The Flow of Information: How to Approach Structural Analysis for a High Grade

For many students, structure seems like a mysterious, confusing concept. They end up writing vague, repetitive phrases like:

"This makes the writing flow and interests the reader."

Let’s be honest: that is not an insightful response. Every story flows and interests the reader (Ok, yes, there are some badly written books out there which technically don't do those things, but they were still trying to!)

To achieve a high grade, you must understand what structure actually is: it is the conscious control of the flow of information. The writer starts with 100% of the information, and the reader starts with 0%. Structural analysis is about investigating why the writer chose to reveal specific details at specific times, and how those structural choices reinforce the themes of the text.

An essential first step of that process is understanding the crafting tools that writer's have at their disposal to control the information of their stories (in other words - structure their text). To help with that, I've released a free Structure Technique Bank.

The image with this blog post gives you an exclusive insight onto one of the techniques I teach in the bank and is representative of what you can expect: it will take you through a wide range of structural techniques found in fiction texts (see my Non-Fiction and Poetry Technique Banks for structural techniques found in those text types) and, for each one, give you:

• A definition
• An example
• Potential effects

That last bullet point is arguably the most important, as I have tried to help you on that step towards analysis by giving suggestions of why a writer may be using that technique.

Head over to the Study Materials section to download your copy. You'll also be able to find my Language Technique Bank, which is the perfect companion to this one.