Analysing a text can sometimes feel like a dark art – where do you start? How do you know what you’re looking for? In the classroom, it can often feel like the focus is reading a specific text, rather than learning what the process of conducting a good reading might be.
Whatever stage you are at, from GCSE all the way to degree level, the way to approach a new text is always the same and will help you to develop an understanding of the book in front of you.
Read the Text
The first time you read a new text, concentrate on simply making sure you understand what’s happening (and try to enjoy it too!). Always read with a pen or pencil in your hand, ready to underline, insert question marks, highlight and make cross references (it’ll also double up as a useful bookmark). Highlight any words you don’t know, then look them up.
If there’s a reference you don’t get, google it. If the action is taking place in a town or country you aren’t familiar with, quickly read its Wikipedia page. The aim of this isn’t to become an expert, simply to help you to get an initial feel of the setting for when you’re imagining the action in your head.
If you’re reading a play and are feeling flummoxed by all the stage directions and different voices, see if there’s a version you can watch first to organise in your head what is happening.
And while you can never substitute reading a novel by simply watching the TV adaptation, the adaptation might help you remember who’s who (especially if the cast of characters seems to exceed a hundred, like with War and Peace). The aim of your first reading is to understand what happens, when it happens and to whom it happens, nothing more.
Now Read it Again
Not even the most thorough, sophisticated reader can hope to fully understand a text on first reading. Whether it’s one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, or a two-hundred-page George Eliot novel, you have to dedicate time to reading the text more than once. Particularly with fiction, knowing what happens at the end of the narrative will help you to understand how the plot developed to that point.
On your second reading you might pick up on certain ‘clues’ the author placed in the text to help you guess what was going to happen that you skipped over first time around. Or was everything a complete surprise? Had they done the opposite, and tried to convince you a different ending was inevitable? The second reading is to help you pick out all the small details you might have missed first time around, and to start to get you to think about not simply what was written, but how it was written.
Isolate the Passages you find most Important or Revealing
Once you have a thorough knowledge of the text, you can then start to make judgements about it. Which lines, acts or paragraphs seem to you to be most important? Do they set the tone of the whole text, or perhaps they might reveal the meaning of the text?
Maybe the first time you read them you did not anticipate that they were important, but now you see their hidden relevance? This is your opportunity to reflect on the text as a coherent piece of work, by thinking about the smaller parts of it that can tell the reader something about it as a whole.
How do you Feel?
It is true that no-one has ever got a good grade simply by describing how a text made them feel. But if you can find a way to discover what the writer did to stir up an emotion in you – whether that be pity, or annoyance, or dread, or delight – the chances are you will be able to offer a unique and exciting analysis of the text.
This is the moment to pore over every word used and reflect on the effects they have. Think about the kind of language used (is it formal, dialectic, non-standard?) and the rhythm of the writing (are the sentences long, short, questions, statements?).
What is the overall effect? What’s happening with perspective? Does it change from that of the narrator to a character’s, or vice versa? Does the text go from describing things visually to depicting things aurally? Take your time to really unpick everything that is happening and the effect it has.
If you know the technical names for some of these effects – assonance, onomatopoeia – then great, scribble that in the margins. If you don’t know a technical term, don’t worry! If you can describe the effect the writer creates, when it comes to writing an essay you will be rewarded for your understanding.
Collect your Evidence
Once you’ve analysed your passages, you should start to be able to draw together examples where the same kind of things are happening. Go back over your comments in the margins and see if you’ve made the same kind of notes, or if you keep highlighting the same or similar words. Find moments of consistency and try to explain to yourself why this is happening.
You should then be able to draw a wider conclusion about what this means – does the writer covertly keep using the same kind of language to build up an increasing impression? Start linking together moments in the text where the same themes keep appearing: make a list of pages where the same kind of things are happening and categorise them together under thematic headings.
If you follow this process, where reading becomes an active event as your jot down notes in the margin and use your pencil to highlight and define words, your understanding of the text will be thorough enough to allow you to produce an analysis that is grounded in evidence, but which also demonstrates your own personal insights.
By Dr Rachael S, Private tutor in London, Cambridge University Graduate. Interested in working with Rachael? Contact Us today to arrange English or French Tuition with our English / French Tutor either in your home or using our online tutoring platform.