Written by
Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior in What Writing Does and How It Does It An Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.2004.pp 1-3.
Discourse analysis has grown in popularity as a major analytical method in social science research fields such as communications studies, sociology, and anthropology. As well, it has been an increasingly popular method for research, practical applications, and pedagogical assessment in composition, education, and applied linguistics/ESL. Most discourse analysis has, however, been focused on spoken language. Yet a number of critical social domains involve significant written text. Think, for example, of schooling, scientific and disciplinary knowledge, cultural production in the arts, the everyday life of government and corporate institutions, the public spaces of news, the diverse worlds of electronic text on the World Wide Web, and other forms of widespread cultural self-representation.
Looking at only the spoken interchanges in such educational, institutional, professional, and social settings gives a limited and potentially misleading picture of the ways that language enters into the dynamic unfolding of situations and events. In extending the reach of discourse analysis to engage with written text, we would do well, however, to remember some of the lessons learned in analysis of spoken language: that language is emergent, multiform, negotiated in the process, meaningful in the uptake, accomplishing social acts.Analysis of writing must go beyond considering the written text as an inert object, complete in itself as a bearer of abstract meanings.
Traditional forms of text analysis developed within school and in such academic disciplines as literary studies, rhetoric, and philosophy have told us much about what texts can mean. These modes of analysis, developed mainly for purposes of interpretation and criticism, by and large have not been brought into dialogue with discourse analysis as currently conceived and practiced within the social sciences. Yet they form the basic way most of us approach texts and represent what we are likely to think of as textual analysis. In order to understand how textual analysis can address issues beyond interpretation and criticism, we must be able to see the relationship between traditional forms of text analysis and the newer methods considered part of discourse analysis.
To understand writing, we need to explore the practices that people engage in to produce texts as well as the ways that writing practices gain their meanings and functions as dynamic elements of specific cultural settings. The absence of attention to writing as a social and productive practice has come about for reasons we discuss below. The effect, however, has been to severely limit the analysis of written text, closing off many lines of inquiry into how and why texts come to be as they are and what effects they have on the world.
Why Analyze Written Texts and Writing?
Traditionally the motivation for analyzing texts has been to understand them more deeply and/or to examine the limitations of their meanings. Text analysis was earliest developed within scriptural religions, where people were highly motivated to find all the meaning they could out of holy books such as the Bible, Talmud, Koran, or Baghavad Gita. The emergence of philosophy and other intellectual endeavors involved criticizing claims of opponents, which motivated analysis of texts to find flaws in reasoning, confusions, or other limitations. Similarly as law became a matter of written law, written court precedents, and written legal briefs, it became important to determine what the law really said, what the loopholes were, how precedents could be used to argue one side or another, what the weaknesses and strengths were of opposing arguments.
Rhetoric was first a productive discipline, concerned about how to make civic texts that would persuade others of an argument, establish the ethos (credibility and status) of the rhetor, or create a climate of feeling that would incline others toward certain views and actions. Rhetoric, however, also fostered a critical reading practice, reading civic texts for the means of rhetorical action, for the presence of tropes and topics, the signs of audience and authorial construction.
Literary studies was premised on the importance of certain cultural texts, which may be difficult to understand because of their historical distance,cultural difference, profound meaning, or complex literary technique. Thus,it required ways of analyzing those texts in order to understand their meaning.
Students, consequently, needed to be introduced to the techniques of analytical reading so as to have access to the culture of these texts. Cultural and historical criticism then served to characterize the particularity of the views and experiences in the texts. In all of these modes of analysis, the primary focus has been on uncovering or criticizing the meaning of the text.
This concern for meaning is natural enough in reading and responding to other people’s thought expressed in the writing. It is the natural stance, as it were, of the reader to be looking for meaning. However, there are many other questions that can be asked about texts and we can learn many other things about texts beyond what they mean and whether we approve of the meanings. We can consider - how texts direct people’s attention to various objects and concerns;
- how different linguistic, rhetorical, and graphic resources make possible the creation of meaning;
- how texts depend on and use other texts; how texts influence people’s beliefs and actions;
- how people learn to recognize, read, and produce genres (texts of certain types);
- how people actually go about producing texts; and
- how social systems of activity depend on and promote particular kinds of texts.
I hope today's posting will be useful for all of us. Amien.
