How to Analyze Text

ANALYZING A PASSAGE In writing about literature or any specific school textbook, you leave behind clevernessen your watchword if you offer specific passs from the text as evidence. Rather than simply move in quotations and expecting their significance and relevance to your argument to be self-evident, you need to hand over sufficient analysis of the passage. Remember that your over-riding goal of analysis writing is to butt some new understanding of the text. HOW TO ANALYZE A TEXT? 1. postulate or reread the text with specific questions in mind. 2. Marshal elementary ideas, events and names.Depending on the complexity of book, this requires additive review of the text. 3. Think through your face-to-face re fulfill to the book identification, enjoyment, significance, application. 4. Identify and consider most important ideas (importance will depend on context of class, assignment, study guide). 5. Return to the text to square up specific evidence and passages related to the major ideas. 6. Use your knowledge succeeding(a) the principles of analyzing a passage described below test, essay, research, presentation, discussion, enjoyment. PRINCIPLES OF ANALYZING A PASSAGE 1. successive material The Man With The ScarOffer a thesis or topic destine indicating a basic observation or assertion about the text or passage. 2. Offer a context for the passage without offering alike much summary. 3. Cite the passage (using correct format). 4. Then follow the passage with some combination of the following elements * Discuss what happens in the passage and wherefore it is significant to the work as a whole. * Consider what is said, particularly subtleties of the imagery and the ideas expressed. * Assess how it is said, considering how the word choice, the ordering of ideas, sentence structure, etc. contribute to the import of the passage. * Explain what it means, tying your analysis of the passage back to the significance of the text as a whole. 5. Repeat th e process of context, quotation and analysis with additional support for your thesis or topic sentence. SAMPLE ANALYSIS PARAGRAPHS FROM mob MCBRIDESTHE COLOR OF WATER An important difference betwixt throng and his engender is their method of dealing with the pain they experience. While James turns inward, his beat Ruth turns outward, adeptting a new relationship, pitiable to a disparate place, keeping herself busy.Ruth herself describes that, even as a new(a) girl, she had an urge to run, to know the freedom and the movement of her legs pumping as fast as they can (42). As an adult, Ruth still discovers the urge to run. Following her second husbands death, James points out that, while she weebled and wobbled and leaned, she did non fall. She responded with speed and motion. She would not throw in the towel moving (163). As she biked, walked, rode the bus all over the city, she kept moving as if her life depended on it, which in some ways it did.She ran, as she had done m ost of her life, but this time she was running for her own saneness (164). Ruths motion is a pattern of responding to the tragedy in her life. As a girl, she did not sit and think about her inglorious father and her trapped life in the Suffolk store. Instead she exclusively leave home, moved on, tried something different. She did not analyze the connections between pain and understanding, between spotion and response, even though she seems to understand them. As an adult, she continues this pattern, although her running is change by her responsibilities to her children and home.The image of running that McBride uses here and elsewhere supports his understanding of his mother as someone who does not stop and consider what is happening in her life unless is able to move ahead. Movement provides the solution, although a jury-rigged one, and preserves her sanity. Discrete moments of action preserve her sense of her own strength and offer her new alternatives for the future. Even McBrides sentence structure in the paragraph about his mothers running supports the effectiveness of her spurts of action without reflection.Although varying in length, each of the last seven sentences of the paragraph begins with the undetermined She and an active verb such as rode, walked, took, grasp and ran. The section is choppy, repetitive and yet clear, as if to reinforce Ruths unconscious insistence on movement as a means of coping with the difficulties of her life. FROM TONI MORRISONSTHE BLUEST shopping mall 1 The negative effect the environment can have on the individual is shown in Morrisons comparison of marigolds in the ground to state in the environment.Early in the novel, Claudia and Frieda are concerned that the marigold seeds they planted that spring never sprouted. At the end of the novel, Claudia reflects on the connection to Pecolas failure I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it was the defacement of the earth, our land, our town. I ev en think now that the land of the entire res publica was uncongenial to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we bow and say the victim had no right to live. 206) Morrison obviously views the environment as a powerful influence on the individual when she suggests that the earth itself is distant to the growth of the marigold seeds. In a similar way, people cannot thrive in a hostile environment. Pecola Breedlove is a seed planted in the hostile environment, and, when she is not nurtured in any way, she cannot thrive. 2 One effect of the notion that vacuous skin, blonde vibrissa and blue eyes are the most beautiful is evident in the characters who admire white film stars.Morrison shows an utilisation of the destructive effect of this lulu standard on the character Pecola. When Pecola lives with Claudia and Frieda, the cardinal sisters t ry to please their guest by giving her milk in a Shirley Temple mug. Claudia recalls, She was a long time with the milk, and gazed fondly at the silhouette of Shirley Temples face (19). This picture of two young African-American girls admiring the beauty of a white American film star is impossible for Claudia to comprehend. Another character who admires white beauty is Maureen Peale.As Pecola and the girls walk away a movie theater on their way home with Maureen, Maureen asks if the others just love Betty Grable, who smiles from a movie poster. When she later tells the others she is cute and they are ugly, Maureen reveals her touch sensation that she is superior because she looks more like a Betty Grable image than the blacker girls do. Pecolas and Maureens fascination with popular images is preceded by Paulines own article of belief in the possibility of movie images. She describes doing her hair like Jean Harlows and eating candy at a movie.Rather than being transported into th e romantic promised land of Hollywood, she regresss a tooth and ends in despair. Everything went then. Look like I just didnt care no more after that. I let my hair go back, plaited it up, and settled down to just being ugly (123). Admiring beauty in another is one thing transferring a sense of self-disgust when a person doesnt measure is another. At that point, the power of white beauty standards becomes very destructive. TSITSI DANGAREMBGASNERVOUS CONDITIONS Although Tambu recognizes the injustices she and Nyasha endure as females, she hesitates to act on her suspicion because of fear.First of all, she is afraid that she might not recognize and feel comfortable with herself in a critical role. She hesitates to pursue her critique, noting to herself, I was source to suspect that I was not the person I was expected to be, and took it as evidence that somewhere I had taken a wrong number (116). Using other peoples perceptions rather than her own, she judges her thoughts to be wro ng. Although she senses that her behavior as the grateful poor female relative was insincere, she admitted it matt-up more comfortable. It mapped clearly the ways I could or could not go, and by keeping within those boundaries I was able to avoid the mazes of self-confrontation (116). While she is pretty embarrassed that she lacks the intensity she had when fighting against Nhamo and her father over the maize, she is reluctant to lose Babamakurus protection and fears experiencing the same kind of trauma Nyasha does in her struggle. Although she says she feels rational to be preserving her energy, unlike her cousin, who was burning herself out, she reveals that she fears losing a familiar sense of herself in order to battle injustices.