Every Text Is a Made Thing
🎯 Today's mission briefing
We are learning to analyse how texts construct — rather than reflect — perspectives of people, places and ideas, and how those constructions position audiences.
You'll know you've got it when:
- I can explain the difference between a text reflecting reality and a text representing it, using a specific example
- I can deconstruct a text's representation by naming its selections, language choices, and gaps and silences
- I can describe the reading a text invites, and produce a resistant reading that names what the invited one conceals
Two sharks, one ocean
Connects to what your guest already knows and makes them curious. Activating prior knowledge is one of the strongest predictors of new learning.
Same week, same stretch of Queensland coast, same three-metre tiger shark. Headline one: 'MONSTER LURKS: predator stalks popular family beach.' Headline two, in a marine science newsletter: 'Welcome back: apex predator's return signals a recovering reef.' Neither invented a shark. Both photographed the same animal. But one text built a horror film and the other built a homecoming — from identical raw material. In junior English you learned to catch bias leaning a text left or right. Senior English goes further down: there is no un-leaned floor underneath. Every text — including the calm ones, including the ones you agree with, including this one — is a construction: somebody selected this material and not that, this word and not that one, and built you a version of the world. Today you stop asking 'is this text biased?' and start asking the senior question: 'what is this text building, out of what, and where does it want me to stand?'