Winning Words Lesson Guide (Adults) Winnning Words Lesson Plan Guide | Page 12

Revisiting the text over and over

Within your groups, conduct a formal
analysis of the story. This requires the
members of your interpretive
community to go back to the text several
times to achieve a deeper understanding
of the use of language and how that use
of language achieves certain effects.
Use the questions below to help
you analyse the story.
1. Is there anything strange about the
way the entire story “looks” on paper?
2. Martin Boyce experiments with the
stream of consciousness technique in
this story. Research the features of the
“stream of consciousness” technique on
the internet. Based on what you discover,
is his short story Thin Line Between
successful or unsuccessful? Find
evidence in the way he uses language to
defend your position.
Formal Analysis? Whuz dah?
It’s an idea that focuses on the critical
analysis and evolution of the literary
devices and grammar that make up
literary texts. The theory gradually took
shape when a group of prominent
Russian writers began to scrutinise the
qualities that made “literary language”
different from “everyday language”.
They believed that the literariness of a
piece of writing increases when more
and more literary devices are used.
In this way, descriptions of everyday
events become new, strange or odd in
a process known as defamiliarisation.
Formalists believe that defamiliarising
everyday events is key to the
production of literature.
(a) angry (b) modern (c) artistic (d) insane
(e) masculine (f)sane (g) effeminate
(h) a victim (i) despised (j) educated
(k) religious?
3. Write out pieces of language (phrases, 4. Study the presence of italics, square
sentences, literary devices) from the text brackets, capitals, parentheses and punc-
that mark the narrator as:
tuation throughout the story. What the
significance of the use of each?