Questionnaires

As research for my Professional Project I have created several questionnaires to learn more about the area I looking into.  The first questionnaire I kept short to encourage people to answer the questions and circulated this primarily through the university emails.  This questionnaire asked 6 short questions, gaining information about the person responding, (age and sex), and then questions about their poetry reading habit.  I had 80 responses to this survey, unfortunately they were from a very specific age range and the majority of responses were female, however, they did show me that not many people were reading poetry or buying poetry books.  This supported my theory that poetry books were not aimed to this age group and that they viewed poetry as inaccessible.  I also asked about specific poets and if people had heard of them or read them, the poets I mentioned ranged from historically famous poets, like John Keats, to modern, award winning poets like the current poet laureate Carol Duffy.  Surprisingly few people had read Alfred, Lord Tennyson which encourages me to use the poem 'The Lady of Shalott' to create an illustrated book to make his word more available and visually enjoyable for a larger audience.

The second questionnaire I created asked people to write a written response to 'The Lady of Shalott', sharing their initial response, the way the poem made them feel and what it made them think of.  They were also encouraged to say what language in the poem effected their reading and the way they visualised it.

As well as continue my research into books and typography, my next step will be to take recordings of people reading the poem aloud so that I can listen to the way they read, for example, where they emphasise certain words and pause.