Text Structures PDF

DEPICTING REAL LIFE Text Structures The vast majority of texts are written for one or more of these three purposes: To make an argument To inform To tell a story To achieve these purposes, authors use one or more of the following Five (5) text structures: Description Sequence/Instruction...

DEPICTING REAL LIFE Text Structures The vast majority of texts are written for one or more of these three purposes: To make an argument To inform To tell a story To achieve these purposes, authors use one or more of the following Five (5) text structures: Description Sequence/Instruction/Process Cause/Effect Compare/Contrast Problem/Solution You must be able to unpack these five (5) text structures and study their components to fully understand and analyze informational texts, whether they're reading textbooks, news articles, or works of literary nonfiction. 1. Description It is pretty straightforward. Texts that use this structure describe something. With few exceptions, these texts also present plenty of details about what they're describing. A text using this structure might also: Tell you why we are describing something Tell you why the described topic is important Provide examples of the described topic(s) Descriptive texts are everywhere—in novels, works of literary nonfiction, news articles, and science textbooks—which makes sense because the entire point of description is to present information. Example: “Two distinct desert ecosystems, the Mojave and the Colorado, come together in Joshua Tree National Park. A fascinating variety of plants and animals make their homes in a land sculpted by strong winds and occasional torrents of rain. Dark night skies, a rich cultural history, and surreal geologic features add to the wonder of this vast wilderness in southern California” - National Parks Service. 2. Sequence/Instruction/Process This text structure covers a few purposes: Sequential instructions (Step 1, Step 2, Step 3; do this, then do that, and finally do this)  Chronological events (This happened, then this happened, then this happened, etc.) Arguments that use evidence to support a claim (presenting evidence from least to most convincing) When you read or write a text with this structure, order is the key. Texts that use this format don't present any event or instruction out of order, as doing so would make its directions more difficult to follow. As a ludicrous example, imagine a cake recipe in which preheating the oven is the last step. It would just be confusing and odd. Poorly written instructions just aren't worth your time. Here is a non-exhaustive list of words and phrases that indicate a text follows the sequence/instruction/process text structure: before During Earlier After Finally First From Eventually In order Last While How to Now until While next Example 1: “World War I, also known as the Great War, began in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. His murder catapulted into a war across Europe that lasted until 1918.” - World War I (history.com) Example 2: “Pulse flour, sugar, and salt in a food processor to combine. Add butter and process until the largest pieces of butter are pea-size. Transfer to a large bowl.” BA’s Best Apple Pie (bonappetit.com) 3. Cause/Effect Cause/Effect text structures explain, well, causes and effects. Sounds pretty simple! However, works that use this structure can become complex when an effect has multiple causes (or vice versa). You will encounter complex examples of cause-effect when they read historical texts. Many historical events had more than one cause, all related in ways that can be difficult to unpack. Here is a non-exhaustive list of words and phrases that indicate a text follows the cause/effect text structure: because effect Led to consequence accordingly Cause result Reason Example: “After inflating, the universe slowed down its expansion rate but continued to grow, as it does still. It also cooled significantly, allowing for the formation of matter — first neutrinos, electrons, quarks, and photons, followed by protons and neutrons.” - How Did the Big Bang Happen? (astronomy.com) 4. Compare/contrast This text structure involves a comparison between multiple things, revealing how they are similar and different. Ensure to know that contrasting two or more things doesn't necessarily mean identifying them as good or bad. Comparisons relay the differences; therefore, one thing could have positive and negative traits. Here is a non-exhaustive list of words and phrases that indicate a text follows the compare/contrast text structure: however also Both comparable Even though In common Just as Similar although but despite Difference alike instead otherwise Unlike Example: “Beethoven has a much more fiery personality. Whereas Mozart’s music is clean and precise, Beethoven employs many surprises in his music. Many times he will build up the music as if it’s leading to something only to suddenly get soft – his trademark use of subito piano.” — Mozart vs. Beethoven (livingpianos.com) 5. Problem/Solution This text structure involves two parts: The author identifies a problem The author details a solution to this problem Problem/Solution can be a very complex text structure, as it necessitates using other structures, too. The author needs to describe the problem. The author would likely also explain the causes and effects of the problem to argue in favor of their solutions. Does implementing the author's solutions involve following a series of specific steps? That involves another structure. What if the author wants to mention other potential solutions and then explain why their solution is the best one? Oh, hello there, Compare/Contrast! What's important here, as it is with any text in which an author marshals an argument, is that the author uses only the information needed to advance the argument or refute counterarguments. When you examine a text that uses the Problem/Solution text structure, they should examine at least two things: the argument as a whole and the individual components of it. Knowing that aspects of other text structures might appear in the Problem/Solution will help you examine the argument's components. That's why it's essential that you understand and can analyze the other four structures if you want them to be able to examine the Problem/Solution effectively. Example: “Transportation is the second leading source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. (burning a single gallon of gasoline produces 20 pounds of CO2). But it doesn't have to be that way. One way to dramatically curtail transportation fuel needs is to move closer to work, use mass transit, or switch to walking, cycling, or some other mode of transport that does not require anything other than human energy. There is also the option of working from home and telecommuting several days a week.” — 10 Solutions for Climate Change (scientificamerican.com) ___ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (A Must Read) Here are some fun facts that are nice to know before reading the book Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: The concept of “childhood” was only invented in the 18th century when the middle classes began to see the value of a child’s innocence and play. For most of the literary history, children were rarely mentioned, occasionally appearing in such works as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile and William Wordsworth’s The Prelude. In the 19th century, Charles Dickens sometimes placed children in the foreground of his stories, but only in books for adults. Most tales written for, as opposed to about, children were adaptations of adult stories or moral didactic. In the early 19th century, The Brothers Grimm’s illustrated folktales, collected initially for adults, were criticized as being unsuitable for young people because of their sexual and violent content – later editions were adapted to be more child-friendly. Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote his Fairy Tales (1835-37) specifically for children, caused an outcry by failing to include a moral. Justice - Power and perversity prevail over fairness, mirroring the arbitrary nature of adult power over children. Behaviour - Charactats are often trude, aggressive, m frustrating, as adults can be, incomprehensably, in a child's world Scale - A child can grow of shrink, umaally as a result of drinking or eating something. just as children are often told to grow up Animals - Animals have human characteristics, though courggerated or distorted, functioning as stand-ins for adults Time - Clock time has no meaning, reflecting the adhah world of rules, regulations, and schedules that make no sense to a child In Wonderland, the laws of both nature and society are turned on their heads: time and space behave unpredictably; animals talk; at tea parties and games, anything might happen. The child’s sense of threat in an adult world is evoked through fantasy. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, writing for children enjoyed a golden age, founded on increasing literacy, the growth of commercial publishing, and recognition of the creative potential of a child’s world. Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), by English author Thomas Hughes, started the tradition of the school story; another new genre was the coming-of-age-tale, such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868-69) in the USA. Other classics include Johanna Spyri’s Heidi (1880-81), from Switzerland, and Scotsman JM Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the most influential books of this flowering. Regarded as the first masterpiece for children in English, its fantastical story is a marked departure from the prevailing realism of literature at the time. On a July day in 1862, Charles Dodgson, a young mathematics don, went rowing with a male friend and three young sisters on the Thames near Oxford and told a story of a girl named Alice – which was also the name of one of his passengers, Alice Liddell, aged ten. So Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland took shape, appearing as a handwritten book, and then as a publication under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. In the story, seven-year old Alice falls down a rabbit hole and finds herself in a surreal universe. She negotiates alone a world of strange creatures, strange attitudes, strange happenings, and strange linguistics logic. This is the focus of the book and its principal theme. Part of the book’s coherence comes from the fact that Alice herself entertains unorthodox logic. 0As she falls down the rabbit hole, she wonders if she is going to the land in the “Antipathies” (Antipodes), and imagines herself appearing ignorant when she has to ask whether she is in Australia or New Zealand. Her next observation shows Carroll brilliantly inhabiting a child’s frankness: “No, it’ll never do to ask: perhaps I shall see it written up somewhere.” Alice always wonders: about who she is, what are the rules of this peculiar world, and how she is to regain normality, common issues of childhood. Her bewilderment at first focuses on her being the wrong size, either too big or too small to do as she wants. After she meets the Caterpillar, new anxiety arises the challenge of repeatedly, often rudely, contradicted. Towards the end, with the Queen’s repeated plea for a beheading, the possibility of violence adds to the tension. The characters that Alice meets are mostly animals. Apart from Alice and her sister, who features before and after the adventure, the only human characters are the Mad Hatter and the Duchess, since the King and Queen of Hearts are playing cards. Parents do not make an appearance, nor is there any reference to them. Yet the inversions of everyday life that imprison Alice might also, at the same time, be seen as liberating by Victorian adults accustomed to the convention. One of the attractions of nonsense is that it offers a playground for the imagination, and arguably for the satisfaction of subliminal needs, including occasional escape from social rules. Alice does not refer at the end to have learned any lessons from her adventures. However, she does, in the course of the book, become more forthright, and by the time of the trial scene near the end, she is capable of saying to the Queen that her perverse sense of justice is “Stuff and nonsense!” Her final act, by which time she is child-sized again, is to insist that the playing cards are just that – inanimate things – after which they fly into the air. By force of character, she has punctured the illusion. The coda, featuring Alice’s older sister, is beautifully judged. It starts with her dreaming “after a fashion,” since a fully-fledged dream would be less subtle than this elusive mind-state. First, she affectionately imagines Alice herself; then, the weird characters Alice has been describing pass in front of her. Finally, she imagines Alice turning into a “grown woman,” but keeping the “simple and loving heart” of her childhood, and passing on the story of Wonderland to a new generation. _______ The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (A Must Read) Here are some facts about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that are nice to know: With little history to speak of and few literary traditions to anchor them, US writers in the 19th century were engaged in holding up a mirror to the varied, complex populations of their rapidly evolving nation. One author blazed a trail, sitting his story specifically in the Mississippi Valley in the Midwest with a poor white boy narrator like no other. Mark Twain’s Huck Finn relates his adventures in regional dialect, salted with philosophical musings and homespun wisdom, and along the way becomes one of the first authentic voices in American literature. What is it The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that led Ernest Hemingway to declare it to be the starting point for all American literature? For a start, it empowered generations of American writers to shift literature from its center in the New England colonies and site their works on home soil with local color and vernacular speech. But what is also remarkable is the radical heart of this free-flowing “boy’s own” story. Twain’s novel was published after the American Civil War (1861-65) but is set 40-50 years earlier when slaveholding persisted in the South, and settlers were scrabbling for land in the West. Huck’s original thoughts reflect the numerous contradictions at the heart of American society. Before 1823 - The Pioneers, the first of James Fenimore Cooper’s saga, the “Leatherstocking Tales,” offers conflicting views of life on the frontier in one of the first original US novels. 1852 - Harriet Beecher Stowe creates multiple vernacular voices in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a sentimental story that inflames the anti-slavery debate After 1896 - In the Country of the Pointed Firs, Sarah Orne Jewett paints a vivid picture of life in an isolated fishing village on the coast of Maine. 1939 - John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath mixes local color with social injustice in an epic story of a family’s journey west amid the Great Depression. Early on in the narrative, Huck introduces himself to the reader as an established character from a previous novel by Twain., The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which gives his account credibility of social history. He feigns death to escape the civilizing folk of Missouri and the brutality of his father and begins his journey down the Mississippi on a raft, in the company of Jim, a runaway slave. As they drift south, the brutal reality of backwoods society encroaches whenever they make contact with the shore. In these one-horse towns, lynch mobs and gangs administer justice; tricksters play to the weakness of the crowd; loud-mouthed drunks are summarily shot, and a young gentleman who befriends Huck is murdered in a family feud. In a text that is peppered with the offensive word “nigger”, subversion is played out through the talks between Huck and Jim. Newly escaped from being sold down the river by his mistress, Jim concludes: “Yes – en I’s rich now … I own myself, en I’s worth eight hundred dollars. I wished I had the money.” Living on the raft in idyllic self-sufficiency, Huck and Jim are cast adrift from their social order, and a friendship develops. Later, as Huck wrestles with the southern ideology that demands that he should turn Jim in, he can remember the man only as a friend” “we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing … somehow couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him…” by the time Tom Sawyer, the eponymous hero of Twain’s earlier novel, steps on to the page, Huck’s emotional development is almost complete. Although it was condemned as “coarse” when it was first published in 1884, Huckleberry Finn injected American writing with new energy, style, and color. Its focus on the speech of real Americans stretched on through the voices of John Steinbeck’s dispossessed farmers in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) to recent first-person narratives such as Drown (1996), Junot Diaz’s stories of Dominica-Americans in New Jersey. Mark Twain Born on 30 November 1835, Samuel Langhorne Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, which served as the model for “St Petersburg” in Huckleberry Finn. After the death of his father, Clemens left school at the age of 12. He worked as a typesetter and occasional writer, and in 1857 became a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi. During the Civil War, he prospected for silver in Nevada, then started writing for newspapers, adopting the pen name Mark Twain. In 1870 Clemens married Olivia Langdon; they settled in Connecticut and had four children. Despite the success of this novel, a series of poor investments bankrupted him. Still, from 1891 he lectured widely, enjoyed international celebrity, and restored his finances as Mark Twain wrote 28 books and many short stories, letters, and sketches. He died in 1910.