Language Checklist Flashcards
Verbs
Tenses, active, passive, modal, imperative? What effect does this have?
Mode
Is it written, spoken or somewhere in between? Is it a letter, report or newspaper?
Nouns
Unusual, cliche, coined, foreign, subjects, objects, connotations? Why?
Adjectives and Adverbs
Superlatives and comparatives? Why? Lots of adverbs? Why?
Semantic/ lexical fields
Why is this field used?
Punctuation
Exclamation marks, three part lists, colons, rhetorical questions, hyphens?
Quotations, references to specialists, celebrities, events or shared knowledge
Does this make it more convincing? More entertaining or exciting? More academic?
Technical aspects and phonology
Onomatopoeia, assonance or alliteration? Similes, metaphors or ellipses? Why are they used and what effect do they have?
Mood/ Tone
Informal or formal? Why? Contractions used? Sensationalist? Think why that mood or tone has been used in that situation
Paragraphs
Look at length, setup and structure
Sentence structure
Simple, compound, complex? Simple sentences are used more for teenage audiences, while complex sentences are more for academic pieces.
Graphology
Use of white space, pictures, logos, size of text- what effect does this have?
Clauses
Look at clause elements- are they regular? Verb-less clauses are often found in newspaper headlines such as ‘Rooney out for six weeks’
Pronouns
Does it use the second personal pronoun ‘you’? (direct address, used to integrate reader). Demonstrative pronouns, indefinite pronouns?
Anything else you can think of!
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