How to Analyse Texts is the essential introductory textbook and toolkit for language analysis. This book shows the reader how to undertake detailed, language-focussed, contextually sensitive analyses of a wide range of texts – spoken, written and multimodal. The book constitutes a flexible resource which can be used in different ways across a range of courses and at different levels. This textbook includes: three parts covering research and study skills, language structure and use, and how texts operate in sociocultural contexts a wide range of international real-life texts, including items from South China Morning Post, art’otel Berlin and Metro Sweden, which cover digital and print media, advertising, recipes and much more objectives and skill review for each section, activities, commentaries, suggestions for independent assignments, and an analysis checklist for students to follow a combined glossary and index and a comprehensive further reading section a companion website at www.routledge.com/cw/goddard with further links and exercises for students. Written by two experienced teachers of English Language, How to Analyse Texts is key reading for all students of English language and linguistics.

Analysing Practical and Professional Texts focuses on texts as constituents of human usage, showing how written documents and other 'texts' are integral to social organization. It reveals social organization itself to be not only textually-mediated in nature, but also textually-constituted, showing how texts - professional, technical or otherwise - as well as various social-scientific methodologies employ the resources of ordinary language. Theoretically sophisticated and illustrated with empirical examples, this book will be of interest not only to those with interests in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, but also to social scientists and anthropologists concerned with text analysis, textual sense and the 'linguistic turn' in the methods of their own disciplines.

Now in its second edition, Text Analysis with R provides a practical introduction to computational text analysis using the open source programming language R. R is an extremely popular programming language, used throughout the sciences; due to its accessibility, R is now used increasingly in other research areas. In this volume, readers immediately begin working with text, and each chapter examines a new technique or process, allowing readers to obtain a broad exposure to core R procedures and a fundamental understanding of the possibilities of computational text analysis at both the micro and the macro scale. Each chapter builds on its predecessor as readers move from small scale “microanalysis” of single texts to large scale “macroanalysis” of text corpora, and each concludes with a set of practice exercises that reinforce and expand upon the chapter lessons. The book’s focus is on making the technical palatable and making the technical useful and immediately gratifying. Text Analysis with R is written with students and scholars of literature in mind but will be applicable to other humanists and social scientists wishing to extend their methodological toolkit to include quantitative and computational approaches to the study of text. Computation provides access to information in text that readers simply cannot gather using traditional qualitative methods of close reading and human synthesis. This new edition features two new chapters: one that introduces dplyr and tidyr in the context of parsing and analyzing dramatic texts to extract speaker and receiver data, and one on sentiment analysis using the syuzhet package. It is also filled with updated material in every chapter to integrate new developments in the field, current practices in R style, and the use of more efficient algorithms.

In What Writing Does and How It Does It, editors Charles Bazerman and Paul Prior offer a sophisticated introduction to methods for understanding, studying, and analyzing texts and writing practices. This volume addresses a variety of approaches to analyzing texts, and considers the processes of writing, exploring textual practices and their contexts, and examining what texts do and how texts mean rather than what they mean. Included are traditional modes of analysis (rhetorical, literary, linguistic), as well as newer modes, such as text and talk, genre and activity analysis, and intertextual analysis. The chapters have been developed to provide answers to a specified set of questions, with each one offering: *a preview of the chapter's content and purpose; *an introduction to basic concepts, referring to key theoretical and research studies in the area; *details on the types of data and questions for which the analysis is best used; *examples from a wide-ranging group of texts, including educational materials, student writing, published literature, and online and electronic media; *one or more applied analyses, with a clear statement of procedures for analysis and illustrations of a particular sample of data; and *a brief summary, suggestions for additional readings, and a set of activities. The side-by-side comparison of methods allows the reader to see the multi-dimensionality of writing, facilitating selection of the best method for a particular research question. The volume contributors are experts from linguistics, communication studies, rhetoric, literary analysis, document design, sociolinguistics, education, ethnography, and cultural psychology, and each utilizes a specific mode of text analysis. With its broad range of methodological examples, What Writing Does and How It Does It is a unique and invaluable resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and for researchers in education, composition, ESL and applied linguistics, communication, L1 and L2 learning, print media, and electronic media. It will also be useful in all social sciences and humanities that place importance on texts and textual practices, such as English, writing, and rhetoric.

How can you analyse narratives, interviews, field notes, or focus group data? Qualitative text analysis is ideal for these types of data and this textbook provides a hands-on introduction to the method and its theoretical underpinnings. It offers step-by-step instructions for implementing the three principal types of qualitative text analysis: thematic, evaluative, and type-building. Special attention is paid to how to present your results and use qualitative data analysis software packages, which are highly recommended for use in combination with qualitative text analysis since they allow for fast, reliable, and more accurate analysis. The book shows in detail how to use software, from transcribing the verbal data to presenting and visualizing the results. The book is intended for Master’s and Doctoral students across the social sciences and for all researchers concerned with the systematic analysis of texts of any kind.

Practical advice on finding a topic, organizing an argument, and writing an effective essay. Includes detailed discussions of how to write clear paragraphs and effective sentences, using dozens of examples from actual student essays.