Work with the texts: What we think about when we think about a text

Basic questions

Attention to the following series of questions should bring into focus the main areas of theme, form, response and history – they are compiled from class reflection on the kinds of reading we might conventionally expect to undertake in first year undergraduate work:

What is the text about? (story, plot, themes, people…)
What kind of text is it? (medium, genre, function, location, historical moment…)
Who is talking to whom, within and around the text? (Dialogues, monologues, narrators, implied readers…) In what ways do you respond?
What versions or visions of experience does the text appear to offer? (Personal, social, historical, political, moral, aesthetic, emotional…) Are you persuaded or happy to share any of them?

Detailed/Close Analysis

Build up your account of a text with evidence drawn from the following areas:

Word Choice:
What sorts of vocabulary? Dialect? What others might have been used, or were used in other versions? Literal? Figural? Metaphorical?
Word Combination:
Speech? Complex/Simple? Repetitions? Tenses? Active/Passive? Questioning? Stating?
Sound Patterning and Visual Presentation:
Stress? Rhythm? Voices?
Textuality:
Structure? Shape? Relation to other texts? Genre? Unified/Fragmentary?