A Comparison of Two Newspaper Articles

A Comparison of Two Newspaper Articles In this essay I will be comparing two articles taken from local

newspapers in different areas. I will be looking at the techniques

used in each article and their effectiveness. I will use this

comparison to eventually decide which article is the more effective of

the two.

The two headlines from the articles are quite different. 'Inches from

tragedy' is a large, bold headline written in a way that makes you

want to see what the headline is talking about, as it sounds serious.

'Firemen free bathroom tot' on the other hand is quite small for a

headline and only really uses one emotive word, free, making it sound

like the child was imprisoned, which is worse than what actually

happened. I think that 'Inches from tragedy' is the more effective of

the two headlines because it grabs the readers attention and uses a

lot of emotive language in such a short space to make the reader carry

on reading.

The language used in these articles is quite emotive in both cases.

Both articles use exaggeration to tell you what they are trying to

say. This is especially evident from quotes like "escaped death by

inches" and "impossible for him to get out" as they are telling the

truth about the events that occurred in each case, but are blatantly

over-emotive to make the article more interesting. The firemen free

bathroom tot article especially exagerrates the situation as it makes

a toddler stuck in a bathroom sound like a major rescue ...

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...ened and how

instead of the excess of interviews. Firemen free bathroom tot is also

very well written and is probably aimed at being something of a comedy

article. It makes the situation sound major by using lots of

exagerration and emotive language. However, sometimes the language

used is a bit too much for the situation, as it isn't anywhere near as

serious as the article makes out. There is also quite a bit of

irrelevant information in the article, such as the child looking at

the fire engine. I think the most successful of these two articles has

to be Inches from Tragedy, because it is interesting, informative and

not too long. It also backs up the information given in the articles

by picking out relevant quotes and sections from interviews. The other

article I feel doesn't do this as well and so it just loses out.