Level One Analysis
UNDER DEVELOPMENT - SOME OF THESE RESOURCES MIGHT BE UNAVAILABLE FOR NOW, OR THEY MAY BE INCOMPLETE.
At this level of our analysis, we examine how authorial choices create effects. We focus on the intentional or unintentional choices included by the author and explain how they emphasise, imply, or evoke things.
KEY ELEMENTS
Accurately Identifying Authorial Choices
This requires you to state precisely what choice you are talking about. For instance, are you discussing the effects of a metaphor, personification, parallelism, or a rhetorical question? If you simply say "this quote highlights" or even "this implies" after stating your evidence, you haven't done this.
Identify the Effects Authorial Choices
This requires you to state the effect of the authorial choice that you've identified. We do this by using the words or synonyms of the words, emphasise, imply and evoke. We avoid vague words such as show, portray and illustrate because they lack precision.
Explain How Authorial Choices Achieve Effects
This requires you to justify that the choice has the effect that you've identified. Many people have different interpretations of texts, so it's important that we do this to give our own interpretation legitimacy.
Justifying evidence is an important skill if we want our analysis to be convincing. Click the heading or the image to access slides that explains how to justify different types of authorial chocies.
Linguistic Choices
Non-linguistic choices refers to the decisions an author makes about anything that's not related to the specific words that they use in their work. This includes the events of the story, character actions, narrative choices, and choices related to the structure of their work. Click the title or image to learn more about these types of choices.
That author's can make different choices in different mediums. To learn more about the types of choices that author's can make in different text types, visit our Text Type webpage.
What if I can't remember the name?
Whilst it's always better to be precise and accurate, sometimes this isn't possible, especially under timed, exam conditions. In that case, we simply describe the choice by saying what you see. For instance, instead of saying "polysyndeton," you might say "the repeated use of and in a list;" or, instead of saying "anaphora," you might say "the repetition of words at the beginning of sentences."
Practice
Identifying
Identifying authorial choices in Robert Browning's 'Love in a Life'