CAD skills

In this blog, I will be writing about how I've used some of the writing skills from my CAD class in my MPA class. MPA is a class about Music and Performing Arts. In this class, we had a textbook, "Musical Theatre A history" by John Kenrick, which is a book about the musicals in the USA mainly focusing on the 1800s-2000s. While reading the text, I realized I was analyzing the text while also trying to read like a writer. This was a strategy which I learned in my CAD class. While reading like a writer, I could understand why the author made certain choices while writing and how it affects his audience. Reading like a writer really helps because it helps us borrow knowledge from the writer and use their strategies in our own writing.

As you can see in this image, I have first tried talking to the text and thinking aloud. This helps me get a deeper understanding of the text and sometimes helps me predict the rest of the texts. While I was talking to the text, I could visualize the situation that the chorus people were in and the tension in the air when Gilbert appeared in the backstage. Analyzing the text also helped me identify the text in detail and thus gave me more perspective. For eg: the use of "enraged" to define Gilbert's emotion gave me a feeling that Gilbert was a person with a short temper, however in contrast to that when the text said that Gilbert was "moved", we get an impression that his reaction took a surprising turn of events than what was to be expected. Also "Temple's solo remaining in the show" struck to me as something of importance in that chapter.

Then in the next section of that page, I tried to find the key concepts that we've learned in our CAD class. The few that I've managed to find were: Context; Audience; Perspective; Rhetorical Situation and Exigence. Finding these concepts are also part of the analysis of the text as it helps me understand not just those concepts and what they mean, but also what the text means and this enriches our knowledge on the topic.

I hope this helped in understanding how to "talk to texts" and why it is important.