Overview
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Overview
Word analysis is a skill you need to add to your warrants. Word analysis can be added immediately after “In other words” and is a more sophisticated look at language than the general all-purpose warrant will allow for. |
How Word Analysis Works
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Word analysis goes BEYOND the restatement of a word’s surface meaning to ask the following questions:
Word Analysis Basics
Imagine that you pour out your heart into a text message to your beloved. In this text, you explain that you admired them from afar, that you lacked the courage to say this directly, that you wish to have a further relationship, that your heart belongs to them, and so on. Here is their reply: "ok." Apply word analysis to this situation. What are the implications of this word? What does this reply suggest? What is the tone? What about other features of this text -- spelling, punctuation? How would our “reading” change if the punctuation or spelling were different? |
Close Reading in Real Life
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Loaded Words: Race, Gender, Class
Authors often (deliberately or unconsciously) signal bias in their choice of words to describe people. For example, think about the people who get described using the following words. Consider the race, gender, sexuality, religion, or class of the people typically characterized as “sassy,” for example. Who gets described as “sassy”? Who doesn’t? Loaded Words
Real-Life Examples
Recently in his campaign for the senate seat in Atlanta, the eventual Senate winner Doug Jones called the credibility of his opponent, Roy Moore, into question by saying the following:
Analyze the impact of the italicized statement, particularly the following words:
What other words could Jones have used to describe Moore’s physical movement? What are the implications of the word “prancing,” especially prancing “around on a stage” in a “cowboy suit”? Put it all together as a whole. What larger picture is Jones painting here of Roy Moore? How does Jones characterization of Moore undermine Moore’s credibility with his conservative base? |
Directions for This Assignment
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Directions:
TEMPLATE
NOTE: If you are already proficient in writing, feel free to adapt this template to your needs. You will see that in the examples below, the writers have not necessarily adhered religiously to the template. NOTE #2: In the following example #1, anything that is "setup" -- basically, claim, context, and data -- are in blue. Actual analysis is in red. The two are split up essentially for the reader's convenience. |
Example of Close Reading #1: Pregnant Replies
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Curiously, Polonius -- never an intentional source of wisdom -- offers some revealing, if unintentional, insights into Hamlet's character with this line about pregnant replies, suggesting that although Hamlet seeks to define deceptiveness as strictly "feminine," this trait is much more gender-fluid than Hamlet wants to admit. In context, Polonius witnesses Hamlet's crazy act, and like the pompous blowhard he is, assumes he can correctly "read" Hamlet's words for more than just their apparent meaning. Observing, "How pregnant sometimes his replies are!" (II. ii. 207-208), Polonius goes the usual interpretive route here by asserting that the words of a sane man, like a prophet or a seer, contain great symbolic value. In this, he is right, of course -- Hamlet's words do contain more than their surface meaning -- but not really in the way Polonius thinks. Hamlet's "replies" are more about using insanity as an excuse to throw shade shade than anything else -- and of course, to expose the deception he sees at the heart of the Danish court. In his desire to expose this deception, though, Hamlet targets not Claudius, but his mother and Ophelia. Defining women as the emblem of all falsehood, the creatures who distort God's creation of their identity, their "one face," by "mak[ing] themselves another" (III.i.45), Hamlet is structurally positioning himself here as the masculine avatar of disclosure and transparency, a kind of one-man Warren Commission or Washington Post of Denmark whose mission is to uncover corruption -- since he, of course, is such an honest, straight-shooting guy, as men are.
This is hardly the case, as Polonius' observation unwittingly reveals. Hamlet's double-meaning words are described as "pregnant," a word Polonius intends on the surface to mean pregnant with meaning, or rich in meaning or implication, but which -- especially in the later discussion of Hamlet as the sun/son who breeds maggots in Ophelia the dead dog -- suggests that it is Hamlet himself, or at least his "replies," that are the real breeders here. Pregnancy is a kind of deceptive state, really: a pregnant woman is simultaneously two people in one, a human matryoshka doll in which one being is concealed inside someone completely different. God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another. It is therefore no surprise that Hamlet, concealing his real intent and real motives sometimes even from himself in double-entendre replies full of meanings within meanings, should be described as having "pregnant...replies." What is a surprise is the gender-fluidity this comment suggests or allows for in Hamlet's own identity. Hamlet, it turns out, is just as fluid, just as deceptive and masquerading in his identity, as either Gertrude or Ophelia, both of whom (by any objective measure) are far less of an actor than Hamlet himself. Women, as it turns out, do not have the corner on the market of deception. Ultimately, as much as Hamlet tries to push that label from himself, from his own father, and even from Claudius, and on to Gertrude and Ophelia, he cannot escape the reality that "femininity" is not, in fact, a synonym for "falsehood." Frailty, thy name is Hamlet. |
Example of Close Reading #2: "I Best"
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One particular phrase from the short story that works powerfully to communicate Edgar Allan Poe’s central idea that repressed motives exert powerful pressure on language is the key phrase “As I best could” (Poe 1), a statement Montresor makes in the opening sentence of the story. In context, Poe’s phrase appears in his story “The Cask of Amontillado” in which our narrator, Montresor, justifies his murderous hatred for his frenemy Fortunato by stating that he has “borne” the “thousand injuries” inflicted on him “as I best could,” finally vowing revenge after Fortunato “venture[s] upon insult” -- whatever that means. On its surface, the phrase “as I best could” basically reads like a slight variation on the common idiom “as best I could” -- that is, in the best manner of which one is capable. Superficially, this sentence suggests that the poor, patient narrator has had to endure all manner of insults and slights from Fortunato -- insults and slights that Fortunato, to judge by his later friendly manner to the narrator later in the story, is apparently completely unaware he has committed. However, the implications of the phrase are revealing. For one, why was it even necessary to change the usual expression as best I could? Surely the two ideas are closely related enough so that the word switch at first seems irrelevant -- so potentially irrelevant, in fact, that the word switch is easy to miss. Were Poe not such an obsessively careful editor -- and we know that obsessively careful editing was Poe’s actual paying job -- one might be tempted to call this word reversal an accident. It’s not. The change is significant: the word switch from as best I could to as I best could suggests an actual need on the narrator’s part to shift the focus, implying to the reader that the narrator has a compulsion to put himself first, to say “I [am] best,” even at the cost of clear language. For another, the fact that the narrator could not resist saying “I [am] best” can also suggest a powerful motive for a previously motiveless murder: He must “best” Fortunato; he must be the “best” man. This reading would make readers question whether our narrator is fully aware of his own tiny ego or the degree to which his petty sense of self is threatened by this more “fortunate” man. Ultimately, the pressure that Poe’s narrator Montresor puts on the language suggests that Montresor has a vindictive and compulsive need to assert his superiority, one he may not even be aware of as he works so very vigorously to convince us (and possibly himself) that his actions were justified.
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