Week Five

Following our voice recorded feedback off Alison, our group met up and refined our ideas into the form of an e-mail that we sent to Alison:

"Dear Dr. Sealey,

Following our group meeting today we have come up with some more refined ideas. I have included a rough summary for each idea, please could we have some feedback on them to see if any of them are viable topics?

Main idea:
1. Student communication within the university
- We will look at three multimedia texts including Redbrick, Facebook and Guild flyers (back-up if the other two texts do not give enough linguistic data)
- We would then answer these mini questions within this topic area, possibly having each member of the group assigned to a particular question:
- Is there evidence of colloquial language in the Redbrick newspaper?
-How does the University’s Facebook page differ in traditional linguistic choices?
- Is there evidence that Facebook has changed the punctuation and layout of the newspaper to something more modern?
-Does the traditional written formal prestige of the Redbrick newspaper still remain in its place?
- A questionnaire to investigate the social attitudes and preferences towards the two mediums of communication.
Together we can form the information into a conclusion, answering the final main question of whether technology and changing social attitudes have influenced the linguistic choices of Redbrick newspaper. The measurable factors would be the questionnaire results and the number of instances of particular lexical features.

Back up ideas:
2. Persuasive discourse in political speeches or political discourse in the media

3. Comparing persuasive discourse between subject departments in the University prospectus

Thank you,
Group 6"

She then gave us further points that we need to refine a little more. To resolve this we will use Alison's office hours on Thursday, after which we will hopefully have our idea set in stone and we can then utilise reading week to kick start the project.