Learning objective: To develop awareness of the writer’s intention
Critical analysis can be summed up as the activity of trying to understand that the writer is trying to do, and how they have done it. Identifying intention is the first step in this process.
When exploring a text, one of the most important questions you can ask students is: What is the writer’s intention here? Expand your question: what does the writer want you – the reader – to feel, think or believe at this point in the text? Are they trying to make you:
- sympathise with a character?
- hate a character?
- be intrigued?
- feel tension?
- understand their point of view?
- agree with their argument?
- make you angry about the issue they are highlighting?
This is the key to analysing the writer’s choices of vocabulary, sentence structure, text structure, everything. All the writer’s choices will (or should) have been made to achieve their intention. So the next question is: How has the writer tried to achieve that intention?
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