Reading for better writing

When we read a text, we respond in a certain way and, if the author has constructed his text effectively, in a way that will meet at least some of his intentions. This applies to both literary texts and formal discussions of them, though the strategies employed to achieve the reader response will differ considerably.

One observation needs to be made: there is no one single “right” way of organising a text. An author could approach the same task in many different ways. Each text, even though following certain conventions of writing, will also depend for its structure on the author’s intention, the target readership and the type of content or information the author wants to convey.

Analysing how other writers achieve their goals can contribute significantly to our becoming more accomplished writers. Understanding what successful writers DO – what strategies they use – helps us to employ these strategies as well and to discover our own approaches to achieve our own authorial aims.

You might like to use the following questions as a guideline to reflect on other people’s writing more systematically. The questions are largely aimed at considering more formal writing, so some of them might not apply so rigidly to literary work.

1. Who is the text addressing?
2. What assumptions are made about the readership?
3. What is the aim/motivation of the author?
4. What type of text is it?
5. Describe the nature and tone of the language used.
6. What strategies of language play does the author use? How does this correspond with and underline the author’s intention (i.e. the message she is trying to get across)?
7. Look at the way quotation and reference is used, if at all. Why is it done in this way?
8. Examine the way in which the transitions between the ideas are achieved from thought to thought, line to line, and from paragraph to paragraph (or stanza to stanza). What strategies are used?
9. Compare the beginning and the end. Do they complement each other?
10. In what ways does the text fulfil/fail to fulfil your criteria for “good writing”?
11. What other constraints apart from those above might also be at play here (e.g. number of words allowed, space or shape constraints, co-text)?

Just to give you an example of ways of analysing a text, here is an essay I looked at with my advanced German students of English. The essay was written to analyse the play Doubt, by John Patrick Shanley, which was being performed by The Hamburg Players in Hamburg, Germany. The students analysed the way the text had been structured and one of them produced a mindmap outlining the ideas and the linking strategies. Her mindmap is below the essay text. Click on the text to get a larger view.

Mindmap by Mareike Becker

© Cate Kimberley and Word and Affect, 2012