English Text Investigation

English Text Investigation

I am going to explore media coverage of anorexia in three different texts, each from a different newspaper, including the Daily Mirror, the Guardian and the Daily Mail. I am going to be looking at how the writers of these articles have used language to represent anorexia.

The first text I am going to look at is from the tabloid newspaper the Daily Mirror written by Natalie Lisbona. It is an informally written text there isn’t a specific audience just anyone who is interested in the topic. It is aimed at the readership of the Daily Mirror, which is the younger generation rather than the older generation, and anorexic men who succumb to anorexia or bulimia who struggle to find help, like Ian Sockett, who has been battling anorexia for 20 years. “Ian struggled to find help due to the stigma associated with the illness”. The purpose of the text is to inform people that not only are there anorexic women suffering but also anorexic men who are as the title says “starving to death in silence”, and that they need to be made aware of so that they feel like they have enough help in order to overcome this illness. The emotive verb “starving” shows how they are suffering and plays on the reader’s emotions.
There are so many preconceptions about eating disorders. The media often highlights “the popular image of eating disorder sufferers as young girls who look like models, but that just perpetuates the stereotype”. The structure of this text is in an anecdote form, it tells a story about his life “pulling on his trainers, Ian Sockett set off on his daily two-mile run”, he tells us about everything about his life and daily tasks such as putting on his trainers.

Lisbona starts the article by introducing us to Ian Sockett; one of the UK’s estimated 10,000 male eating disorder sufferers. The phrase “as his feet pounded the pavement” is polysemic, because of the fact a normal runner pounds their feet on the pavement however it could also be...