The Art and Craft of Analysis

Analyzing Style

•Close Reading: when you read closely, you develop an understanding of the texts that is based first on the words themselves and then on the larger ideas the words suggests.

•start with the small details--we often do this unconsciously.

Analyzing Style

•Examine tone (writer’s attitude), sentence structure, and vocabulary.

Two categories of analysis

•Diction(word choice)

•Syntax(arrangement of words)

•Trope: artful diction

•Scheme: artful syntax

Analyzing Diction:•Look at connotations of words.

•Are the words formal or informal?

•Figures of speech such as metaphors, personification, analogous relationships,...

•Which are the important words in the passage (verbs, nouns, adjectives, and adverbs)?

Analyzing Syntax•What punctuation is used and how does it

affect meaning or emphasis?

•Are the paragraphs brief or lengthy?

•What is the order or the parts of the sentence?

•What are the sentences like? Are they periodic (moving toward something important at the end) or cumulative (adding detail that support an important idea in the beginning of the sentence)?

•How are transitions used?

Trope: artful diction

•Irony Alliteration

•hyperbole Analogy

•personification

•metaphor

•rhetorical questions

•simile

Scheme: Artful Syntax

•Anaphora

•Antithesis

•Anadiplosis

•Parallelism

•Polyptoton

•Chiasmus

•Pa

Anaphora

•: A scheme in which the same word or phrase is repeated at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences.

•Example:"I will fight for you. I will fight to save Social Security. I will fight to raise the minimum wage."

Antithesis

•A scheme that makes use of contrasting words, phrases, sentences, or ideas for emphasis (generally used in parallel grammatical structures).

•Example: " Americans in need are not strangers, they are citizens, not problems, but priorities."

Anadiplosis• repeats the last word of one phrase,

clause, or sentence at or very near the beginning of the next. it can be generated in series for the sake of beauty or to give a sense of logical progression

•Her ring sparkled in the sunlight of the glorious day. The glorious day that signified the end of her misery and the beginning of a new life.

Parallelism•is recurrent syntactical similarity.

Several parts of a sentence or several sentences are expressed similarly to show that the ideas in the parts or sentences are equal in importance. Parallelism also adds balance and rhythm and, most importantly, clarity to the sentence.

• Ferocious dragons breathing fire and wicked sorcerers casting their spells do their harm by night in the forest of Darkness.

Polyptoton

•“A rhetorical term for repetition of words derived from the same root but with different endings.

•"Morality is moral only when it is voluntary."

Chiasmus• might be called "reverse parallelism," since the second part

of a grammatical construction is balanced or paralleled by the first part, only in reverse order. Instead of an A,B structure (e.g., "learned unwillingly") paralleled by another A,B structure ("forgotten gladly"), the A,B will be followed by B,A ("gladly forgotten"). So instead of writing, "What is learned unwillingly is forgotten gladly," you could write, "What is learned unwillingly is gladly forgotten." Similarly, the parallel sentence, "What is now great was at first little," could be written chiastically as, "What is now great was little at first."

•"I'd rather be looked over than overlooked."