How does a text steer a reader toward particular values and attitudes without ever stating them outright?
Analyse how a text conveys values, attitudes and ideologies and positions its reader to accept or resist them through its language and structural choices.
How to analyse the way a text embeds values and attitudes and positions its reader to share or question them, reading the ideology behind the choices rather than just the surface meaning.
Reviewed by: AI editorial process; not yet individually human-reviewed
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What this dot point is asking
A defining concern of English Literary Studies is that texts do not merely describe the world; they take attitudes toward it and invite readers to share them. The Responding to Texts assessment type, worth 50% of your grade, rewards students who can analyse how ideas, perspectives, values, attitudes and emotions are conveyed, and how language and structural choices communicate those values. This is the skill of reading the ideology behind the surface, and of noticing the moment a text asks you to take a side.
Reader positioning is rarely explicit. A text seldom announces that we should admire a character; instead it grants that character the wittiest lines, the inside view, the sympathetic close-up at the crucial moment. The values arrive through technique, and your job is to trace the technique back to the attitude it serves.
Values live in what the text treats as normal
The most powerful values in a text are the ones it presents as natural and unremarkable. What does the text assume its reader already agrees with? Whose behaviour is shown as reasonable and whose as strange? What is rewarded by the plot and what is punished? A text's deepest attitudes are usually carried not in its arguments but in its assumptions, which is why analysing them takes care.
Trace positioning to its devices
Positioning is achieved through specific, analysable means: which character is given interior thought, whose perspective the narration follows, which actions are framed approvingly, how tone colours a description, and what the text leaves out. Identify the device, then name the attitude it produces in the reader.
Read with and against the text
The fullest analyses do both. First show how the text positions its reader and what attitudes it invites. Then step back and ask whether the text earns that positioning or whether it relies on a blind spot. Reading against a text - noticing what it has to ignore to make its values feel natural - is a mark of the considered, astute response the standards reward.
Common error
Close by connecting the positioning to what the text is finally doing - the view of the world it asks its reader to accept. Showing how a text constructs its values through technique, and judging whether it earns them, is exactly the analysis of how meaning, values and attitudes are conveyed that the performance standards single out as astute.
Exam-style practice questions
Practice questions written in the style of SACE Board exam questions on this dot point, with worked answer explainers. The year tag is the paper they imitate, not the source.
SACE sampleHow does Keating use emotive language in his speech to influence his audience? (one paragraph)Show worked answer →
This 2017 sample question (on Keating's Redfern Speech) is explicitly about positioning: the focus word is "influence", so analysis must connect emotive diction to the response it provokes.
Claim the emotional aim first. State what the emotive language is doing - moving a non-Indigenous audience from comfort to accountability and shared grief.
Quote loaded words. Point to the blunt, confronting verbs in "We took the children from their mothers" and "We committed the murders", and the dignifying register applied to Aboriginal people.
Analyse the positioning effect. Explain that the first-person plural "we" implicates the audience in the wrongs, so the emotion is not merely felt but assigned, leaving listeners positioned to accept responsibility.
Keep to one paragraph. Topic sentence on the emotional purpose, two pieces of evidence, and analysis of how each steers the audience's attitude.
SACE sampleIn what ways does Keating use an appeal to reason to justify his viewpoint? (one paragraph)Show worked answer →
Here the focus shifts from feeling to logic, so the 2017 sample task asks you to show how the speech positions the audience through reasoned argument rather than emotion alone.
Identify the logical line. Keating argues that recognising past injustice is the rational precondition for reconciliation - acknowledgment must precede progress.
Cite the reasoning moves. Point to the cause-and-effect structure (naming specific historical actions, then drawing the conclusion that the nation must respond) and the appeal to shared national interest in a just future.
Analyse the positioning effect. Show that by framing acknowledgment as logical and practical rather than guilt-driven, Keating positions even a resistant listener to accept the conclusion as reasonable.
Stay disciplined. One paragraph: claim about the reasoned appeal, evidence of the logical structure, and analysis of how it justifies the viewpoint to the audience.