And General Recommendations

While doing a linguistic analysis your main goal is to demonstrate complete understanding of the text. Usage of the following recommendations will help you provide sufficient analysis of a passage.

1) Introduction. Information about the author. (Some data about the writer's biography, creative activities and outlook are required.) If possible the student should say a few words about the novel from which the excerpt is taken.

2) The summary of the extract. It must be short and logical.

Among the most important of the elements of the story is its plot. Plot is the sequence of incidents of actions in a story. Whatever the characters do, or whatever happens to them, constitutes a plot.

The most important element in plot is usually conflict. Conflict may be external or internal; it may be physical, intellectual, emotional, or moral. A story may pit people against the environment, against other people,
or against their own unreasonable impulses or desires. In the richest stories there is usually more than one kind of conflict. The conflict of the main characters with other people or with nature may be complicated by conflicts within themselves.

A plot may be either realistic or fantastic. It may start from an ordinary, everyday situation or from a highly unusual or even supernatural one. Each kind of initial situation is capable of providing pleasure, revealing a character, or giving insight into some kind of truth. All the succeeding events, however, should proceed logically from that initial situation; and all the characters’ actions should be consistent with their individual natures. A good plot is governed by an inner logic. It may begin with a far-fetched coincidence, but it will not ordinarily end with one. The reader has a right to demand that a story be true to its own original conditions.

3) The structure of the text. If possible exposition, complications, climax and denouement should be identified. The text must be as well subdivided into logically complete parts. The student should say whether the text is the first or the third person narration, what forms of subject matter presentation are predominant in the text (the author’s narration, description, dialogue, psychological portraiture of the characters) and in what parts.

4) The general atmosphere of the text. (It may be dry, unemotional, emotional, vivid, bright, tense, dramatic, pathetic, tragic, humorous, ironical, satirical, sarcastic, etc.) It may change throughout the text. These changes are to be accounted for. Also examples from the text should be given to show how the author creates this or that kind of atmosphere, what words and stylistic devices help him to do it.

5) The tone of the story. The words actually being used give us the most obvious indication of the tone of voice a writer is employing. But we must also bear in mind possibility that the writer is not being straight-forward but has an ulterior purpose behind what appears on surface:
in other words, he may be using deception for particular purpose, and again it is the words the writer uses that will provide the clues to this.

What kind of thing, then, are we looking for when consider the tone of voice of a writer? We want to find answers to questions like these: Is he being formal or informal? Is he sympathetic or unsympathetic towards a character he is writing about? Is he being serious or comic? Is he being emotional or restrained? Is he being cynical or sentimental? Is he presenting the facts honestly or is he trying to persuade you to his point of view? All of these are points that we have to know if we are properly to understand what we read, and they are all points where tone is of paramount importance.

What we must do, basically, is to try to capture the tone of voice the author is using by reading the passage the way we could imagine him reading it. It involves imaginative imitation of the way the author is talking to us, and our success or otherwise depends upon our interpretative skill and the ability of the writer to make his intentions clear. When we read a play, we try to read the speeches of the various characters with the correct dramatic intonation. The same is true of any type of writing: we must try to put ourselves in the place of the author and imagine how he would say it. The words the author uses should provide us with clues as to what his tone is.

6) The characters of the extract, whether they are described directly (i.e. the author himself names their features) or indirectly (i.e. through their actions, speech, thoughts, appearance), what kind of people they are judging by the text, what kind of relations can be observed between them. The author’s attitude to the characters, is it expressed clearly enough or is it not expressed? The students are obliged to present their own attitude to the characters and to ground it substantially. Also examples from the text are required to prove each idea of the student.

Fiction, for two reasons, allows us to see more deeply into the inner nature of a character than we usually can in life. First, it places its characters in crucial situations, which test them and expose their nature more clearly than would ordinary situations. Second, authors can, when they wish, take us inside a character and let us experience at first-hand inner thoughts and feelings which in life we could only guess at from outward actions. Of course, fictional characters are imaginary people and have only imaginary existence. Yet if their author has drawn them accurately, we can, by understanding them, gain a better appreciation of real people.
To be believable, a character cannot be either all good or all bad; we know that real people are not like that. Also, characters must be consistent
in their actions: they must not act one way on one occasion and an entirely different way on another. In addition, their actions should be clearly motivated: that is, we should be able to understand the reasons for their actions. If characters change during the course of the story, we should be able
to understand why they change.

If a character is to be fully convincing, the author must do a good deal of showing as well as telling. An author must dramatize characters – show them speaking and acting. What we are told about characters will have little force unless we are shown the characters behaving as they have been described. Modern writers often rely entirely on indirect presentation. Although this method puts a greater burden on readers, who must decide for themselves what a character is like, it can increase the speed and vividness of a story.

7) The general characteristics of the style of the extract. Vocabulary and syntax employed by the author. Can any instances of bookish and colloquial vocabulary be found? Why does the author use it? What kinds of sentences predominate in different parts of the text? Does the author use stylistic devices amply or sparingly? Is his style in general vivid, clear and emotional or matter-of-fact and constrained? The students should pay much attention to the text imagery.

Imagery is the use of comparisons or associations to connect one object or idea with another so that the first object or idea can be more effectively understood and imagined. It is a fanciful and non-literal way of describing things so that they become more vivid to the reader. A good image or comparison can give us more information about what is being described and can set it more precisely in our minds; it can create a much more vivid impression; it can set up reverberations and associations which enrich the experience.

8) The theme (main idea, message) of the text, i.e. what the author wanted to tell the reader by this extract, the underlying thoughts and ideas of the author. It must be formulated by the student laconically.

The theme of a story is its controlling idea or central insight: the single large generalization that the story suggests about life. Not all stories have theme. If a story is written purely to entertain, it will often not have theme. But every story that has a single point of view and an important purpose – every story in which the author has faithfully attempted to reveal life – has theme, or central meaning.

One good way of getting at theme is to ask what a text is about and then translate the answer into a general statement.

Our ability to state theme is one of the best tests of whether we really understand a text. In stating theme, always state it in the form of a complete sentence, with a subject and verb, to be sure that it is a complete thought. Also, be sure to make your statement a generalization, not a comment on specific characters or a specific situation.

9) The student’s evaluation of the text under analysis. It may logically continue the previous item of the plan. The student must express his attitude to the message of the text and other ideas conveyed by the author and state whether these ideas are important and urgent. Stylistic and compositional peculiarities of the text are also to be dwelt upon here.