsheet newspapers differ greatly. In this project I will be attempting to discover whether or not this is the case by analysing various aspects of the linguistics of a piece from the Guardian and a piece from the Sun, each from the same day updating the public on the situation in Afghanistan. In most cases you would expect the two pieces to differ greatly in the way they use language, however given the size and nature of these two pieces I believe that they will be more similar than most people would expect. For example I fully expect each piece to use similar aspects of Journalese, such as starting with informing us who, what, when and where.

The pieces were taken from the Sun and the Guardian; coincidentally both were also on page 11. From each piece I will be analysing the Denotation and Connotation, Stylistics, Grammar, Graphology and Lexis and trying to determine what this tells us about the style in which each piece is written and why this is.

I will then be looking at the differences between the pieces and seeing what conclusions we can draw from this.

Because of the relative shortness of the two articles the amount of connotation is quite low. There are some examples however; in the Sun the 2 most prominent examples are "Erupts" which is referring to something starting suddenly. The Denotation of this is a volcano eruption. Both meanings are emotive and powerful and designed to get the public behind the decision to go to war. The second example of "wobblers" is said in the context as people who are not totally in support of the war, rather than people who rock from side to side.