Tools for Analyzing Texts (Julia Green)

Summary:

This chapter first talks about how we analyze texts regularly.  You look at different aspects of a whole and see how they are put together to create the entirety of the whole. Looking deeper into analysis, you can see that there are different lenses, or “theories.” Some of these theoretical concepts are: audience, purpose, genre, and media. These concepts are used to consider a texts context. The last part of analysis is personal interpretation. After taking the text apart and looking at the individual parts, what has it offered you? What can you offer someone else about the text that you have analyzed? Analyzing texts doesn’t just mean words, you can analyze a picture or someones stature, or an artistic piece. The first part of analyzing is just describing what you see, then interpreting what you described.

Response:

I found it very interesting that you can analyze something without even realizing you’re doing it. You take apart a text and come to your own conclusion about what it means to you, or what the author is trying to convey. Every person can look at the same text and take away something different from it, which I think is a beautiful concept.

Question:

What do you do if you analyze the same text multiple times and get a different result every time? Is there a way to decide which is the most “correct” analysis?

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