present attitudes to people's accents (40).
Whilst both Text A and text B acknowledge that people are judged on
the basis of the accents they use, Text A adopts a clearly academic,
serious approach to the subject, whereas the Daily Mail article
evidently focuses on a more lighthearted, populist, poll-driven
approach to the subject.
The texts aim to engage their readers, in different ways. Text A begins
with a tricolon of rhetorical questions, the first being ‘Do you say bath
as “barth”?’. This brings an interactive tone to the text, encouraging
the readers to think about their own accent and dialect/idiolect and
therefore engaging them. The writer then proceeds to answer his own
rhetorical question ‘Does it matter if you don’t?’ with the response
‘Yes, it sadly does’. In pushing the readers to conform to this view,
emphasised by the adverb ‘sadly’, he sets an agenda for the rest of
the article in which he may gain readers or lose readers, suggesting
he is looking for approval or agreement. Yet either way, he captures
their attention with this statement. Text B also engages the reader,
with Chronondo using short, simple paragraphing to make the text
interactive. Evidence needed! This allows for the article to be easy to
follow, with only one or two ideas in each paragraph. This accessible
structure is furthered by the graphology of the text, with bullet points
beneath the title to introduce the key points of the article, and a list of
the favourite and least favourite ‘sexy’ accents to organise the
research that was found. This engages readers as everything is
simple to understand and they won’t be uninterested by long, detailed
paragraphs.
However, the way the texts are structured differently is due to the
tones of each article, which clearly contrast with one another. Text A