Our A2 English Language investigation into the change of car adverts.

1. Investigating language -
Car adverts
Alex and Tilly 

2.  Modern adverts are more simplistic
 Image of car is likely to take up the whole page, not a
small section
 Basic backgrounds – more emphasis on car
 Websites used on modern day adverts
 More colourful backgrounds on newer adverts
 Weight references wouldn’t be acceptable
Hypotheses - differences
(Example)

3.  Use of synthetic personalisation
 Larger images of the car
 Repetition of the car’s name/brand
 Company slogans
 Technical information about the car-
‘front-wheel suspension’
Hypotheses - similarities
(Example)

4.  Resources = general newspapers and magazines
 Some magazines, such as FHM, didn’t provide any car adverts
at all, so we were unable to use anything from these.
 Our modern advert is a valid comparative with our older
advert as they are both car adverts containing important
information about the car. However, our modern day advert is
much more simplistic than our older advert.
 Easy to find the car adverts as we had the available resources
which allowed us to search through and pick out the
appropriate texts. It was also fairly easy to analyse the texts
and find similarities and differences between them.
 Difficult to analyse the texts if they had a lack of words.
Methodology

5. 1962 - 2011

6.  More colour on newer adverts
 Bigger image of just the car – no separate little images
 Photoshop used to edit the car
 Ford advert states the different engine sizes of the model
in a lot more depth and all of the features that people look
for in a car. The Austin A40 only describes what the car
looks like and how big it is
 ‘Austin A40’ name stands out in the middle of the page,
the ford advert doesn’t
Systematic Analysis –
Graphology

7. Graphology has changed over time due a number of different
reasons;
 The growth of technology and its software- Photoshop is used
on almost every advert
 Improved cameras/quality
 How magazines and newspapers are printed- 50 years ago
they would have been printed manually with ink, today they
are printed in large factories by fast machines
Why has the graphology of adverts
changed over time?

8. Systematic analysis – Lexis
We thought the word ‘roomy’ would be used much more nowadays than the word
‘capacious’ which is used in the Austin A40 advert. However, using the Ngram Viewer, we
were able to see that this is not the case as both of these words are used equally in 2000.

9.  The grammar of the two adverts hasn’t changed dramatically
since it’s within a time frame of about 50 years, and words
haven’t changed a lot at all over this period
However, a couple of grammatical differences we noticed on the
adverts were;
 The start of the sentence not starting with a capital letter ‘you
invest in a Austin’
 Short sentences containing just a few words on the modern Ford
advert, but more complex and compound sentences on the
Austin A40 advert
Systematic analysis –
Grammar

10.  Semantics are in
both the old and
modern adverts
as the image of
the car that the
advert is about, is
shown as the
centre focus
Semantics

11.  To conclude, adverts have changed a lot over time mostly due to the growth in
technology. The language used in the older advert (Austin A40) isn't that
different to the modern advert (Ford focus), which is surprising.
 In our hypotheses we suggested that modern adverts have minimal writing on
compared to older adverts. However, our hypotheses were proven wrong as
the advert we analysed had a lot more words than we believed modern adverts
would have.
 The Ford advert contained 94 words and the older advert contained 270 words.
Although there are significantly less words on the modern advert, there’s still a
lot more than we previously expected and therefore, not as simplistic as we first
thought.
Conclusion

12.  Our advice to someone who is wishing to explore our chosen investigation
would be to not spend much time choosing their adverts and to pick ones
with plenty of writing on to write about as we had to keep changing ours
in order to have enough information to write about and analyse.
Evaluation
What went well What we could improve on
Use of resources – we had a wide range of
resources which were available for us of
both modern and older adverts. We used
magazines and the internet to find
suitable car adverts that we could use and
analyse
Time management – we didn’t allow
ourselves enough time to write our
systematic analysis in a lot of detail as we
spent too much time choosing the adverts
that we were going to use