What to look for when analysing texts
Here is a checklist of things to annotate for when analysing an article:
 The item’s intention?
 Register-formality / informality? Where is it shown – how formal / how informal and
why / how so?
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Use of the vernacular / colloquialisms?
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Who might be excluded and why so?
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Types of sentence e.g. declarative, interrogative, exclamative, imperatives – and why
so?
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Sentence structure (compounds? complex? etc) and fragmentation?
Use of humour?
How the writer builds rapport / intimacy / social closeness via their language use?
How inclusiveness is promoted by the language use? How does their lexical choice
isolate certain groups of society?
Use of parallelism? Use of repetition? Contractions? Pronoun reference? Morphological
creativity (eg abbreviation etc)-what effect does this have on the audience’s reception
of the text?
Nominalization? Passive voice?
Information flow and how it progresses – and why so? (devices which assist this)?
Cohesion devices – eg - dot points, headings, hyponymy, conjunctions, front focus,
topic comment, diexis, repetition …
All of these features are designed to help you answer the questions below. Once you
have found the items above, use these to answer the questions in dot points.
1. What is the purpose of this text? Find two things (lexical, syntactic, semantic etc.)
that are in the text because of its purpose
2. How would you describe the formality of this text? Use words like formal, quite
formal, quite informal, very informal and so on. Find three pieces of linguistic evidence
(to do with syntax, the lexical choices, the morphology of words and so on) that support
your claim.
3. Find one example of something that is present due to the cultural context of the text
(make sure you link the example with a particular value/belief/attitude)
4. Say who the intended audience is and find one example of something that is present
as a result of the audience (again, consider the lexicon and other subsystems)