Evaluation of the School Newsletter

For our prelim task, we have been asked to produce a school news letter, so with this in mind, in lesson we decided to get an insight by looking at and analysing our own school newsletter from Deyes High. Our newsletter is most likely to be aimed at the students' parents from the articles discussed and the content explaining about achievements throughout all aspects of the school, however the target audience could also involve the students themselves as this can be seen through the choice in images and colour choices. The colour scheme is appropriate and quite effective as they match the colours of our school logo/badge (red, white, light/dark blue), however, this is also one of the newsletter's limitations as the tone of the colours are very abstract, bright primary tones which could be connoted as quite unprofessional and a slightly childish outlook.

Also the images chosen for articles within the newsletter are clip art cartoons, which could have connotations of an immature choice of imagery and divert from the majority of the target audience of parents. On the other hand, this is contrasted as a fair bit of the way through the newsletter, there are a few professional looking photographs of students taking part in drama lessons, which would not only appeal to the parents reading, but also promote the subject effectively.

All throughout the newsletter, the use of plain black text in a formal, paragraphed layout will appeal to the target audience with also a mature feel. However, over the middle spread of pages ('recall to central'), there are large sections of just reams of text and a lot of people, (especially the students within Deyes) would at first sight be put off and bored with reading such large amounts of text. This makes me draw the conclusion that these sections of the newsletter is aimed at the parent, but even a large majority of parents might potentially get bored with this also.

Towards the end, there are pages that are titled "puzzle time" and "Numeracy top tips" that are clearly aimed at the students, which may be quite useful to them, however a Mickey Mouse clip art is used also here and though this section is aimed at the students, Mickey Mouse is usually associated with younger children than those in high school, and so the students could feel slightly patronised and may be dissuaded from reading the page. Overall, this newsletter has a mixed target audience which may decrease the appeal to any children or adults that are supposed to read it, which is clearly outlined by the use of both informal and formal content. From analysing the newsletter from our school, it has allowed to really think about what changes and amendments I will have to consider when making my own, to make my target audience clear.