Reading A Range Of Text Types

Before you have read a word of the extract properly, you can already know a great deal about it. Prose does not arrive from nowhere: it arrives as a review, a speech, a letter home, an obituary, a page of somebody's journal, and each of those carries a set of habits it can barely help. Recognising the kind of text in front of you is the cheapest reading skill there is, and the one that most reliably tells you where the marks are hiding.

This note teaches identification and prediction. You will learn the tells that give each text type away in its first two sentences, what each type is trying to do to its reader, where its most analysable writing tends to sit, and what to do when an extract turns out to be two things at once.