Writing about Texts
Paper 1 of the English A2
examination (IB Diploma) requires students to
write a “Comparative Commentary”.
This
is an essay comparing two very different types of text, on a related
theme
(e.g. a poem and a magazine feature, both about flying). It is important to be
familiar with a range of
text types, understand how audience and purpose affect the creation of
a text
and discuss the various stylistic features of texts.
In addition, students must
write two "Written Tasks"; these must
be accompanied by a “rationale” that makes reference to the purpose,
audience
and stylistic features of the students’ own texts.
To complete the above tasks
effectively, students need to learn the
language of textual analysis,
including literary criticism. The following exercises are designed to
familiarise you with the relevant terminology.
[For questions 1-3, draw a
three-column table with the headings “Text
Types”, “Audience” and “Purpose”.]
1.
In your group, make a list of 10-20 different text types.
Your
classrooms, the corridors, your school bags and even your heads are
full of
texts! Be as
precise as possible – for
example, not just "Newspaper article", but Newspaper report,
describing
a car accident or sports report (golf tournament) or
lifestyle feature (topic: kitchens).
Note: the
word GENRE can
also used when describing text types. This is especially true of
novels; we
speak of "the detective genre", "the horror genre", the
"romance genre", "the historical genre" and so on.
2.
For each of your texts identify the audience. Again, be as
precise as possible. It may be helpful to consider factors such as:
Age; Sex;
Class; Occupation; Level of education; Nationality; Culture; Personal
Interests; Political views; literary tastes; Historical period (e.g.
Audience =
"nineteenth century slave-owners").
3.
Suggest the
purpose of each text type. NB:
purpose should always be expressed
as a verb – to …
(e.g.
to inform readers about …; to explain how …;
to entertain readers; to persuade …).
Talking about Texts
4.
What do we call a
short piece of writing taken from a
longer text? (Think of two different words.)
5.
What do we call writing
that is not poetry – for example,
the sort found in this worksheet, newspaper reports and letters?
6.
What is the adjectival
form of the word in (b)?
Note: We
can use this adjective to describe any kind of writing that is very
plain, with hardly any imagery or vivid language. We can even use it to
describe a poem!
7.
What do we call the
words of a song?
8.
What do we call a
poem of 14 lines (usually divided
into stanzas of 8 and 6 lines and usually rhyming)?
Tone
9.
List some adjectives
you might
use to describe the tone of each of
the First World War poems below.
"If
in some smothering dreams you too
could pace
Behind
the wagon that we flung him in
And
watch the white eyes writhing in his face
[…]
My
friend, you would not tell with such high
zest
To
children ardent for some desperate glory
The
old lie: Dulce et Decorum Est
Pro
Patria Mori.
"Dulce
et Decorum
Est", Wilfred Owen
"Blow
out, you bugles,
over the rich Dead!
There’s
none of these so lonely and poor of
old,
But,
dying, has made us rarer gifts of gold.
These
laid the world away; poured out the red
Sweet
wine of youth …"
"The
Soldier",
Rupert Brooke
10.
What is the
tone of each of the
following prose extracts?
"More
than 300 million people in the
world speak English and the rest, it sometimes seems, try to. It would
be
charitable to say that the results are sometimes mixed."
"Mother
Tongue: the
English Language", Bill Bryson
"I
guess looking at it, now, my old man
was cut out for a fat guy, one of those regular little roly-poly fat
guys you
see around, but he sure never got that way, except a little toward the
last,
and then it wasn’t his fault, he was riding over the jumps only and he
could
afford to carry plenty of weight by then."
"My Old Man", Ernest Hemingway
"It
may be said that
there are three main conditions to be considered by anyone wishing to
cultivate
a garden in Singapore or Malaysia. They are the soil, the sun and the
money,
and we will consider each of these in turn."
"A Gardening Handbook for
Singapore and Malaysia", Singapore
Gardening Society
Note: when
looking at longer texts, be alert for changes
of tone. For example, a text might start with a humorous,
tongue-in-cheek tone
but then turn serious later. Or a bitter, angry tone might change to a
calmer,
more accepting one.
11.
How do we describe a text
dominated by the
pronoun "I"?
e.g.
"The year the war
began I was in fifth grade at the Annie F. Warren Grammar School in
Winthrop,
and that was the winter I won the prize for drawing the best Civil
Defence
signs."
“Superman and Paula Brown’s
New Snowsuit”, Sylvia Plath
12.
How do we describe a text
which uses the
pronouns "He" or "She” rather than
"I"/"We"?
Note: There
is more to viewpoint than just identifying whether a text is
written in the first or third person. For example, a narrator ("I")
often has views that the author does not agree with. The author may use
a
racist narrator as a means to pour scorn on racism.
13.
What adjectives might you use
to describe the poet’s point of view
in the following excerpts?
"They
fuck you up,
your mum and dad.
They
may not mean to, but
they do.
They
fill you with the
faults they had
And
add some extra, just
for you."
"This be the Verse", Philip
Larkin
"may
you remember, as
the years go by
and
you grow slowly towards
maturity,
that
life consists in the
receipt of life,
its
fun and games, its
boredom and its grief;
that
no-one, sons or
daughters, fathers, wives,
escapes
the rough stuff
that makes up our lives"
"The Yaddo Letter", Derek Mahon
Note: Viewpoint
and Tone are obviously very closely related. You can think
of TONE as something created by the
language (you hear it) whereas VIEWPOINT
is essentially the author’s
attitude towards what s/he is
writing about.
14.
What adjective do we use for
the point of view of a text which tells us
about the thoughts and actions of all
the characters?
15.
What adjective do we use for
the point of view of a text which is told from
just one character’s perspective?
16.
What is the
basic structure of
the following poem?
"What
are days for?
Days
are where we live.
They
come, they wake us
Time
and time over.
They
are to be happy in:
Where
can we live but days?
Ah,
solving that question
Brings
the priest and the
doctor
In
their long coats
Running
over the
fields."
"Days", Philip Larkin
17.
A piece of prose is usually
divided into paragraphs. What do we call the
sections of a poem?
18.
What do we call stanzas that
are just
two lines long?
19.
What do we call a stanza of four
lines?
20.
What do we call the
two parts of a
sonnet? (8 + 6)
21.
What is the
rhyming scheme of
the Philip Larkin poem, "This be the verse", in 6 (c) above?
22.
How do we describe the kind of
rhymes contained in the Derek Mahon poem in
6 (c)?
23.
What aspect of a poem can we
use these words to describe?
uneven,
jerky, staccato;
slow, ponderous; upbeat
24.
How would you describe the sentence
structure of this prose extract?
"Of
the seven hundred
thousand villages dotting the map of India, in which the majority of
India’s
five hundred million live, flourish and die, Kritam was probably the
tiniest,
indicated on the district survey map by a microscopic dot, the map
being meant
more for the revenue official out to collect tax than for the guidance
of the
motorist, who in any case could not hope to reach since it sprawled far
from
the highway at the end of a rough track furrowed up by the iron-hooped
wheels
of bullock carts."
"A Horse and Two Goats", R K
Narayan
You may find the following
words/phrases useful: main clause,
subordinate clause, relative clause, syntax, inverted.
25.
What can you say about the syntax
of these lines?
"Our
culture rub skin
against
your own
bruising
awkward as plums
black
music enrich
food
spice up"
"Fear", Grace Nichols
26.
If you were quoting
the first
three lines above, how would you lay them out on the page if you wanted to save space? Do it!
Note: "Imagery"
is uncountable. However, "image" is
countable (an image, images).
27.
Underline
the images in the extracts below.
"The
high gray-flannel fog of winter
closed off the Salinas valley from the sky and from all the rest of the
world.
On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great
valley a
closed pot."
"The Chrysanthemums", John
Steinbeck
"I
am a camera with its shutter open,
quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at
the window
opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all
this will
have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed."
"A Berlin Diary", Christopher
Isherwood
"Engineers
in Singapore are moving from
construction sites and factory floors to research laboratories to carve
a slice
of the burgeoning market for medical devices, estimated to be worth
billions."
"Singapore Eyes Big Market for
Medical Devices", Straits Times
(30/08/99)
"The
economy of modern Russia is
haemorrhaging cash: every month, US$2 billion (S$1.7 billion) to US$2
billion
slips out in wire transfers, phony import-export documents and insider
price
manipulations."
"Jong
Song Ok won North Korea’s first
ever athletics world gold medal as she survived a duel in the midday
sun for
the marathon title at the World Championships here yesterday."
"North
Korea’s First Ever Athletics Gold", Straits Times
(30/08/99)
"The
last leaves fell like notes from a
piano
and
left their ovals echoing in the ear;
with
gawky music stands, the winter forest
looks
like an empty orchestra, its lines
ruled
on these scattered manuscripts of
snow."
"Forest of Europe", Derek
Walcott
"Inside,
the hammered anvil's
short-pitched ring,
The
unpredictable fantail of sparks
Or
hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.
The
anvil must be somewhere in the centre,
Horned
as a unicorn, at one end square,
Set
there immovable: an altar
Where
he expends himself in shape and music.
"Door into the Dark", Seamus
Heaney
"The
cold smell of potato mould, the
squelch and slap
Of
soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through
living roots awaken in my head."
"Digging", Seamus Heaney
28.
Identify the types of image
used above (e.g. simile, metaphor,
onomatopoeia).
29.
What is alliteration?
Can you
find any examples of it in the extracts above?
30.
How would you describe
the diction
of the following extracts?
"Frank
What are you doing here?
It’s Thursday, you …
Rita I
know I shouldn’t be here, it’s me dinner hour, but listen, I’ve gorra
tell someone, have you got a few minutes, can y’ spare …
Frank
My God, what is it?"
"Educating Rita", Willie
Russell
"It
is a most miserable thing to feel
ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude in the thing, and the
punishment may be retributive, and well deserved; but, that it is a
miserable
thing, I can testify."
"Great Expectations", Charles
Dickens
"They
say you should always pick your
travel companions carefully. Look what travel-buds-from-hell Brad Pitt
and
Juliette Lewis turned out to be for David Duchovny in Kalifornia.
Or
what soul-mates Susan Sarandon’s Louise and Geena Davis’ Thelma became.
Okay,
that’s reel-life, but you get the picture."
"The Ski’s the Limit", 8 Days
(28 Aug – 4 Sept, 1999)
"Sip
cooling drinks by a palm-fringed
swimming pool, a gentle breeze wafting through the air … step onto your
private
balcony and watch the sunset over the South China Sea, the summit of
Mount
Kinabalu looming on the horizon … witness orang-utans playing in the
lush
rainforest of Borneo’s hinterland, one of the world’s last untamed
frontiers –
all this and stay at the high quality 5-star Tanjung Aru Resort, part
of the
prestigious Shangri-La group."
"Discover Borneo",
advertisement, The Guardian (28/08/99)
31.
Comment on the
diction of the other
extracts in this worksheet.
A Little Extra
32.
What term do we use for spoken
language in a text?
33.
What is hyperbole?
How do we
pronounce this word?
34.
Who is the protagonist
in a
story?
35.
What term do we use for the place,
time and cultural environment in which a story takes place?
36.
What is a
pun? Find some
examples in newspaper headlines (or elsewhere).