‘Reading to children losing out to TV and dinner’

News link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/sep/18/booktrust.survey.reading.to.children?INTCMP=SRCH
According to a recent report of The Guardian, a survey of Booktrust indicates that parents in nowadays spend much less time on reading to their children daily. Children, at the same time, spend lots of time on watching TV, DVD or surfing on the internet.

This article has a very effective start. Like most of the news article, this article starts with a short, conclusive sentence so that audience can acquire the essential idea of the whole article at the first glance.

It is followed by the details of the survey which includes related statistics. For instance the second graph shows among 1,500 parents, only one in three parents are reading to their kids daily. The average four to five-year-old spends double time on watching TV weekly when compared with doing reading. The average 11 to 12-year-old spend 8 and a half in front of the television per week. The advantage of doing so is that statistics can support the author’s idea to make the news article more persuasive. Also these statistics can help audience form a specific idea about how less time parents spend on reading to their kids. Furthermore, if audience still feel interested in this topic after seen the first sentence of the article, he or she can moving on to get more details.

To generate topic and discussion about the survey, the author then incites several reasons for such situation for parents. That is—busy life, fatigue and having to cook dinner. The author then quote a message from the director of Booktrust to suggest that even though parents now have a more stressful life, they can still squeeze enough time to read for their kids since early education is quite important.

To me, this news article is more like a promotion article for the charity organization Booktrust since the statistics and quotes in this article are all from it. However the angle and way of writing can alert the public about children’s education and even our own life style.

'9/11 children's colouring book angers US Muslims'

Pictures and news link: http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8630417638156893104




This is another news article written by Allison Flood from the Guardian. The title of this news article is ‘9/11 children’s colouring books angers US Muslims’. It’s a very good title since it can hook the audience and keep them reading this article. Since, according to the public, colouring books for children are very innocent thing, how it could angers US Muslims? This is exact the reason for why I decide to keep reading.

The news article itself is not such grabbing as news articles about disaster, war, crime, etc. However, I think this news article is also very interesting because of the conflicted factor in it. Firstly the two subjects in this article is children’s colouring book, and the other is US Muslims who feel ‘disgusting’ about this book because of the misleading and maybe discrimination content in it. Secondly, Allison Flood presents two conflicted view toward the content of this book. This is a balanced structure which could show unbiased opinion and also because of the two conflict view toward a single issue, the audience would feel interesting. After exam the factors of this article I consider this news article as a human interest article.

Allison Flood is very skilful at writing good news article about books and new media publishing. If she’s just describing the content of these books and try to promote these books to the audience then her news article would be very boring. However, in her news article she relates a certain book to a recent news topic and then brings a totally new angle to the audience. So each time I read her news article I feel totally obsessed about the new idea she brings to us and also feel that I have the interest to read the books she described in her article.