Tuesday, 10 May 2016

10/05/2016 - paper one practice


Because ‘YouGov’ is a website which enables people to have an opinion on political issues, the use of engaging techniques allows the website to come across less dry. The form of address within the website name ‘YouGov’ shows how the receiver is their main priority because of the possessive pronoun ‘you’ , making the receiver feel important even if they were not the target audience as it is addressing you personally. By ‘you’ being in red emphasises the importance of the audience’s participation within this website. The interrogative ‘what would you like to do’ makes the audience want to engage within the website as it is asking about what you want but giving you options. The use of influential power will make the target audience of non ‘YouGov’ members feel excepted as well as them not using the governments lexical field when describing the group ‘YouGov members share their opinions…’. As it is partially to the right of the centre also highlights how significant it is for ‘YouGov’ to make you feel welcomed because the topic of politics is not very interesting.  Due to this, if this website was transferred into an article, it will only appeal to people who are already part of ‘YouGov’.

Because the ‘BBC News’ addresses the online article specifically to a target audience, the use of personal language will make the audience feel special. By the concrete noun ‘Bristol’ being included within the headline will connect to the discourse community of Bristolians straight away. Even though the topic of politics will narrow down the intrigued audience to people informed with the lexical field of politics, by the article being about ‘Bristol City Council’ could appeal to a wider audience of all Bristol residents as it could therefore affect them. This political power the article gains within the headline will make people want to read on and find out how this issue will affect them. This power is also obtained via the political party ‘Labour’ being included at the start. This is different to the ‘YouGov’ website which does not address a specific audience within its title therefore will appeal to a wider audience. This implies that the website is more desperate and in need of an audience as the audience’s participation is needed and the audience does not have to engage with the article. The purpose of the article and website could also effect this as the online article is to inform the audience and the website is to persuade the audience to express their view.

1 comment:

  1. Great start - just a tweak to the phrasing: use the active voice to show how the producer has taken the GRAPE into account, not the passive voice e.g. Because ‘YouGov’ is a website which enables people to have an opinion on political issues, the producer has used influential power techniques to engage the public in a potentially dry topic so that they will add their data to the site.

    Check accepted/excepted.

    I'm not sure what you mean about transferring it into an article but it's a good depth of discussion and there is some very good linking between techniques and GRAPE. Get even more AO1 marks by linking the use of the pronoun you to second person direct address to create a conversational tone to add to the synthetic personalisation of the adjective "welcome" which makes the audience feel personally invited and trusted regarding the validity of their views, which adds to the influential power to encourage users to contribute their data.

    Bristol is a proper noun (names of people, places, companies, titles etc.). Bristol is also a major city and how Labour is faring in the run up to the next election is a topic of national interest, so consider secondary audiences too.

    Check affect (verb) and effect (noun).

    Very promising. Compare/contrast the texts in the topic sentence then explore the degrees of similarity and difference on that point of comparablilty, considering the complexities and using PEE (with terminology) to support your points.

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