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Interpreting Text

Identifying a writers attitude is done by knowing the connotation (a nice or a bad meaning) of the words he uses. If you see a word that you think may have a special connotation, check in a dictionary and look for the abbreviation 'derog.', which means that the word has a bad meaning. It is also important to know if a writer is 'objective' (gives good and bad points) or 'biased' ( gives only good, or only bad points).

The writer's purposes may include to inform, to teach, to entertain, to persuade, or to criticise, etc.

You need to understand the organisation of a text at 2 levels, at the paragraph level and at the whole text level. The paragraph level means understanding the organisation of the sentences in a paragraph, and the links between them. For example you can draw arrows from words like 'he', 'she', 'they', and 'it', back to the nouns they refer to, like this:

You also need to understand the logic of the paragraph or group of paragraphs, for example by drawing a mind maps of the the organisation, with words like 'and', 'but' and 'so' linking the topics and sub-topics.

The whole text level is organised in different ways according to the type of document you are reading, for example a memo might have a situation, problem, suggested solution and a request for action. A report usually has a title page, abstract, table of contents, methodology, findings, conclusions and recommendations sections.

Guessing meanings of words and phrases is possible because you know the situation. However, if you are using the Internet you can use one of the online dictionaries to find the meaning.