TRUTH DOG

LISTEN UNDERSTAND RESPOND CONVINCE

Make the world around you smarter.

TRUTH DOG CHAPTER 7

Author's note: this is the online version of the first chapter of the advanced English textbook I'm writing. I keep this version here so my students can read what I write without an unnecessary waste of paper. The book is not yet published as of 9/1/18.

Another note: information researched from other texts will be properly cited in the published text.


ANALYZING CONTENT & SOUND


NOTE: THIS IS UNFINISHED AND NOT YET EDITED

In Chapter 5, rudely titled “How to Read,” I discussed how educated readers first experience a text. Before diving in, they tend to quickly ascertain all of the following in their heads:

BEFORE READING

  • FORM (what type of document are you looking at?)

  • VOICE

  • OCCASION

  • AUDIENCE

DURING AND AFTER READING: CONTEXT AND CONTENT

  • MESSAGE (content)

  • STRUCTURE (content) — also while reading, highlight emotional diction

  • TONE (content & sound)

  • PARADIGM (context)

  • PURPOSE (context)

AFTER READING: ANALYZE CONTENT

To understand how to analyze content, let’s get into the writer’s head. Every writer selects a topic, selects a basic message, then selects and arranges the details that support the message.

This is the essential process of creating any type of document, right? Every photographer selects a subject, then selects and arranges the details of the shot.

Let's look at some different ways to analyze the content.

DETAILS

What details did the author choose to include? What details are missing?

You might be wondering, what is a detail? A detail is a noun. A bad detail is a vague noun. A good detail is a proper noun in a situation so specific it appeals to our senses: we can see it, touch it, smell it, taste it, read it, visualize it.

First, let's differentiate good details from bad details.

"Teachers" is not a detail, it's a category. "English teachers at Palm Springs High School who talk too much" is not a good detail. It's too vague. "The day Mr. Stanford spoke for an entire class period and it was all one sentence" is starting to get specific.

"Students is not a detail, it's a category. "Eighth Graders at Chaos Hole Middle School" is too vague. "Fred Fudpucker, an Eighth Grader at Chaos Hole Middle School, and the story of the water balloon" is going to be a great detail when I flesh it out.

"The civil rights movement" is not a detail, it's a category of events. "Dr. King's desire for equality" is not a good detail. You just dropped a name—that's all you did. "Dr. King's 'Letter from Birmingham Jail,' the fourth paragraph," is going to be an outstanding detail.

"People" is not a detail. "Firefighters" is not a detail. "The sad firefighter famously photographed with a dead toddler in his arms after the terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City" is a great detail.

"T.V. shows" is not a detail. "Saturday Night Live" is not a good detail. "The episode of SNL featuring Toonces the Driving Cat in a satirical sketch mocking John Travolta and Urban Cowboy" is an outstanding detail.

"Rivers of the West" is not a detail. "Reservoirs on the Colorado River," that's not a detail, either. "Glen Canyon, now Lake Powell, in Utah," is the beginning of something specific.

Are you feeling me?

"The Holocaust" is not a detail. "Hitler" is not a detail. "Elie Wiesel's arrival at Auschwitz in his memoir, Night," is getting somewhere specific.

"Sin" is definitely not a detail. "Jonathan Edwards" is not yet a detail. "Edwards's sermon 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,' in which the listener is compared to a spider being dangled over the fire" is a super detail.

OKAY, STANFORD! I GET IT!

Do you? Because 90 percent of students struggle with this concept when it comes to their own writing. I'll beat a dead horse in a later chapter when I discuss your own writing. (You can probably tell what I’m going to say.)

For purposes of analyzing a text, make note of what details the writer includes. Also, notice: what’s missing? If there’s little detail, why might the writer do that?

QUESTIONS TO ASK YOURSELF ABOUT THE DETAILS

  1. Is there something special about their arrangement? (see Chapter 6 for a refresher)

IRONY

Is the text ironic?

Hopefully by now you’ve read the text, marked it up, and settled on best possible answers in our “document protocol” so far. Before proceeding, you need to think about irony.

  • Dramatic irony — the reader knows something a character doesn’t know

  • Verbal irony — the speaker says something they don’t mean (sarcasm is a type of verbal irony)

  • Situational irony — it’s the reason those television shows are called sitcoms. The opposite of what’s expected is what happens.

Irony is not coincidence.

There’s an old 1990s pop song by Alanis Morissette called “Ironic,” and every one of her examples of irony is actually coincidence. When she sings, “It’s like rain / on your wedding day,” yeah—rain on your wedding day is a bummer. It’s not what you hoped for. But it’s not ironic.

More ironic is leaving your rainy hometown of Seattle and scheduling your wedding on a dry June day in Palm Springs in order to stay dry, only to have it rain anyway while looking online at scenes of bright sunshine the same day in the Emerald City. That’s ironic.

Satire and parody employ strong irony.

Irony is commonly used to execute satire, the re-telling of something that’s deliberately and mockingly distorted, usually (but not always) for comic effect, and for the purpose of criticizing. Parody is a type of satire in which something is mocked through imitation, for the purpose of criticizing it.

Now that we’ve reviewed content, context, and structure and all of the deliberate decisions expert writers make in those dimensions, we’re ready for the advanced stuff.

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