11 Creative Writers Teach Techniques for Analyzing Any Text
11 Creative Writers Teach Techniques for Analyzing Any Text
Techniques for Analyzing any Text
Lisa Wright and Natasha Tinsley
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14 minute read
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To become a good writer, it is important to analyze other texts by looking closely at specific details to explain or interpret the author’s intended meaning and purpose. This analysis is crucial in helping students develop and improve their own writing by reflecting and drawing on the techniques implemented by other writers. This chapter explores Kiese Laymon’s essay “Mississippi: A Poem in Days” to show how audience, argument, evidence, and stance are relevant tools used to decipher an author’s text. Instructors and students should be aware that the writer uses racially explicit language.
Audience
When a person hits share on an Instagram post a lot of thought probably has gone into the picture. Before posting that one photo, more than likely, the person has taken several pictures, reviewed the lighting, colors, angle, and even the items in the background of each picture. They’ve thought about who would gravitate toward this particular picture, who would like it, respond with a comment to spark conversation within a community, or even share the photograph with other like minds. In other words, they’ve selected the particular photo with a specific audience in mind. An audience is an individual or group of people who share similar ideas, beliefs, situations, and struggles.
Though some steps may vary, writers make similar decisions before publishing their writing. For instance, a nonfiction writer will determine which portions of their lives to share in a story. A college professor who writes an essay about the impact of Covid-19 on their class instruction, will probably include different details then if they were composing an essay about their experiences as a mother while working, during the Covid-19 pandemic. If only writing about being a professor during Covid they may discuss how different it feels to teach solely online, the challenges of community building, or the strangeness of teaching to black boxes when students don’t turn their cameras on. Other educators who share similar experiences would be drawn to an essay that has these particular details.
If this same professor decides to write about being a mother and a professor she might write about managing her own and their children’s Zoom schedules, chronicles of recording content with her children in the house, attending meetings, or presenting at conferences while still being responsible for the health and well-being of her children. Though the essence of the essay is about a professor, the added layer of motherhood invites another audience.
One might argue that the readers of the two essays mentioned above could overlap, and while I agree that this is true, what makes one essay distinct from another is the details the writer decides to inc