This document outlines topics, challenges, and requirements for a written task on analyzing texts. It discusses how a text's meaning depends on the reader's cultural identity and context, and how social groups are represented or excluded. It also addresses genres and their conventions. The challenges include narrowing the focus, avoiding overgeneralizations about readers and representation, and demonstrating knowledge of the original text and genres. An outline must be completed in class selecting a question, text(s), part of the course, and key points of analysis. References and a formal essay structure are required.

1. Written Task 2

2. Topics
• Reader, culture and text
• a text’s meaning is determined by the reader and by the cultural context
• the reader and producer’s cultural identity or identities, age, gender, social
status, the historical and cultural setting of the text and its production, aspects of
language and translation.
• Power and privilege
• how and why social groups are represented in texts in particular ways.
• who is excluded from or marginalised in a text, or whose views are silenced
• Text and genre
• Certain textual features belong to a particular genre and can be identified by a
particular reader or audience. Writers make use of, or deviate from, particular
conventions of genre in order to achieve particular effects.

3. Challenges you may have
• finding and defining a sufficiently narrow focus for the word count (800-1000 words).
• Answering in a way that relies on factual knowledge, rather than pure supposition, even when being
asked to identify an imaginary reader and/or audience.
• Avoiding oversimplifications and stereotyping when exploring the potential responses of different
readers to texts or the effects on the texts if set in a different time or place or written in a different
language.
• Demonstrating knowledge of the original text under discussion, even when writing about the
imagination of a different one (see previous point).
• Allowing for social complexities in the discussion of the representation of social groups.
• Being able to read against the grain in order to recognise the ‘gaps’, ‘marginalisation’ or ‘silences’ in
narrative representations and being able to explain, without oversimplification, the contextual
reasons for these.
• Knowing enough about genres and their conventions to be able to discuss how these are used or
breached and why.
• Having enough general and literary knowledge to recognise and be able to discuss the function of
allusions, references, or traditions in texts.
• Choosing texts that provide a suitable focus of inquiry for the question chosen.

4. Outline
This outline must be completed in class time and
must include:
• the prescribed question that has been chosen
• the title of the text(s) for analysis
• the part of the course to which the task refers
• three or four key points that explain the particular
focus of the task.

5. Written Task 2
• Where appropriate, task 2 must reference, in a bibliography, the
relevant support documentation such as
• the newspaper article or magazine advertisement on which it is based.
• Where a complete shorter text is chosen (for example, a newspaper
article or an advertisement from a
• magazine) students may refer to other texts to support their response.
• The critical response is in the style of a formal essay and must be
clearly structured with an introduction,
• clearly developed ideas or arguments and a conclusion.