anlysis of news
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intro_to_analysis__.docxIntro to Analysis
Analysis focuses on what goes on in a text. Analysis is the process of separating something complex into various elements as a way of studying its nature, determining its essential features, and examining their close relationships to each other.
Analysis is not so much tearing a text apart as it is isolating one particular thing in the text and discussing its role in the text as a whole. Analysis draws our attention to aspects of a text we may have overlooked and leads us to reflect more on them.
Concentrate on one to two features to analyze in detail. These are your threads. (Don’t try to cover everything.)
Avoid the easy and the obvious and look for what is fresh, unusual, subtle, or particularly thought-provoking about a text. [Examples of doing this might involve writing about what the text does best, what is most difficult to understand or accept, what raises questions or problems, what seems insignificant but isn’t, what is left out but shouldn’t be, etc.
Do more than summarize the text. Develop a thesis that is disputable and persuades readers that your idea has some significance.
1. TIP: Focus only on key passages: a sentence, a few sentences, a paragraph, a particular scene or visual detail that seems to shed light on the other parts of the text.
1. TIP: If the text is something with a plot, do not use the plot as an outline for your analysis-- that will make you fall prey to summarizing too easily. For news shows, this might mean that you don’t cover each segment chronologically! Organize your analysis by topic or idea, by a series of techniques, or by a series of points about your central idea.
Rely on the text itself for evidence in the form of specific details and quotations.
1. TIP: Keep quotations short, and quote only the most important sentence, key words, or phrases instead of entire passages.
Notice & Focus
Not: “what do you think?”
Not: “what do you like or dislike?”
BUT: “what do you notice?”
A few prompts:
“What do you find most INTERESTING?”
“What do you find most STRANGE?”
“What do you find most REVEALING?”
This strategy
- counteracts tendencies to generalize too rapidly
- redirects attention back to the subject matter
- delays pressure to come up with answers before you are ready
Steps:
1. List details that you notice. Go longer than feels comfortable—ordinarily the tenth or eleventh idea may lead to the best one.
2. Focus inside what you’ve listed. Rank the features of your subject according to the most interesting/strange/revealing/significant aspect. The purpose of relying on these words helps to deactivate the like/dislike switch that is often more about opinion or judgment. These will allow for a more analytical response.
3. Say why three things you selected struck you as the most interesting/relevant/ significant/strange). Saying why will trigger the interpretive leaps to the possible meaning of whatever you find important in your observations.
Interesting—things that are interesting capture your attention—maybe you don’t know why
Strange—oddities that stand out, something that isn’t readily explainable
Revealing/Significant—forces you to start making choices and leaps that can lead to analysis and interpretation.
And then, for all of these things that you “Notice” ask the most important question of all: SO WHAT? Why does it matter that this text does this? What’s important about it? What effect might it have on the larger text, the audience, on me?
Writing Up Analysis
In order to write up your analysis in a seminar paper or essay, when you pick the ideas you are going to write about, you will write them up in at least a two-step fashion:
1) Report on your detail, pattern, repetition, anomaly or example first with no evaluation, judgment, or opinion.
- Just summarize what you found.
- Just quote from the text.
2) Interpret the meaning, significance, or importance of what you reported.
-Answer the so what? question from your work with ‘Notice and Focus’ here.
- Explain why you picked this detail or example to focus on.
- Explain what this detail or example means beneath the surface or beyond what’s obvious.
- Connect this detail or example to a bigger idea, like the theme of a text or the thesis of your paper.
Use the present tense when analyzing texts. Example: “On this episode of the Daily Show, Jon Stewart introduces the first topic, then proceeds to make a joke about it almost immediately.” NOT “On this episode of the Daily Show, Jon Steward introduced the first topic, then proceeded to make a joke about it.”
