Compare how information and attitudes about spiders are conveyed by the speakers in the two texts.

Text A is an emotive piece; it is a conversation between Patsy and her friend about her fear of spiders. Text A’s agenda is to inform Phil about Patsy’s experience with spiders because of this Phil allows Patsy to go into a monologue as she speaks, the text involves a lot of personal anecdotes showing Patsy’s heightened emotional state.
Text B is an article for a high brow newspaper, its agenda is to inform people about arachnophobia. The text is very formal and uses a very sophisticated range of vocabulary as the readers are likely to be well educated, as well as the sophisticated vocabulary there is also a lot of social science jargon.
In text A Phil is very sensitive when introducing the agenda; this is shown by the use of hedges and pauses. From the very beginning we see that Patsy is very passionate about speaking about her fear. She interrupts Phil and asserts her view that she “hate[s] spiders” this simple declarative which Patsy uses as her first utterance shows her passion towards the creatures and also demonstrates her dominance over the conversation. The verb hate used here denotes a strong, possibly exaggerated, feeling towards the agenda. The phrases “can’t stand em” and “they scare me to death” also illustrate this exaggeration and suggest an obsession towards the subject. The anecdote in the next section suggests that Patsy has a vivid, detailed, specific memory of the event which occurred creating a sense of trauma. The connective “and” is repeated showing her nervousness towards the subject, it could also show the child-like simplicity in her speech and attitudes towards the spider, further showing her anxiety as it feels like she is reliving the experience.
In text B the response is very analytical and sophisticated, Chris Speakman does this as he is trying to explain how people develop the fear of spiders in a rational way which people can understand, his explanation if how the fear comes about relates closely to Patsy’s fear in text A in terms of vocabulary with low frequency words such as “heightened” being used, however we see that generally the vocabulary used in this text is a lot more sophisticated than that of Patsy’s for example in text B pre-modifying adjectives such as “heightened” whereas Patsy uses the simple adjective “big” showing a wider range of vocabulary in text B, which is to be expected as the newspaper is aimed at highly educated people. In text B subordinate clauses are also used, again, contrasting Patsy’s use of simple connectives usually “and”. The tone of text B is very different to that of text A with text B persuading the reader.
In text A the first person pronoun “I” is used frequently, this is to be expected as the text is mainly a monologue however it could be argued that Patsy is quite self-centred and focuses more on herself in the anecdote rather than the spider which should be the main focus. The phrase “you know” is used several times as an attempt to connect with the interviewer, Phil, and to create a sense of empathy towards her and the situation. Throughout the text Patsy’s language is completely ungrammatical, for example she frequently uses “were” instead of “was”, this shows a sense of childishness within Patsy which could again link to her exaggeration of the fear as children have a tendency to exaggerate. The use of ungrammatical language could also be used to demonstrate the high levels of fear she is feeling by reliving the story.
Similarly to text A the personal pronoun “I” is used a lot when Ben Clarke speaks, this is because he seems to have a covert agenda of advertising himself, however Ben creates a more egocentric tone when speaking whereas Patsy’s tone is more emotive.
In conclusion text A and text B have a few similarities such as the use of personal pronouns however they are mostly different as they have different purposes and use different tones and vocabulary throughout.