Lesson 1 (part 2) Close reading

• Engels
• Middelbare school
• vwo
• Leerjaar 4

Close Reading

Think of the communication cycle

How do readers respond – context – time place and culture. Literary theory

Why do writers write – social political historical personal message – human creativity an intrinsic desire and need to tell stories

What choices do they make – genre, text type, purpose and literacy features

Analytical tools

The big five models helps you to analyse texts. It is very useful for Paper one, written tasks and individual oral commentary. This is the lens in which you look at texts and reveal the levels of understanding.

Audience and purpose – who wrote the text, who was it written for, why did the writer write it

Content and Theme – what is the text about

Tone and Mood – what is the writer’s tone how does the text make the reader feel.

Stylistic analysis – what devices does the writer use

Structure – what kind of text is it, what structural conventions are used.

Analysis of texts requires logic. In order to come to a conclusion about the theme you have to establish several arguments. In other words use both deductive and inductive reasoning. Deductive comes to a specific conclusion by drawing on general premises. Inductive comes to a general conclusion by drawing specific cases.

An example

The private detective Sherlock Holmes walks into a dirty, dingy room that is sealed off with yellow police tape. Inside, a woman is lying dead on the floor. Other British police detectives who had examined the body before Sherlock Holmes arrived concluded the woman committed suicide based on their deductive reasoning. Holmes thinks otherwise.

He observed the scene, noticed certain jewelry on the woman’s body had been recently cleaned, except for her wedding ring. That forced him to ask the question, Why? Why would she clean everything except her wedding ring? Holmes induced that the woman did not commit suicide. In part, because she was traveling to London for one day, she packed an overnight bag—and had a secret meeting before returning home. The secret meeting and wedding ring, all allowed Holmes to continue to probe the none obvious, asking questions along the way but never forming a final opinion. Sherlock Holmes behaves like an annoying child who continually asks, Why. The “whys” stack upon one another, and before too long, they allow Holmes to form a pattern to reach a hypothesis and then a final theory.

Is this inductive or deductive?

Answer = INDUCTIVE

Who can answer the question why? What is the final conclusion?

Possible answer = the woman had an affair (reason why she did not clean her wedding ring) and the boyfriend she had a secret meeting with killed her/or the husband killed her. Two persons of interest come to of this scene

Inductive reasoning starts with observations that produce generalizations and theories.

Steps:

1. First, observe the figures, looking for similarities and differences.
2. Next, generalize these observations. 
3. Then, form a conjecture; a conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information.
4. Finally, in some situations, apply the conjecture to make a prediction about the next few figures.

We all need to form a process of our own when observing situations using the power of inductive reasoning. We need to ask why more often. We need to stop jumping to false conclusions, then collecting the data which will support our decisions.

conjecture = conclusion formed on the basis of incomplete information.

Moving on to smt new...

After the who and the what of a text we must look at how a writer uses language to instigate a response from the reader. How do readers feel in response to that language of various texts. 

The writer uses a particular TONE to put the reader in a particular MOOD. Think of the cause and effect relationship.

Tone is related to the context of the composition. Think that the author is in a certain state of mind ie frustrated, troubled, hurt then imagine what kind of vocabulary he would use to convey this message.

Disenfranchised to deprive of a franchise, of a legal right, or of some privilege or immunity; especially :  to deprive of the right to vote

 

Here are some of the words from MLK ‘s speech. You can see the diction and the tone that these words create. Even if he chooses sad and lonely, he isn’t sad and lonely but wants to create the tone of empathy.

How do you jump from sad to empathetic – imagine how the writer must have felt to select these particular words in that context. Imagine how MLK represented all the Afro-Americans on that stage at that one moment. Imagine how it would be to speak in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. The tone relies heavily on the CONTEXT of COMPOSITION in which the piece is written.

Students often forget how the text makes them feel. Textual Analysis should also include reader’s feelings in response to the text. Language has the power to put us into a certain mood.

Mood + MLK speech

How did the MLK's audience feel?

Words operate at 2 different level

- denotation: refers to the literal meaning of words

- connotation: refers to the surrounding aura or emotional meaning of words

The word "crippled"

How did the MLK's audience feel? Does it differ from how people feel now when hearing his words (context of interpretation) 

So a word such as crippled literally means ‘not physically able’ but its connotation calls on sentiments of sympathy or feeling sorry for someone.

In textual analysis writing about sentiments in an appropriate way requires a very sophisticated vocabulary. Instead of saying a text is light or scary you may what to use whimsical or threatening.

A good variety of descriptive vocabulary distinguishes a top level textual analysis from the rest.

Therefore you need to build up a good vocabulary.- lots of adverbs and adjectives when you talk about tone and mood.

Developing tone and mood takes time to develop. There is no single list of vocabulary to learn and use. 

(You could try creating a spider diagram around a particular text. You could brainstorm with others how the text makes you feel. By reading books, film reviews and discussing texts you can extend your vocabulary.)

Choose a page from the article you have chosen and answer these questions.

7 minutes

Write a 200-300 word paragraph with your findings.

7-10 minutes

Stylistic devices

• Techniques to give an additional and/or supplemental meaning, idea, or feeling.
• The goal of these techniques is to create imagery, emphasis, or clarity within a text in hopes of engaging the reader.

techniques have to be unraveled to discover a deeper meaning. 

also, these techniques beautify a text and make it more literary/aesthetically pleasing.

These are considered the writer’s tools of the trade. Becoming more familiar with them will help recognize the underling meaning the writer is trying to convey

Stylistic Devices

Elementary questions fundamental to a good textual analysis. Identify the type of text!

News article in columns with at headline, images and is newsworthy.

A brochure is often folded, printed on glossy paper, clear bullet point information.

Poster for a film has image placement, title and staring actors and producers names.

It is a skill of media literacy and is becoming more popular in this digital age.

- to anticipate, to predict

In your analysis of a text you will need to ask yourself why the writer chose to write that particular type of text. How does the type of text suit the purpose of the writer? The answer could reveal a lot about the context in which it was written and read.

It's not this simple. 

You have to be more precise!

In the following weeks we will talk about this more. 

IHAD analysis

Example on how to analyse structure correctly

Do it like Nancy Duarte

For an answer, we turn to Nancy Duarte, of California-based Duarte Design, who mapped out a masterpiece of American oration — Martin Luther King Jr.,’s “I Have a Dream” speech — to illustrate the shape of rhetorical genius.

She started by organizing the graph around verb tense, which shifts back and forth throughout the speech, riling up the audience. What you end up with is a series of flattened crests and peaks that represent MLK’s deft slalom between what is and what could be. That long concluding plateau there highlights his powerful vision of the future — in Duarte’s words, the “new bliss of equality.”

Over that, she layered a bar graph, with each bar representing a block of text. (Breaks in the bars represent pauses that give the speech its irresistible cadence.) Then, she color-coded the bars to highlight assorted rhetorical devices: blue stands for repetition; pink for metaphors; orange for political references; and green for familiar literature and songs, from Scripture to “America.”

There’s lots of blue and green here, especially at the end where he’s riffing on “America,” but what’s really fascinating is how much pink you’ve got everywhere — enough to put a coat of paint on Barbie’s Dream House. We all know MLK, Jr., was an expert at using words as a paintbrush. Seeing it in graphic form, though, shows just how frequently he resorted to visual language to hammer home his point. So next time you have to give a PowerPoint presentation or an address on the state of the country, remember: Think pink. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

Which rhetoric devices can stay the same. Aristotle approach and propaganda

 That include Emotion, leadership, logic. Rule of three

 Intertextuality must also be included. Intertextuality is the shaping of a text's meaning by another text. Intertextual figures include: allusion, quotation, calque, plagiarism, translation, pastiche, and parody. An example of intertextuality is an author’s borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. 

What would you keep?

Changes in literary elements

Repetition would be limited.

Changes in cultural elements – or leave it out so the world is not excluded.

Bible allusions turned to Koran allusions or not

Summer of discontent

How was the lesson?

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