Thursday

Works have layers of meaning, we see something new each time we read them.

How do you find the Nutritional Value in books, stories, essays and poems?

A - Close reading

-developing an understanding by the words themselves, and then on the larger ideas that the words suggest.

Style is important. It is made up of: body language, gestures, facial expressions, tone of voice, volume, sentence structure, colloquialisms, vocabulary and more. (35)

We read and recount on situations just as we would write about a text we were analysing. The Rhetoric Triangle comes back into play.

Tone and Vocabulary make up a pieces Style, which helps us to discover layers of meaning.

Written and Visual style contribute to the meaning, purpose and effect of a text (37)

Choices of words: diction

Arrangement of words: syntax

Trope: artful diction. Metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole

Scheme: artful syntax. Parallelisms, Juxtapositions, antitheses

Question You Should Ask (37)

*when analyzing diction

1. Which of the important words in the passage (verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs) are general and abstract? Which are specific and concrete?

2. Are there important words formal, informal, colloquial, or slang?

3. Are some words nonliteral or figurative, creating figures of speech such as metaphors?

• When analyzing syntax

1. What is the order of the parts of the sentence? Is it the usual (subject-verb-object), or is it inverted?

2. Which part of speech is more prominant - nouns or verbs?

3. What are the sentences like? Are they periodic (moving toward something important at the end) or cumulative (adding details that support an important idea in the beginning of the sentence)?

4. How does the sentence connect its words, phrases and clauses?

Annotation is a super dank tool for analyzing (40)

-Circle words you dont know

-identify main ideas, thesis statements, topic sentences

-identify words and phrases you dont understand or that appeal to you

-look for figures of speech or tropes (metaphors, similies, personification)

-look for imagery and detail

Dialectical Journals are another way to interact with the text

These use columns to represent the conversation between the text and reader.

Note Taking	Paragraph	Note Making

Zeugma: connecting two seemingly different things in the same grammatical construct,

(“drying the hills and the nerves”)

*What effect is the author striving for?

*how does the effect serve the purpose of her writing?

Graphic Organizer

-takes time to complete, but lets you gather a lot of information

*Copy something the writer says, but then put it into your own words

*then analyze how the author said it and what that specific construction implies

These tools for analyzing written text are also very useful for analyzing visuals

*”The more we examine the elements of diction and syntax and consider their effects, the deeper our understanding of an essay, a speech, or a visual text becomes.” (51)