Ten Questions To Ask Of Unseen Texts

1. Does the language give any clues as to when it was written? Can you draw on your knowledge of history to say something about the text? (It might be saying something timeless in archaic-sounding language. Can you translate any of the sentiments into modern English?)

2. What you can infer about the character and motivation of the speaker? (Speaker is a generic word that could refer to the real writer of a non-fiction work, the narrator of a novel, a character in a play, or the disembodied voice speaking a lyric poem.) In each case, ask yourself whether he or she is trying to get something or argue a point of view.

3. Does any notable vocabulary place the text in a particular domain (a stratum of society, a country, a technical field, an occupation)? Even if you don t know the exact definition of every word, you might be able to speculate.

4. Can you identify the genre? If so, you have a set of expectations and conventions that the text is either exemplifying or (even better) playing with in interesting ways. Think of all your GCSE and A-level texts. What features would allow you to identify their genres if you hadn t come across them before? And what are the purposes of different genres?

5. Focus on any declarative statements, i.e. statements about what reality is like statements that could be verified or falsified. Look too at what the speaker assumes to be the case without making a declarative statement.

6. Is the speaker addressing anyone (another character, a real historical person, the reading public, an object, God)? Is there any ideal reader being constructed?

7. What is the overall effect? Consider your most meaningful experiences of reading your favourite books. The memory probably comes with a certain feeling cosy, reassured, understood, afraid, confused, even angry. Try to identify the feeling the text creates, then say how it does so.

8. Is there a narrative? Does anything change/happen/develop between the beginning and the end?

9. Practise the facility of zooming in to the most granular linguistic detail and out to the big picture, i.e. combining quotations with analysis of how they fit into the whole text and its themes.

10. Particularly when you re presented with a whole text a poem, say consider both what it s about and what it s really about. Simon Armitage s poem Chainsaw Versus the Pampas Grass is about a man trying to remove pampas grass from his garden maybe it is about male anger and frustration. William Wordsworth s Intimations ode is about his intense childhood experiences of the natural world. And, in the words of the critic Harold Bloom,

it is about separateness and consequent, mortality, and about the imaginative power that can bridge that separateness and so intimate an immortality that is in turn, just and only, primal sympathy of one human with another. (The Visionary Company)