Introduction: Tuesday-Structure
Objective:
To discover how the author organizes his thoughts.
Goal (Mile-Marker 2)
With a firm handle on the implications of our passages genre(s), produce a structural diagram of the passage along with summaries of its major unit of thoughts.
On Tuesday we will analyze the relevant grammatical, rhetorical, and narrative relationships in our passage of study. Our focus will be on phrases, sentences, communicative structures, and narrative conventions.
Doing this is of vital importance in order to understand the author’s thoughts. If we fail to do so, we run the risk of turning into secondary something that the passage places as primary.
Then, having unraveled these issues, we will try to summarize what this work highlights for us. In other words, our text is structured in the way it is structured in order to make certain assertions and convey certain ideas. The idea behind summarizing the blocks of thought is to highlight each of these statements or ideas in such a way that we can later interpret and apply them.
Normally, these summaries are the seeds for the «takeaways» from our study or the main points of our lesson or sermon. If we end up «saying something» these are that «something» we will say.
Tasks to Perform to Discern Structure
The articles in this series develop these basic ideas in an order that I hope will be helpful. I present them as four tasks, with the obvious understanding that this distribution is somewhat arbitrary.
As always, I continue to recommend an ongoing task….
Task 0. Continue with panoramic reading…
- Task 1. State the implications of your passage’s genre(s).
- Task 2. Determine important syntactical, rhetorical, and narrative relationships.
- Task 3. Develop a structural diagram.
- Task 4. Summarize units of thought.
Finally, I will add a brief review along with some additional ideas for the brave.
If you are already familiar with the process, you can download a Quick Start guide for Tuesday-Structure here.