Decide on the focus of your study i.e. not just the general topic, but also the
features that you intend to examine.
B. Select appropriate data. The data can be a text, or a small number of related texts, or
a corpus. Possible text types are:
Written to be read silently: newspaper article, blog, short story, excerpt from a
novel.
Written to be spoken: speech, TV/film script
Written texts imitating speech: dialogue in a novel / short story / comic book.
Spoken texts: conversation, TV quiz show, panel discussion (NB. You will need to
transcribe them)
C. Select appropriate analytical techniques. You can combine techniques from different
approaches. However, your analysis must examine at least one of the following:
linguistic features, pragmatic features, discourse features.
D. Present the results of your analysis.
E. Discuss what the results suggest regarding underlying attitudes and/or ideologies
and/or motivations