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PSAT/NMSQT is a registered trademark of the College Board and National Merit Scholarship Corporation. All other products and services may be trademarks of their respective owners. Visit the College Board on the Web: www. Introduction: Analysis as “Undoing”.
On Reading and Writing Analytically: Theory, Method, Crisis, Action Plan. Analytic Writing in College: Forms, Sites, and Strategies. 19 Mary Kay Mulvaney 4. New Worlds in Old Texts.
Teaching Analysis of Nonfiction Prose as Language Landscape. Asking Students to “Play” with a Text: Teaching Analysis of Audience and Purpose. The Appeals and the Audience: The Rhetoric of Dramatic Literature. About the Editor.
About the Authors. 99 iii Introduction: Analysis as “Undoing” David A. Jolliffe University of Arkansas Fayetteville, Arkansas Think of an automobile engine. When it’s perfectly tuned up, it purrs like a kitten.
Nobody calls the mechanic then. Think of an outstanding stage play. When the members of the cast are equally well prepared, when they act together as a flawless ensemble, the performance is consummately compelling. Nobody even notices that there ever was a director, let alone thinks actually to praise his or her work.
Think of the classic double play in baseball. At the crack of the bat, the shortstop moves toward the ground ball and the second baseman glides over to cover the bag. The shortstop, in one motion, fields the grounder and underhands the ball to the second baseman, who slides his foot over the bag, leaps and pirouettes to avoid the incoming runner, and pegs the ball on a rope to the first baseman, who plants one foot on the base, leans out, stretches his arm, extends his glove, and makes the catch, just before the runner, jetting down the baseline from home, reaches the bag. Bingo, bango, bongo, six to four to three, Tinkers to Evers to Chance.
Nobody even notices that the team has a coaching staff. Oh, but when the engine gets out of tune, when the acting is uneven and the play drags, when the shortstop’s toss is too wide or the runner takes the legs out from under the second baseman or the first baseman can’t dig the throw out of the dirt, then we notice. What went wrong? Who supposedly tuned up that engine? What must the director have been thinking? Hasn’t the manager taught the fundamentals of turning a double play to these guys? To cure all these ills, we analyze. What parts of the engine need our attention so we can get it back in tune? What parts of what scenes need more direction, more rehearsal? What actions need to be executed in what different ways by which players to pull off the double play? Special Focus: Reading and Writing Analytically Perhaps by experience, or perhaps through intuition, most high school and college students will recognize the need for analysis in these three scenarios, and some students may even have expertise in conducting such analyses.
Yet when course assignments call for analysis, or when an academic challenge such as the AP® English Language and Composition Examination requires students to analyze texts and images, students run into trouble. Why? There are myriad reasons, many of which are unpacked in the chapters of this volume. Perhaps one reason may lie in an essential disjuncture between the act of analysis, as we assign it to students or expect responsible citizens to be able to do it, and the etymology of the word. We require students to analyze published essays, stories, poems, and plays or to analyze slick advertisements, polished photographs, and precise charts.
We expect citizens to analyze politicians’ platforms; their business’s or industry’s strategic initiatives; and their church’s plans to add members, diversify services, and raise money. These pieces of literature and public documents may appear to be seamless, unified entities. The etymology of analysis, however, tacitly asks us to “unseam” them, to “disunify” them. “Analysis” comes from Medieval Latin, derived from the Greek analusis, a “dissolving,” which in turn comes from analũein, “to undo” or “to loosen.” That sense of analysis—of reading and writing analytically—as “undoing” is the common theme that runs through all six chapters of this volume.
All six chapters focus on reading and writing analytically as essentially an act of taking something apart, seeing how the parts work, and showing how the parts produce the whole. The original vision for the collection was for it to have three chapters that are essentially theoretical and conceptual and three that are completely “hands-on” and “teacherly.” But all of the contributors, I’ve found, are both teachers and theorists, so none of us could avoid being pragmatic. All of the chapters not only frame conceptual issues related to reading and writing analytically but also offer guidelines on teaching advanced high school and beginning college-level students how to do so. In the first chapter, I attempt to unpack a definition of analytic reading, explain how the AP English Language and Composition Examination tests a student’s analytic reading and writing abilities, and describe what I perceive to be a relatively precipitous drop-off in these abilities in recent years.
In Chapter 2, Mary Kay Mulvaney describes in substantial detail the kinds of analytic reading and writing tasks college students generally encounter during the undergraduate years, and she offers her perspective on how both college instructors and AP teachers can teach analysis. In Chapter 3, Hephzibah Roskelly turns her attention to the teaching of analysis as the teaching 2 Introduction: Analysis as “Undoing” of reading, and she concentrates primarily on how and why we must continue to teach our students how to read “old” texts—those written prior to 1900. In Chapter 4, Bernard Phelan describes how he teaches analytic reading of nonfiction prose by using the metaphor of the “language landscape.” In Chapter 5, Kevin McDonald explains how he gets his students attuned to analyzing audience and purpose by encouraging them to “play” with texts. In Chapter 6, Jodi Rice demonstrates how teaching dramatic literature is an excellent way to teach analysis of texts in general.
It is our sincere hope that these chapters will frame for the AP English community new principles and practices for teaching students to read and write analytically in all their classes, on the AP English Language and Composition Examination, and in their lives as productive citizens. 3 On Reading and Writing Analytically: Theory, Method, Crisis, Action Plan David A. Jolliffe So let rhetoric be defined as the faculty of discovering in the particular case what are the available means of persuasion. (Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 1355b) But the art of rhetoric has its value.
It is valuable, first, because truth and justice are by nature more powerful than their opposites…. [So a proper knowledge of rhetoric would prevent the triumph of fraud and injustice.] Secondly, [rhetoric is valuable as a means of instruction.] … Thirdly, in rhetoric, as in dialectic, we should be able to argue on either side of a question; not with a view to putting both sides into practice—we must not advocate evil—but in order that no aspect of the case may escape us…. Lastly, if it is a disgrace to a person when he cannot defend himself in a bodily way, it would be odd not to think him disgraced when he cannot defend himself with reason [in a speech]. (Aristotle, On Rhetoric, 1355a) [T]welve-year-olds debating the merits of a Michael Jackson concert or a Mariah Carey video are making the same kinds of claims, counterclaims, and value judgments as those made by published book reviewers and media critics; there’s even a continuity between the struggling adolescent who says ‘It sucks’ or ‘That’s cool,’ and the scholar or journalist who uses more sophisticated language.
(Graff 155) In my years of teaching young readers and writers about how to read and write analytically—and I’ve been at it for more than three decades now—I have repeatedly made five points, and this chapter will proceed more efficiently if I state them squarely, up front, right from the outset: Special Focus: Reading and Writing Analytically • First, reading and writing analytically are not rocket science. To read and write analytically means to examine any text, “literary” or “ordinary,” in order to determine both what its meanings, purposes, and effects are and to show how its parts work together to achieve those meanings, purposes, and effects. • Second, all textual analysis is ultimately rhetorical analysis. What people call “literary” analysis, “stylistic” analysis, or “discourse” analysis when it is done well is a subset of rhetorical analysis.
• Third, the practices of reading and writing analytically can be grounded in a body of theory from classical rhetoric that has stood the test of time—it’s been around for about 2,500 years. As the initial quotation from Aristotle above makes clear, rhetoric is the faculty of discovering—not necessarily of using, but certainly of finding—all the things a speaker or writer might do in a given situation to make his or her text meaningful, purposeful, and effective. In other words, the theory of rhetoric underlies analysis and criticism, as well as persuasive speaking and writing. • Fourth, as the other quotation from Aristotle above reveals, reading analytically is what I like to call “the good citizenship stuff” as well as “the good student stuff.” Good citizens and good students need to know how texts work on them—how a text’s rhetoric can prevent fraud and injustice and, I suppose, perpetrate them as well.
They need to know that all good teaching relies on good rhetoric, and most bad teaching probably reflects ineffective rhetorical choices. They need to know how to do justice to both sides of an argument—and, woe is us, how seldom the media in the United States give us the opportunity to do this. And students need to know how to use rhetoric to support their own positions. • Fifth, reading analytically is something most thoughtful people do every day.
Gerald Graff, in the final quotation above, suggests that preteens responding to a concert or a video engage in rhetorical analysis: Presuming that Michael Jackson and Mariah Carey are trying to achieve some meaning, purpose, or effect, the 12-year-olds, ideally, not only utter “It was cool” or “It sucked,” but also provide some justification for their evaluations. They refer to specific features of the concert or video—Michael Jackson’s snappy dance moves, for example, or Mariah Carey’s sappy lyrics—as support for their “cool” or “sucked” claims.
