I predict that people with political power will use a higher level of formality in their tweets; one aspect which I will be looking at is the frequency of non-standard grammar.
Methodology:
In order to look at the level of formality in the tweets of someone with political power a radio presenter was selected for comparison. Fearne Cotton and Ed Miliband: Both are British, they share a similar age, both are in the media at the moment and both are influential.
Using tweets is an ethically sound method of studying language as they have been published and therefore consent had been pre-given.
Analysis:
|
|
Miliband
|
Cotton
|
|
Non-standard
English
|
0
|
12
|
|
The
use of multimodal resources
|
1
|
2
|
|
First
person pronoun
|
5
|
9
|
|
Emotive
language
|
12
|
7
|
- Miliband uses much more descriptive language.
- Cotton uses 12 times more non-standard English.
- Miliband uses a lot of emotive language: we did not expect this.
Conclusion and Evaluation:
There are comparable issues between the two chosen participants. The data gathered, mainly the use of non-standard English, supports my hypothesis. As Miliband always uses hyper correct grammar, this may be a sign of formality. The use of emotive language could in fact raise the formality levels as Milibands tweets could have been descriptive and useful whereas Cottons less emotive tweets may be 'empty'. However emotive language can be subjective as the audience will react to the language use in different ways.
For the future:
- Gather a larger data pool in order to compare more tweets.
- Avoid being subjective.
- Quantify relevant things.
