Tools for Analyzing Texts

Lisa Blankenship, Seth Graves, and Kate Eickmeyer

We analyze texts all the time.

Think about it: walking down the street here in New York, you’re constantly bombarded by screens, messages, arguments, and (may we say again?) rhetoric! In this class and your other classes in college, you’ll be asked to analyze texts of all sorts. You may be good at discussing certain aspects of texts because of previous experiences you’ve had in school and the experience you’ve had simply living the complex life you’ve lived so far. This essay will give you some tools or lenses you can use to analyze texts of all kinds.

First, though, what is analysis exactly? What word or image or cultural context comes to mind first for you when you think of this concept? Maybe someone on a couch being examined for hours by a psychoanalyst? A biologist examining cells under a microscope? A consultant giving advice to people wanting to expand their business? Or someone trained in accounting or finance giving financial advice to someone about their retirement account or investments? Maybe even an English teacher or professor asking questions about a book, a poem, or a play.

As we stressed in the previous essay “What Is Rhetoric,” literally everything you encounter in any given day is making demands of you to take it in and act or think a certain way. There simply is no way around this. What we want to try and persuade you of in this brief introduction to analysis is that life will be much more interesting to you (and you’ll probably be more interesting to everyone you know and meet) if you learn to step back and think critically about how the rhetoric of texts of all kinds makes demands on you. It’s impossible not to be affected by texts, but we can learn to analyze them so that they have a bit less power over us.

You may be well versed in how to “read” your family and how to talk many different “languages” in the various parts of your life and in the many roles you inhabit in your life. The new kind of reading you’ll learn in college is how to think in a “meta” or critical way about how you’re thinking—and how others are thinking and asking you to think and behave. The Greek prefix meta signifies “beyond.” So when you step back and analyze, or do “meta thinking,” you’re trying to get outside or beyond a concept or thing or person or text in order to figure out how it works. Analysis signifies looking at the whole by examining particular elements or parts and their relationship to one another. It also means—and this is really important—finding an interpretation, or a new insight. You could call this a thesis or claim.

Looking at particular elements makes the whole more interesting. You may think, “I’d just like to watch something or read something and not have to break it apart and analyze every little detail.” I understand this feeling, but one of the many ways of analyzing a text is to reflect on how a text made you feel. Are there certain texts you turn to at certain times, for different reasons? There are reasons texts move us, make us cry, make us think, provoke us, bore us, inspire us. Analysis asks us to find out what a text tells us about ourselves and the world around us and specifically how a text creates meaning and does various things to us.

Lenses for Analysis

These “ways of seeing” or lenses are referred to as theories by academics who study texts. Theories are ways of explaining how texts produce certain effects in audiences. One of the exciting parts of this class is that you’ll learn new ways of seeing, and you’ll learn the names of the ways you already see. Rather than forcing a certain way of seeing on you, ideally a writing/rhetoric/literature/composing class gives you new tools for seeing texts (and people, and everything in your life) in new ways. If you don’t gain new ways of seeing while you’re in college, we as your professors will have failed you, and you will have failed yourself, because you have to be open to new ways of seeing and to seeking out new ways for yourself in order to learn.

So here are the tools or lenses that have helped us be better thinkers—tools that we “think with” every day, whether we’re reading an article in The New York Times, seeing a billboard on Broadway, reading a novel or a poem, listening to a song, watching a TV show or film, or reading one of the hundreds of emails I get in an average week. Not all of these tools will be useful in every situation: some lenses work better for visual texts; some work better for nonfiction or fairly straightforward rhetorical (persuasive) texts; and some work better for imaginative work like fiction, poetry, song lyrics, or plays.

Important lenses for analyzing non-fiction texts (and fiction, to some extent) include:

• Ethos: analyzing how the writer tries to persuade an audience or make a point based on her or his credibility with the audience
• Pathos: analyzing how the writer uses emotion to move or persuade an audience
• Logos: analyzing how the writer uses facts or logic to persuade an audience
• Audience: analyzing the role of audience in the creation and circulation of a text
• Purpose: analyzing what the text “does” in the world and in its audiences
• Genre: identifying the genre of the text and considering what difference it makes. Asking questions such as: How does the genre affect the form and content of the text? What generic conventions does it reflect or resist? Why does this matter in terms of audience expectations or other factors such as constraints and affordances for the writer/rhetor?
• Media: considering the medium or media the text originally published in (and circulated within since it was written or created), and asking what difference this makes in terms of the text’s message and reception. Media analyst Marshall McLuhan famously wrote in 1967 that the medium is the message (or “massage” actually; look it up!).
• Constraints: considering the resistance the writer/rhetor faces from the audience (can include the audience’s beliefs in the form of ideology or other differences between the writer/rhetor and the audience’s values) or from genre conventions
• Exigence: asking what were the historical/cultural/material circumstances that led to the text being composed
• Kairos: considering the timeliness of a text or argument (“time” in Greek, in the sense of “timely,” vs chronos or “clock time”)

If you’re viewing a text with multiple modes of communication, such as video or images, it’s important to consider design and stylistic elements such as contrast, repetition, alignment, and proximity as well as focal points and white (or negative) space. If the text in question is from a time period you’re not familiar with, answering questions about the historical context is necessary to understand the original context for the text’s circulation.

If you’re analyzing a work of fiction, you can use some of these same lenses or tools for rhetorical analysis to help you discover insights about how the text is working. Some that are unique to fiction include: setting, implied author, narrator, thematic elements, and plot elements such as flashforward or flashback. You also may consider the effects of the metaphors that appear prominently in the text. An inquiry into the role of metaphors in a text works well for nonfiction as well, such as the idea that “time is money” in a piece about financial markets.

Other lenses you can use (alone or in combination) as you analyze or interpret texts of all kinds include the following:

• Gender studies looks at ways that texts interpret and stereotype gender. One major theoretical text in both gender studies and queer theory is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), which argues that gender is socially constructed. Gender studies looks at the ways texts reify problematic concepts of gender, such as demeaning portrayals of women and idealizing portrayals of men, but also less obvious stereotypes. Gender studies also questions binary notions of gender and suggests that gender is a spectrum.
• Queer theory critiques the normativity, or normalization, of heterosexuality and considers a constellation of associated matters. Queer theory certainly looks to point out homophobic and transphobic rhetoric, but is also interested in subtler ways that texts marginalize and stigmatize non-normative sexuality and non-normative identity, more broadly, and in exploring alternative modes of being.
• Critical race theory considers both obvious and subtle ways that people get marginalized, stereotyped, and disempowered based on “race,” and points out ways mainstream rhetoric and institutions reinforce and justify systemic racial inequality. Analyses based on a lens of critical race theory critique racial bias and implicit assumptions about white supremacy in texts.
• Intersectionality considers ways in which various cultural and social markers of identity (race, class, gender, for example) are intertwined and function together to affect how someone is presented in a text. For example, this lens helps us understand the intersecting roles of race, gender, and social class in any given situation. We may be tempted to focus only on the role of someone’s social class, but the reality is that someone with black or brown skin in the U.S. has very different life experiences than someone with white skin, regardless of the person’s social class.
• Marxist theory focuses on the role of economic relations and social class in a text, undergirded by the idea that relations between economic classes are the main drivers of history. Marxist analysis of a text works to expose ways in which those with wealth oppress the working class. It resists anything that stigmatizes, marginalizes, or disempowers the working class, or that distracts from or masks class inequality, and it values anything that calls attention to class inequality and unfair working conditions.
• Postcolonial theory examines texts for attitudes toward colonialism and colonized peoples, particularly stereotypes and elements that “otherize” other cultures or imagine them as inferior or “primitive,” as well as texts that romanticize or exoticize other cultures for the pleasure of Western readers, or that otherwise exploit or appropriate those other cultures for Western purposes.
• Disability studies looks at the ways texts construct cultural images of and ideas about illness and disability. It looks for instances of “ableism,” the normalization and privileging of specific types of bodies or brains, and contends that ableist attitudes are socially constructed, marginalizing, and stigmatizing of other types of bodies and brains that differ from normalized ideas and images.
• Ecocriticism focuses on the environment and the way texts represent both the environment and humans’ relationship to the environment. An ecocritical work might draw out and explain the precise philosophies of environmentalism in historical nature writing, for instance, or critique a text’s anthropocentrism, the view that humans are radically different from and more important than anything else in the world.

• Posthumanism is closely related to ecocriticism in that it critiques anthropocentrism, but posthumanism is particularly interested in deconstructing common ideas about what it means to be human, what it means to be conscious or sentient, and what it means to be capable of subjective experience. Posthumanism includes attention to animals and animal rights, as well as technology’s revisions of the way we define the boundaries of what is human.

Putting These Lenses to Work: What Do You See?

If we were to practice using some of these lenses (whichever best apply to give us new insights), we could use most anything. If you were in my (Lisa’s) class I might ask you to go online and choose two news stories about the same topic (or our thematic topic for the class) on the same day in two distinctly different news outlets. This can be great fun, as well as really depressing, and after doing this exercise you may never look at the news the same way again. Looking at headlines on the same story in the digital version of The New York Times and FoxNews.com, for example, makes it seem like the audiences of the two news outlets are living in different realities. Regardless of your political views, it’s hard to argue with a straight face that rhetoric isn’t incredibly powerful. It shapes (not just reflects) how we view the world.

Let’s just take one image as an example. If you were thinking critically about or analyzing the image below, where would you start?

Black Lives Matter protest, Baton Rouge, LA, July 8, 2017

First, what do you notice about the image? Don’t “read” or interpret it yet; just describe what you see.

Here’s what I (Lisa) see:

A non-white woman standing in the middle of what appears to be a fairly wide, urban street, wearing a grey and black dress, glasses, and casual black shoes, almost as if she were going to a party. She looks straight ahead stoically as two white male police officers dressed from head to toe in full riot gear rush toward her holding plastic handcuffs as if they’re about to apprehend her. In the background stand around a dozen or more officers, also in riot gear, as well as around a dozen bystanders or protesters (one seems to be holding a sign). All are watching the scene unfolding with rapt attention. The photographer seems to be really close to the woman and the two officers.

You may notice other elements as well. Now think about which of the tools or lenses we’ve described may help you make some meaning of or interpret this image. Here are some questions that may be helpful:

1. What would you need to know first contextually? The historical context, where and when the image was taken, who the people are in the image, where the image has been published and how has it been received by various audiences.
2. In terms of its genre, does it remind you of any other images? It makes me think of the Tiananmen Square image that has come to be known as “the tank man,” during the student protests of 1989 in China. This is an example of intertextuality, or the ways one text shapes how we see another. Does it have associations for you as well? Why is this important? It can help explain the wide circulation of the image, for one, and it also can help us think about the image using generic conventions. If the photo is immediately read as a protest image, for example, rather than a pro-police image, then we can draw some other conclusions about how the rhetoric of this “text” is working.
3. What about the audience for the piece? Who do you think would be drawn to it and why? Why is this important?
4. What do you think the purpose of the image is? Relatedly, how do you think the image has been used by people other than the photographer who took it? For what purposes?
5. What gave rise to the photo (exigence) and why is this important? How does it compare to the exigency and historical circumstances of other famous protest images from, for example, the Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s in U.S.? Why would this be important and what could it tell you about the image?
6. In terms of the composition of the image, how is it “organized”? How are the elements arranged (proximity) and why might this be important? What may have been left out (or possibly cropped or edited out of the image) and why would that be important? Who took the image (author/composer)?
7. Do the Aristotelian elements of ethos/pathos/logos help you read the image at all? In what ways? Could you say there’s an argument or some kind of claim being made in this image? If so, what? What is the evidence or data (or rhetorical appeal such as pathos or logos) that leads you to this conclusion? What values would a viewer of the image have to believe or hold in order to be persuaded by the claim (or be moved by the image)?
8. What does the image make you feel and why?
9. How does gender factor into the story? What about the role of intersectionality, race and racial stereotypes? Why is it important that the central figure is a woman, that she is read as black in the U.S., and that she seems to be calm in the midst of the chaos around her. Could the fact that this was one of the most widely circulated images from the Black Lives Matter movement be attributed in any way to the fact that this woman’s demeanor doesn’t fit into tropes of the “angry black woman” that have shaped how white people in the U.S. “read” black women and how they should behave?

Having gone through these questions and used various lenses to think with, what insights could you come up with about how the rhetoric in the image is functioning? The final aspect of an analysis, whether it’s of a piece of nonfiction or fiction, is the interpretation or insight you offer your reader about the text. This is the interpretation of what you’ve “seen” in the text. Now that you’ve taken the text apart to examine its individual elements, so to speak, and put it back together again, what did your efforts to zoom in tell you about the piece as a whole, about its audience, and about the culture in which it circulates and “works” on members of its discourse community? How does the text “work” on its audience? On you?

Summary vs. Analysis

As a writer of an analysis essay, your main goal is to analyze, not summarize. Some summary may be necessary and helpful to your reader. The amount of summary you need to include will always depend on the topic, context, assignment, and instructor. However, when I (Kate) am writing an academic essay, I use the following standard as a baseline: I imagine that my reader has read the book or watched the film I’m discussing, but that they either read or watched it a while ago or were a little distracted at the time. My reader doesn’t need a full recitation of the plot, but they appreciate a brief refresher to jog their memory and find it helpful when I remind them of details and plot points as I discuss them. When you need to include a paragraph of summary, I suggest using the journalistic convention of putting that summary paragraph right after your introduction. That order allows the reader to get a sense of your argument and read the summary with your ideas in mind.

For the most part, though, an analysis asks that you analyze rather than summarize. So, what’s the difference?

Summary describes something (a book, film, or other text, or an event or sequence of events). A book report, for example, usually gives a “plot summary” that describes significant plot points in the order they occur in a book, along with descriptions of major characters, and perhaps a list of themes. A description of “What I did on my summer vacation,” where I simply state what I did in June, July, and August (I did X, then I did Y, then I did Z, and now I’m back at school) is another kind of summary.

Analysis attempts to dig deeper and provide an interpretation of a text. Examples of analytical inquiries include the following: what the text means; how it expresses that meaning; why the text is important; why it’s unique, unusual, or odd; why it’s influential or what influences it; how it reflects social, cultural or historic currents; how it conceals, exposes, reinforces, or challenges hidden violence or prejudiced attitudes; what philosophical, psychological, or affective concepts it channels; or where it stands (or should stand) in relation to other texts.

For example, here are three paragraphs discussing the 2003 Pixar film, Finding Nemo. The first paragraph summarizes, the second summarizes and analyzes simultaneously, and the third analyzes.

Summary: Finding Nemo tells the story of Nemo, a young clownfish, and his father, Marlin. At the beginning, a shark eats Marlin’s wife and all of Nemo’s brothers and sisters. Somehow, Marlin and Nemo recover from this experience and carry on with their lives. One day, Nemo wanders off on a school trip and finds himself scooped up by a scuba diver, who ships him off to Australia to live in an aquarium in a dentist’s office. Meanwhile, Marlin sets out to search for Nemo. Along the way, Marlin meets a blue tang fish named Dory, who suffers from short-term memory problems. Marlin and Dory make their way to Australia, meeting other sea creatures along the way who help them navigate. Back in Australia, the other fish in the dentist’s aquarium help Nemo escape through the window into the adjacent harbor, where he eventually reunites with his dad.

Hybrid Summary and Analysis: Finding Nemo tells a story about overcoming trauma-induced risk intolerance and the futile desire to control the world. The film opens with the tragic demise of Marlin and Nemo’s family, which leaves Marlin fearful of the world and neurotically paranoid about the welfare of his single remaining child. His fear is understandable, but he clutches too tightly at illusions of safety; he hovers over Nemo, discouraging the child’s curiosity and sense of adventure. But fate intervenes in the form of a scuba diver who snatches Nemo up, and the meaning is clear: regardless of Marlin’s intentions, the world is too vast and unpredictable to completely control. As Marlin crosses the ocean in search of his son, he discovers the richness of the wider world he previously viewed as hostile and threatening. He makes friends, sees amazing things, and has adventures. By the time he finds Nemo, Marlin understands that the world has its dangers, but also wonders, thrills, and friendships that justify taking some risks.

Analysis: Finding Nemo is an allegory for a fundamental question about the human condition: how do we live life to its fullest despite past traumas, present dangers, and future mortality? The film’s answer lies in a middle way, letting go of illusions of total control while fighting for what we love. The character trajectory of Marlin, Nemo’s father, serves as the film’s thematic backbone; Marlin goes from being a terrified, overprotective neurotic to accepting some of the risks and uncertainties of living. Dory, the loopy blue fish Marlin befriends on his journey, offers a juxtaposed mode of being that cheerfully embraces the present moment, in part because her memory only lasts for a few seconds. Unable to contemplate the past, Dory doesn’t worry about the future, and thus is able to “be in the moment” in a way that Marlin is far too anxious to access. The ocean serves as a global metaphor for the world we live in—it’s enormous, unfathomable, and complex, full of terrifying sharks and friendly, surfer-dude sea turtles; it’s an infinite, and infinitely contradictory universe of good and evil, light and darkness, humor and gravity.

The summary paragraph just tells what happens in the film: this happened, and then this happened, and then that happened. The hybrid summary/analysis paragraph describes the plot with an analytical slant. The analysis paragraph interprets the film; plot description is incidental. The second and third paragraphs identify rhetorical devices like allegories, metaphors, and character trajectories, and they make arguments about what the various elements of the film are doing.

Approaching an Analysis Assignment

Now that you’ve considered an example of describing and analyzing an image and we’ve outlined the main differences between summary and analysis, let’s expand the principles above to analyzing texts. Following are some ways I (Seth) ask my students to approach an analysis, building on the questions, example, and principles above:

1.Read/hear/see the text. Take notes. Write down what you see. Make note of devices you see at work in the piece. Annotate written texts.

2.Describe what’s going on in the text—what you read, hear, or see—in words. Always begin by trying to get down a clear description of what’s going on in the work. Consider your audience someone who has not yet read/heard/or seen the work but is interested in being sold on the idea of doing so. That doesn’t mean you have to talk about how great it is (you might hate it, personally!), but instead why you feel like it has cultural value (again, it could be even a movie you really despised, but you think it says important things about the time we’re in, etc.). Also, don’t be afraid to ask questions of the text, or jot down notes about what confuses you. Perhaps attempting to find answers to what confuses you will lead to new insight.

3.Review questions for analysis. Place your thoughts into more perspective by asking yourself analytical questions of the text (such as those above). Make note of any important contexts (both in the work, and around it in terms of the circumstances of how it was made) for understanding the work. What do you feel like the work is really about? Why? Those questions generally have multiple answers.

4.Consider what larger purposes (or “meanings”) you feel exist in the work. How do the work’s use of devices contribute to one or more of these purposes?

5.Isolate a topic—something you feel like the work is about, or a social subject it it offers a commentary on. Generally, you’ll be choosing one of many. Perhaps part of the work comments on drug abuse, while the same work also comments on the pains of war. Generally there is no one single or right way of seeing a text—only what you can support with the evidence of what you’ve seen how the elements of the text create meaning (which you make the argument for).

6.Develop an argument. Make a claim for what the work is about (again, it’s about many things, but isolate a topic—what’s relevant to your project or focus). Use writing to answer the question: What does this work say about that topic? For example, if I say a work is a commentary on drug abuse (or maybe drug abuse in America), then I need to answer: What does the work say or suggest about drug abuse? This will become your argument—often expressed in a “thesis.”

7.Draft your writing, built upon your thesis and using the information/analysis you have gathered about the work. And draw connections to relevant or social or cultural contexts that give your commentary support and significance.

8.Give your writing exigence—or a sense of why your analysis matters. In other words, explain why your conversation matters. How does the work offer the reader/viewer/listener an opportunity to think about the subject? What does it compel the reader/viewer/listener to think about? Note: A good essay makes this sense felt. In other words, “This analysis doesn’t matter. I just wrote it because I was required to for class” is not an exigency.

A rhetorical analysis ultimately asks you to go through these kinds of steps in order to break a text down into discrete but interrelated elements and return again to the text as a whole and see it (and maybe the world) differently. The best analyses help us see in new ways. We all have lenses we use to see the world and filter and understand the ubiquitous messages we encounter every day in a countless number of texts. Rhetorical critic Kenneth Burke called these lenses terministic screens.

We analyze texts all the time, and everything is a text. As a good critic and analyst of texts of all kinds, your job is to identify the lenses or screens you use to read your world, discover and try new ones, and identify the ones “working” on you—those of your professor, your classmates, your family, your friends, the ones in the air we breathe that we may not be aware of. This is the job of the critic—and your job as a critical thinker, reader, and writer in the world.