English Coursework: Applying the Right Reading Strategy When Evaluating a Literary Text
Monday, February 8th, 2010Evaluation is an essential aspect to reading and writing. If you are writing an English coursework you will have to evaluate and analyze a work of literature, from varied perspectives. The kind of evaluation methodology you choose for your assignment depends on the genre, author, historical implications and other factors of a given text.
The skill of evaluation comes with great practice and clear understanding of the complexities of the text at hand. There are many literary strategies that can be applied when writing an assignment that aims for appraisal of a work, depending on it historical, political and social importance and relevance. But there are few that can be skillfully and productively applied when reading a text.
Choosing the right and apt reading strategy to a text can help a great deal in approaching a justified appraisal of literary text. Reading and understanding of a text plays an essential role to its interpretation and understanding. Writing a coursework helps the student exhibit his/her reading as well as comprehension skills.
Reading strategies of a text are decided and chosen upon in accordance to the text’s nature. Ronald Barthes, an eminent literary critic has interrogated ways of reading a text to reach a justifiable conclusion and understanding. His ways of interrogation can be productively employed when evaluating a literary text.
Here is a quick guide to choosing an appropriate reading strategy for the literary text under evaluation-
- Choose a topic for your English coursework, in which you have a genuine interest. There are many factors that can be taken into consideration when choosing a topic for your assignment: Genre, author, interest and availability of the text among others. There is yet another factor that is of equal importance: Complexity. If you enjoy reading between the lines, reading an writing an analysis of a complex text will be interesting and enlightening.
- Choose the reading strategy appropriate for the chosen text according to Ronald Bathe’s classification of the literary texts. Barthe’s divides literary texts into two distinct categories: ’Readerly’ and ‘Writerly’. The ‘Readerly’ texts are straightforward in narration, with linear narrative. These texts are easy to read and comprehend as the author states his points with clear markings. Most of the classics fall into this category. The writer when reading these texts does to have to make additional efforts to comprehend writer’s ideas and inferences. Evaluation of these texts must be done on the surface with comparative or development study.
- The ‘Writerly’ texts, are the complex texts that makes use of literary techniques like allusions, imagism, symbolism, non linear narration, to communicate the author’s experience in a unique way. The message of the author is communicated with the use of implications and suggestions. The reader when evaluating these texts has to infer possible explanations outcomes of a text. Most of the modern literature falls into this category. As the name suggest, these texts come to life only when a reader reads the texts, creating one’s own interpretation and meaning from the written experience, in the process writing the text.
A pre knowledge of the reading strategy to apply can save time and efforts, thereby producing a quality English coursework.
