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Most readers of books or works of fiction choose their books based on the story - is this a story they would enjoy? Does the plot interest them? However, literary critics, scholars and experts are not only concerned with the contents of the fictional text but also with how these contents are delivered to the reader. In other words, they investigate the narrative discourse of the text.

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Narrative discourse is concerned with which of the following?

Narrative discourse is inherent to which of the following literary theories?

The elements of narrative discourse include which of the following?

True or false: A first-person point of view makes the reader privy to the narrator or character's thoughts

True or False: Stream of consciousness is an example of point of view

True or False: a personal account may be written in the form of letters to a character

Which of the following is an example of a myth?

True or False: the type of narrative discourse has no effect on the reader

Which of the following is not an example of narrative discourse?

The author shapes the narrative discourse of a text to _________ the reader's emotions.

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Narrative discourse: meaning

Narrative discourse refers to the way in which stories or narratives are conveyed through written or spoken language. It encompasses the elements of storytelling such as plot , characters, events, and themes, as well as the structure, style , and language used to convey the narrative. Narrative discourse involves the presentation and organisation of story elements in a coherent and meaningful manner, allowing the audience to follow and interpret the story being told.

The difference between story and narrative discourse

When you read a comic or a graphic novel , you may see a panel with action , where a superhero punches a villain. This panel may feature a giant speech bubble that says 'POW!' or 'KABOOM!' This language may be commonplace in comics but is odd when found in a novel. That does not mean that novels don't feature superheroes and villains, but they convey action differently, perhaps by describing the movements of the characters and their interaction with each other and the setting .

You are probably wondering what this has to do with the difference between story and narrative discourse. Let's break it down:

The story refers to the contents of the work of fiction. This includes setting , characters, series of events, plot etc. In a nutshell, the story answers what the work of fiction is about.

Narrative discourse is concerned with the manner of delivery of the contents of a work of fiction. Narrative discourse answers how the story is conveyed to the reader. This includes techniques such as flashback , unreliable narrator , framed narrative etc.

As a way to distinguish between story and narrative discourse, think of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones' Diary (1996). The story is about a 30-something year old single woman, who is on a mission of self-improvement. The events that occur to the main character, her thoughts and her interactions with other characters are recorded by her in a diary. The reader of the novel , essentially, reads these 'diary entries' and learns of the happenings in the life of Bridget Jones. Therefore, the fictional diary entries of the fictional character contribute to the narrative discourse.

Narrative discourse: summary

Narrative discourse is inherent to a structuralist examination of a work of fiction. Structuralism is a literary theory, wherein structuralists aim to unpack the structure of a story. A story is typically constructed with the use of certain elements, such as characters, narration, time, place, setting, plot etc. Think of these as the building blocks of a story. One of these blocks is the narrative discourse, which is the means by which the story is communicated to the reader.

Elements of narrative discourse

The elements of narrative discourse include narrative voice, point of view and records of thought. These are discussed in detail below:

Narrative voice - The narrator communicates the story to the reader, but in doing so, adds their own perspective to the story. The narrator's opinions, biases, and knowledge influences the way they perceive the events, characters and places in the story, thus also influencing how the readers will regard the tale. There may be fictional narrators that also are characters in the story or narrators that are outside the story. Also, a story may lack a distinct narrator, which would mean that it is understood by the reader that the author of the tale is the one narrating it.

Point of view - The narrator's communication of the story is also coloured by their point of view . A story may be in the first-person point of view , where the reader is privy to the thoughts, emotions and expressions of the character, or in the third-person point of view , where the narrator is a proverbial fly-on-the-wall, narrating everything that they witness. The point of view techniques employed by the author may reveal or conceal information from the reader.

Records of thought - The degree to which the reader is aware of the events and their influence on characters' thoughts and actions is determined by how their thoughts are recorded and then how these records are delivered to the reader. For example, in works featuring stream-of-consciousness, there is often a disconnect between the actions of a character and their unfiltered yet disjointed line of thought.

Examples of narrative discourse

A narrative is relayed to the reader in many ways. Some examples of narrative discourse are a stage play , personal accounts, myths, folktales etc.

Please note that this table is not exhaustive and there may be other forms of narrative discourse not included in this list. Let's have a look at some more in-depth examples.

A stage play or a theatre production features elements that certainly manipulate the way the viewers perceive the story. For example, a magical spell cast in the story may be conveyed with flashes of light, nonsensical chants or quirky music. This too forms part of the narrative discourse. The stage play may also make use of literary devices such as a soliloquy or asides that lie within the scope of narrative discourse. For example, in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (1599) , Anthony's soliloquy reveals his true loyalty and love towards Caesar , thus influencing the audiences' perception of his actions and his motivations.

Personal accounts

Personal accounts may take the form of biographies or fictional accounts that are semi-autobiographical. They may also appear as travel logs or diaries. A good example of a personal account as a narrative discourse is the novel The Boy Next Door (2004) by Meg Cabot, wherein the protagonist exchanges emails with her love interest. The reader is not privy to the internal emotions and thoughts of the protagonist as they only read the emails she sends to the character she likes.

Myths are typically narratives wherein the story is conveyed in a way to deliver information about a belief system or the practices and ideals of a particular group of people. For example, you could call the story of Hades and Persephone a love story, or even a story featuring a kidnapping. However, in most iterations, the story of Hades and Persephone is conveyed as a myth that ancient Greeks told one another to explain the change in seasons.

Purpose of narrative discourse

The purpose of narrative discourse is manifold. The following three purposes of discourse in literature can coexist and overlap in various works, and they contribute to the overall meaning, style , and impact of a literary text. The choice of discourse purpose depends on the author's intention, the genre of literature, and the desired effect on the reader. The most important aspects include the following:

Narrative purpose:

This purpose involves telling a story or recounting events, usually with a chronological sequence of events and characters who engage in actions and experiences. Narrative discourse aims to entertain, engage, and transport readers or listeners into a fictional world through vivid descriptions, compelling characters, and an engaging plot.

Examples of narrative discourse in literature include novels, short stories, epics, and folktales.

Descriptive purpose

This purpose focuses on creating a sensory and vivid portrayal of people, places, objects, or scenes through rich and detailed language. Descriptive discourse aims to evoke the reader's imagination and senses, allowing them to visualize and experience the depicted elements. Descriptive discourse is often used to create mood , atmosphere, or setting in literature.

Examples of descriptive discourse in literature include vivid descriptions of landscapes, characters, or objects in novels, poems, and plays.

Expressive purpose

This purpose involves expressing the writer's emotions, thoughts, beliefs, or opinions through subjective and personal language. Expressive discourse aims to convey the writer's inner world and perspective, often using figurative language, metaphors, and other literary devices . Expressive discourse is often used to communicate the writer's unique voice and perspective.

Examples of expressive discourse in literature include poems, personal essays, memoirs, and diaries.

Further purposes of narrative discourse

Other purposes of narrative discourse include:

The author employs certain aspects of narrative discourse to manipulate the reader's feelings and perspective as they read the story.

Once the narrative discourse is analysed, one may be able to perceive the same event from different perspectives. For example, you may see a robbery told from the perspective of the policeman investigating it, but later through the robber's perspective, understand their motivations behind it and sympathise with them.

• Narrative discourse plays a significant role as the author may evoke a certain response from the reader or audience.

Narrative Discourse - Key takeaways

• Narrative discourse is concerned with the manner of delivery of the contents of a work of fiction.
• Narrative discourse answers how the story is conveyed to the reader. This includes techniques such as flashback , unreliable narrator , framed narrative etc.
• Elements of narrative discourse include narrative voice, point of view and records of thought.
• A narrative is relayed to the reader in many ways, for example as a stage play, personal accounts, myths, folktales etc.

Flashcards in Narrative Discourse 10

Contents of a text.

Psychoanalysis.

Characters.

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Frequently Asked Questions about Narrative Discourse

What is narrative discourse?

Narrative discourse is concerned with the manner of delivery of the contents of a work of fiction. Narrative discourse answers how the story is conveyed to the reader. 

What is the purpose of narrative discourse?

The purpose of narrative discourse is manifold. The most important aspects include the author manipulating the reader's feelings and perspective, the reader perceiving the same event from different perspectives, and the author evoking a certain responce form the reader.

What is the difference between a narrative and a discourse?

Narrative refers to the contents of a work of fiction while narrative discourse answers how the story is conveyed to the reader. 

What are the 4 types of discourse?

The 4 types of dicourse are descriptive, narrative, expository and argumentative.

What are the elements of narrative discourse?

The elements of narrative discourse include narrative voice, point of view and records of thought.

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Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method

1980, Comparative Literature

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Home » Discourse Analysis – Methods, Types and Examples

Discourse Analysis – Methods, Types and Examples

Table of Contents

Discourse Analysis

Definition:

Discourse Analysis is a method of studying how people use language in different situations to understand what they really mean and what messages they are sending. It helps us understand how language is used to create social relationships and cultural norms.

It examines language use in various forms of communication such as spoken, written, visual or multi-modal texts, and focuses on how language is used to construct social meaning and relationships, and how it reflects and reinforces power dynamics, ideologies, and cultural norms.

Types of Discourse Analysis

Some of the most common types of discourse analysis are:

Conversation Analysis

This type of discourse analysis focuses on analyzing the structure of talk and how participants in a conversation make meaning through their interaction. It is often used to study face-to-face interactions, such as interviews or everyday conversations.

Critical discourse Analysis

This approach focuses on the ways in which language use reflects and reinforces power relations, social hierarchies, and ideologies. It is often used to analyze media texts or political speeches, with the aim of uncovering the hidden meanings and assumptions that are embedded in these texts.

Discursive Psychology

This type of discourse analysis focuses on the ways in which language use is related to psychological processes such as identity construction and attribution of motives. It is often used to study narratives or personal accounts, with the aim of understanding how individuals make sense of their experiences.

Multimodal Discourse Analysis

This approach focuses on analyzing not only language use, but also other modes of communication, such as images, gestures, and layout. It is often used to study digital or visual media, with the aim of understanding how different modes of communication work together to create meaning.

Corpus-based Discourse Analysis

This type of discourse analysis uses large collections of texts, or corpora, to analyze patterns of language use across different genres or contexts. It is often used to study language use in specific domains, such as academic writing or legal discourse.

Descriptive Discourse

This type of discourse analysis aims to describe the features and characteristics of language use, without making any value judgments or interpretations. It is often used in linguistic studies to describe grammatical structures or phonetic features of language.

Narrative Discourse

This approach focuses on analyzing the structure and content of stories or narratives, with the aim of understanding how they are constructed and how they shape our understanding of the world. It is often used to study personal narratives or cultural myths.

Expository Discourse

This type of discourse analysis is used to study texts that explain or describe a concept, process, or idea. It aims to understand how information is organized and presented in such texts and how it influences the reader’s understanding of the topic.

Argumentative Discourse

This approach focuses on analyzing texts that present an argument or attempt to persuade the reader or listener. It aims to understand how the argument is constructed, what strategies are used to persuade, and how the audience is likely to respond to the argument.

Discourse Analysis Conducting Guide

Here is a step-by-step guide for conducting discourse analysis:

• What are you trying to understand about the language use in a particular context?
• What are the key concepts or themes that you want to explore?
• Select the data: Decide on the type of data that you will analyze, such as written texts, spoken conversations, or media content. Consider the source of the data, such as news articles, interviews, or social media posts, and how this might affect your analysis.
• Transcribe or collect the data: If you are analyzing spoken language, you will need to transcribe the data into written form. If you are using written texts, make sure that you have access to the full text and that it is in a format that can be easily analyzed.
• Read and re-read the data: Read through the data carefully, paying attention to key themes, patterns, and discursive features. Take notes on what stands out to you and make preliminary observations about the language use.
• Develop a coding scheme : Develop a coding scheme that will allow you to categorize and organize different types of language use. This might include categories such as metaphors, narratives, or persuasive strategies, depending on your research question.
• Code the data: Use your coding scheme to analyze the data, coding different sections of text or spoken language according to the categories that you have developed. This can be a time-consuming process, so consider using software tools to assist with coding and analysis.
• Analyze the data: Once you have coded the data, analyze it to identify patterns and themes that emerge. Look for similarities and differences across different parts of the data, and consider how different categories of language use are related to your research question.
• Interpret the findings: Draw conclusions from your analysis and interpret the findings in relation to your research question. Consider how the language use in your data sheds light on broader cultural or social issues, and what implications it might have for understanding language use in other contexts.
• Write up the results: Write up your findings in a clear and concise way, using examples from the data to support your arguments. Consider how your research contributes to the broader field of discourse analysis and what implications it might have for future research.

Applications of Discourse Analysis

Here are some of the key areas where discourse analysis is commonly used:

• Political discourse: Discourse analysis can be used to analyze political speeches, debates, and media coverage of political events. By examining the language used in these contexts, researchers can gain insight into the political ideologies, values, and agendas that underpin different political positions.
• Media analysis: Discourse analysis is frequently used to analyze media content, including news reports, television shows, and social media posts. By examining the language used in media content, researchers can understand how media narratives are constructed and how they influence public opinion.
• Education : Discourse analysis can be used to examine classroom discourse, student-teacher interactions, and educational policies. By analyzing the language used in these contexts, researchers can gain insight into the social and cultural factors that shape educational outcomes.
• Healthcare : Discourse analysis is used in healthcare to examine the language used by healthcare professionals and patients in medical consultations. This can help to identify communication barriers, cultural differences, and other factors that may impact the quality of healthcare.
• Marketing and advertising: Discourse analysis can be used to analyze marketing and advertising messages, including the language used in product descriptions, slogans, and commercials. By examining these messages, researchers can gain insight into the cultural values and beliefs that underpin consumer behavior.

When to use Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is a valuable research methodology that can be used in a variety of contexts. Here are some situations where discourse analysis may be particularly useful:

• When studying language use in a particular context: Discourse analysis can be used to examine how language is used in a specific context, such as political speeches, media coverage, or healthcare interactions. By analyzing language use in these contexts, researchers can gain insight into the social and cultural factors that shape communication.
• When exploring the meaning of language: Discourse analysis can be used to examine how language is used to construct meaning and shape social reality. This can be particularly useful in fields such as sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.
• When examining power relations: Discourse analysis can be used to examine how language is used to reinforce or challenge power relations in society. By analyzing language use in contexts such as political discourse, media coverage, or workplace interactions, researchers can gain insight into how power is negotiated and maintained.
• When conducting qualitative research: Discourse analysis can be used as a qualitative research method, allowing researchers to explore complex social phenomena in depth. By analyzing language use in a particular context, researchers can gain rich and nuanced insights into the social and cultural factors that shape communication.

Examples of Discourse Analysis

Here are some examples of discourse analysis in action:

• A study of media coverage of climate change: This study analyzed media coverage of climate change to examine how language was used to construct the issue. The researchers found that media coverage tended to frame climate change as a matter of scientific debate rather than a pressing environmental issue, thereby undermining public support for action on climate change.
• A study of political speeches: This study analyzed political speeches to examine how language was used to construct political identity. The researchers found that politicians used language strategically to construct themselves as trustworthy and competent leaders, while painting their opponents as untrustworthy and incompetent.
• A study of medical consultations: This study analyzed medical consultations to examine how language was used to negotiate power and authority between doctors and patients. The researchers found that doctors used language to assert their authority and control over medical decisions, while patients used language to negotiate their own preferences and concerns.
• A study of workplace interactions: This study analyzed workplace interactions to examine how language was used to construct social identity and maintain power relations. The researchers found that language was used to construct a hierarchy of power and status within the workplace, with those in positions of authority using language to assert their dominance over subordinates.

Purpose of Discourse Analysis

The purpose of discourse analysis is to examine the ways in which language is used to construct social meaning, relationships, and power relations. By analyzing language use in a systematic and rigorous way, discourse analysis can provide valuable insights into the social and cultural factors that shape communication and interaction.

The specific purposes of discourse analysis may vary depending on the research context, but some common goals include:

• To understand how language constructs social reality: Discourse analysis can help researchers understand how language is used to construct meaning and shape social reality. By analyzing language use in a particular context, researchers can gain insight into the cultural and social factors that shape communication.
• To identify power relations: Discourse analysis can be used to examine how language use reinforces or challenges power relations in society. By analyzing language use in contexts such as political discourse, media coverage, or workplace interactions, researchers can gain insight into how power is negotiated and maintained.
• To explore social and cultural norms: Discourse analysis can help researchers understand how social and cultural norms are constructed and maintained through language use. By analyzing language use in different contexts, researchers can gain insight into how social and cultural norms are reproduced and challenged.
• To provide insights for social change: Discourse analysis can provide insights that can be used to promote social change. By identifying problematic language use or power imbalances, researchers can provide insights that can be used to challenge social norms and promote more equitable and inclusive communication.

Characteristics of Discourse Analysis

Here are some key characteristics of discourse analysis:

• Focus on language use: Discourse analysis is centered on language use and how it constructs social meaning, relationships, and power relations.
• Multidisciplinary approach: Discourse analysis draws on theories and methodologies from a range of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology.
• Systematic and rigorous methodology: Discourse analysis employs a systematic and rigorous methodology, often involving transcription and coding of language data, in order to identify patterns and themes in language use.
• Contextual analysis : Discourse analysis emphasizes the importance of context in shaping language use, and takes into account the social and cultural factors that shape communication.
• Focus on power relations: Discourse analysis often examines power relations and how language use reinforces or challenges power imbalances in society.
• Interpretive approach: Discourse analysis is an interpretive approach, meaning that it seeks to understand the meaning and significance of language use from the perspective of the participants in a particular discourse.
• Emphasis on reflexivity: Discourse analysis emphasizes the importance of reflexivity, or self-awareness, in the research process. Researchers are encouraged to reflect on their own positionality and how it may shape their interpretation of language use.

Advantages of Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis has several advantages as a methodological approach. Here are some of the main advantages:

• Provides a detailed understanding of language use: Discourse analysis allows for a detailed and nuanced understanding of language use in specific social contexts. It enables researchers to identify patterns and themes in language use, and to understand how language constructs social reality.
• Emphasizes the importance of context : Discourse analysis emphasizes the importance of context in shaping language use. By taking into account the social and cultural factors that shape communication, discourse analysis provides a more complete understanding of language use than other approaches.
• Allows for an examination of power relations: Discourse analysis enables researchers to examine power relations and how language use reinforces or challenges power imbalances in society. By identifying problematic language use, discourse analysis can contribute to efforts to promote social justice and equality.
• Provides insights for social change: Discourse analysis can provide insights that can be used to promote social change. By identifying problematic language use or power imbalances, researchers can provide insights that can be used to challenge social norms and promote more equitable and inclusive communication.
• Multidisciplinary approach: Discourse analysis draws on theories and methodologies from a range of disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology. This multidisciplinary approach allows for a more holistic understanding of language use in social contexts.

Limitations of Discourse Analysis

Some Limitations of Discourse Analysis are as follows:

• Time-consuming and resource-intensive: Discourse analysis can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. Collecting and transcribing language data can be a time-consuming task, and analyzing the data requires careful attention to detail and a significant investment of time and resources.
• Limited generalizability: Discourse analysis is often focused on a particular social context or community, and therefore the findings may not be easily generalized to other contexts or populations. This means that the insights gained from discourse analysis may have limited applicability beyond the specific context being studied.
• Interpretive nature: Discourse analysis is an interpretive approach, meaning that it relies on the interpretation of the researcher to identify patterns and themes in language use. This subjectivity can be a limitation, as different researchers may interpret language data differently.
• Limited quantitative analysis: Discourse analysis tends to focus on qualitative analysis of language data, which can limit the ability to draw statistical conclusions or make quantitative comparisons across different language uses or contexts.
• Ethical considerations: Discourse analysis may involve the collection and analysis of sensitive language data, such as language related to trauma or marginalization. Researchers must carefully consider the ethical implications of collecting and analyzing this type of data, and ensure that the privacy and confidentiality of participants is protected.

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Narrative theories and narrative discourse

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Narrative Essay

Narrative Essay Examples

10+ Interesting Narrative Essay Examples Plus Writing Tips!

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Narrative Essay - A Complete Writing Guide with Examples

Writing a Personal Narrative Essay: Everything You Need to Know

Best Narrative Essay Topics 2024 for Students

Crafting a Winning Narrative Essay Outline: A Step-by-Step Guide

Many students struggle with crafting engaging and impactful narrative essays. They often find it challenging to weave their personal experiences into coherent and compelling stories.

If you’re having a hard time, don't worry! 

We’ve compiled a range of narrative essay examples that will serve as helpful tools for you to get started. These examples will provide a clear path for crafting engaging and powerful narrative essays.

So, keep reading and find our expertly written examples!

• 1. Narrative Essay Definition
• 2. Narrative Essay Examples
• 3. Narrative Essay Examples for Students
• 4. Narrative Essay Topics
• 5. Narrative Essay Writing Tips

Narrative Essay Definition

Writing a narrative essay is a unique form of storytelling that revolves around personal experiences, aiming to immerse the reader in the author's world. It's a piece of writing that delves into the depths of thoughts and feelings. 

In a narrative essay, life experiences take center stage, serving as the main substance of the story. It's a powerful tool for writers to convey a personal journey, turning experiences into a captivating tale. This form of storytelling is an artful display of emotions intended to engage readers, leaving the reader feeling like they are a part of the story.

By focusing on a specific theme, event, emotions, and reflections, a narrative essay weaves a storyline that leads the reader through the author's experiences. 

The Essentials of Narrative Essays

Let's start with the basics. The four types of essays are argumentative essays , descriptive essays , expository essays , and narrative essays.

The goal of a narrative essay is to tell a compelling tale from one person's perspective. A narrative essay uses all components you’d find in a typical story, such as a beginning, middle, and conclusion, as well as plot, characters, setting, and climax.

The narrative essay's goal is the plot, which should be detailed enough to reach a climax. Here's how it works:

• It's usually presented in chronological order.
• It has a function. This is typically evident in the thesis statement's opening paragraph.
• It may include speech.
• It's told with sensory details and vivid language, drawing the reader in. All of these elements are connected to the writer's major argument in some way.

Before writing your essay, make sure you go through a sufficient number of narrative essay examples. These examples will help you in knowing the dos and don’ts of a good narrative essay.

It is always a better option to have some sense of direction before you start anything. Below, you can find important details and a bunch of narrative essay examples. These examples will also help you build your content according to the format. 

Here is a how to start a narrative essay example:

Sample Narrative Essay

The examples inform the readers about the writing style and structure of the narration. The essay below will help you understand how to create a story and build this type of essay in no time.

Here is another narrative essay examples 500 words:

Narrative Essay Examples for Students

Narrative essays offer students a platform to express their experiences and creativity. These examples show how to effectively structure and present personal stories for education.

Here are some helpful narrative essay examples:

Narrative Essay Examples Middle School

Narrative Essay Examples for Grade 7

Narrative Essay Examples for Grade 8

Grade 11 Narrative Essay Examples

Narrative Essay Example For High School

Narrative Essay Example For College

Personal Narrative Essay Example

Descriptive Narrative Essay Example

3rd Person Narrative Essay Example

Narrative Essay Topics

Here are some narrative essay topics to help you get started with your narrative essay writing.

• When I got my first bunny
• When I moved to Canada
• I haven’t experienced this freezing temperature ever before
• The moment I won the basketball finale
• A memorable day at the museum
• How I talk to my parrot
• The day I saw the death
• When I finally rebelled against my professor

Need more topics? Check out these extensive narrative essay topics to get creative ideas!

Narrative Essay Writing Tips

Narrative essays give you the freedom to be creative, but it can be tough to make yours special. Use these tips to make your story interesting:

• Share your story from a personal viewpoint, engaging the reader with your experiences.
• Use vivid descriptions to paint a clear picture of the setting, characters, and emotions involved.
• Organize events in chronological order for a smooth and understandable narrative.
• Bring characters to life through their actions, dialogue, and personalities.
• Employ dialogue sparingly to add realism and progression to the narrative.
• Engage readers by evoking emotions through your storytelling.
• End with reflection or a lesson learned from the experience, providing insight.

Now you have essay examples and tips to help you get started, you have a solid starting point for crafting compelling narrative essays.

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What Is a Narrative Discourse?

Narrative discourse is a type of written or verbal communication that involves narration, or in other words, telling a story. This is one of the classic types of discourse that helps people to identify different modes of communication and different kinds of functions for speaking or writing. The narrative discourse is common in certain kinds of media.

There are a few key characteristics and features of narrative discourse. One is that the narrative usually unfolds in chronological order. Narration or storytelling works this way to inform the listener or reader, bringing them through a chain of events sequentially, so that they can naturally build their understanding of the situation or scenario that is being narrated.

Another characteristic of narratives is that they are often written or spoken in the first or third person. Some of these narratives can use the second person viewpoint, but this is unusual. An omniscient narrative uses the third person; for example, someone who says, “the rabbit bounced into the yard,” is building a third person narrative. By contrast, someone who says, “I saw the rabbit bounce into the yard,” is using the first person viewpoint.

In different media, narrative discourse also comes in various forms. In fiction and some other kinds of text media, the narrative often comes in the form of a continuous omniscient and chronological third person narrative. In some forms of visual media, like television and cinema, narration often comes in a first-person monologue, which is sometimes a “voice-over.” In the voice-over, an off-screen voice provides the narrative, superimposed over remote, but often related images.

Analyzing a narrative and identifying narrative discourse helps outsiders to evaluate and analyze written or spoken communications. Students in various academic departments might use the evaluation of narrative to learn more about media and communication. For example, the use of narrative in advertising, where this form of discourse is often mixed with other fundamental forms, can provide a lot of insight into the marketing strategies of the company behind the advertising. Some modern day journalists, pundits, and others involved in social commentary even refer to a “narrative” as the main element of an issue, where parties struggle over control of the narrative to shape the collective perception of events. Understanding the power of narrative is a key part of studying today’s complex media world.

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Methodology

• Critical Discourse Analysis | Definition, Guide & Examples

Critical Discourse Analysis | Definition, Guide & Examples

Published on August 23, 2019 by Amy Luo . Revised on June 22, 2023.

Critical discourse analysis (or discourse analysis) is a research method for studying written or spoken language in relation to its social context. It aims to understand how language is used in real life situations.

When you conduct discourse analysis, you might focus on:

• The purposes and effects of different types of language
• Cultural rules and conventions in communication
• How values, beliefs and assumptions are communicated
• How language use relates to its social, political and historical context

Discourse analysis is a common qualitative research method in many humanities and social science disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, anthropology, psychology and cultural studies.  

Table of contents

What is discourse analysis used for, how is discourse analysis different from other methods, how to conduct discourse analysis, other interesting articles.

Conducting discourse analysis means examining how language functions and how meaning is created in different social contexts. It can be applied to any instance of written or oral language, as well as non-verbal aspects of communication such as tone and gestures.

Materials that are suitable for discourse analysis include:

• Books, newspapers and periodicals
• Marketing material, such as brochures and advertisements
• Business and government documents
• Websites, forums, social media posts and comments
• Interviews and conversations

By analyzing these types of discourse, researchers aim to gain an understanding of social groups and how they communicate.

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Unlike linguistic approaches that focus only on the rules of language use, discourse analysis emphasizes the contextual meaning of language.

It focuses on the social aspects of communication and the ways people use language to achieve specific effects (e.g. to build trust, to create doubt, to evoke emotions, or to manage conflict).

Instead of focusing on smaller units of language, such as sounds, words or phrases, discourse analysis is used to study larger chunks of language, such as entire conversations, texts, or collections of texts. The selected sources can be analyzed on multiple levels.

Discourse analysis is a qualitative and interpretive method of analyzing texts (in contrast to more systematic methods like content analysis ). You make interpretations based on both the details of the material itself and on contextual knowledge.

There are many different approaches and techniques you can use to conduct discourse analysis, but the steps below outline the basic structure you need to follow. Following these steps can help you avoid pitfalls of confirmation bias that can cloud your analysis.

Step 1: Define the research question and select the content of analysis

To do discourse analysis, you begin with a clearly defined research question . Once you have developed your question, select a range of material that is appropriate to answer it.

Discourse analysis is a method that can be applied both to large volumes of material and to smaller samples, depending on the aims and timescale of your research.

Step 2: Gather information and theory on the context

Next, you must establish the social and historical context in which the material was produced and intended to be received. Gather factual details of when and where the content was created, who the author is, who published it, and whom it was disseminated to.

As well as understanding the real-life context of the discourse, you can also conduct a literature review on the topic and construct a theoretical framework to guide your analysis.

Step 3: Analyze the content for themes and patterns

This step involves closely examining various elements of the material – such as words, sentences, paragraphs, and overall structure – and relating them to attributes, themes, and patterns relevant to your research question.

Step 4: Review your results and draw conclusions

Once you have assigned particular attributes to elements of the material, reflect on your results to examine the function and meaning of the language used. Here, you will consider your analysis in relation to the broader context that you established earlier to draw conclusions that answer your research question.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Measures of central tendency
• Chi square tests
• Confidence interval
• Quartiles & Quantiles
• Cluster sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Thematic analysis
• Cohort study
• Peer review
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• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Conformity bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Availability heuristic
• Attrition bias
• Social desirability bias

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Narrative Discourse

A narrative discourse is a form of communication that describes events, mostly from the past, which employs actions and speech verbs to explain a sequence of events that tangent to each other and focuses on several action performers. In a narrative discourse, events are chronologically arranged and use a first or third person. Examples of narrative discourse include folk stories, historical events, myths and personal experience stories. Language study is often categorized into syntactic, semantics and pragmatics. The difference between syntax, which is the sentence form and semantics, which is the meaning of words and sentences is crucial to language study.

The syntax is the study of the correct layout (structure) of sentences about certain rules and principles of grammar. According to the principles of grammar, a good sentence should have a subject and a predicate. Also in narrative discourse sentences ought to be complete with the right structure so as to put out the intended meaning. For example in children spoken narratives, children who talk like books tend to match teachers expectations by constructing well-structured sentences. In young children, parent plays a vital role in their narrative structure formulation. The parents scaffold children skills by giving guidance and comment on their tasks. In children as young as two years, first, the adults or parent takes the lead and gives both the narrative structure and the content. Also, adults guide the young by asking close-ended questions (yes or no) in sharing of the experience, by the end of pre-school, parents turn to the use of more open- ended question to assist the child to scaffold their personal contribution to the story. As time goes by children slowly withdraw from relying on their parental scaffolding and become adapted to selecting and framing information to construct and narrate stories. Therefore the contribution of the child’s conversational partner(parent or caregiver) help the child in effective story constructing in the right discourse layout giving a correct syntax making the story tellable. Classroom conversations among children and their teacher also help children in formulating well-structured stories in relation to the types of narratives shared in class and the features of these narratives.

Semantics is a study that examines what a word phrase or words themselves mean. Young children point at things using their fingers and name what they have pointed. This pointing and naming activity become an inherent part of human life. When children name this by pointing this enables them to describe immediate objects so make abstract statements of activities or events. To understand the meaning of a sentence one needs to understand that the words in the sentence mean and the how syntactically they are organized. Parents especially mothers, are highly elaborative and involve their children in conversation that are long, giving the structure and very descriptive and detailed information to their children. It enables these children to understand the specific meaning of words as well as the syntactical correlation of the sentence. These parents enable their children to formulate narratives as they ask questions that are open-ended to widen and expand on their children utterances. Research has shown that the characteristics of a child are contributed the mother’s elaborateness. Children who are more attentive and active tend to improve the mother’s elaborateness and create a relationship among them which helps in developing the child’s skills. According to research, greater mother elaborateness is essential for the future construction of narratives and literacy skills. Highly elaborate mothers tend to have children who share tales that are richer, more descriptive and longer. Children whose parents were trained tell a more complicated narrative that those children whose mothers were not in any training group. These kids also tend to give more accurate and richer narrations. The descriptions of a mother and child concerning experience are the earliest context for building up narrative skills in young kids, but also, adult –child book reading is crucial for developing emergent literacy such as vocabulary, critical thinking and read and write. Of equal importance also is how the books are shared, because it follows set textual or pictorial cues, this means that book-sharing interactions between parents and children are more organized and structured than oral narrative interactions. An interesting study showed that there are three particular book-reading styles adopted by mothers of preschoolers in this context, these showed that these forms were predictive of the child’s emergent literacy skills. A section of mothers adopted the describer style; users of this method included descriptions filled with vocabularies, descriptive language, and concept but could not involve the children in discussions about events that happened.  Collaborators engaged their children and encouraged them to participate in the telling of the story and also gave them positive feedback. Finally, comprehenders involve their children but in high-level extra- textual discussions and challenge them to draw conclusions and make predictions. According to the results, the children of the comprehenders and collaborators showcased more print, decoding, vocabulary and story comprehension better those of the describers. For children to understand and construct a tellable story, the parent scaffolding is very necessary, as this will gradually open up the child’s mind to better know how of story formulation and narration. The parent or caregiver guides the child in story content selection and necessary organization or construction of the story for it to be meaningful and valuable to the larger community.

Pragmatics is a study of how language is used and how the diverse use of language determines semantics and syntactic. It tries to explain how humans use language to meet their daily needs by achieving their goals. To begin with, language is a way of communication and humans are social beings which live and work in groups which require strong and sound communication, forming a relationship, broadcasting warnings and sound, and gestures. Pragmatics can be considered through various forms such as stories, myths, gossip, and humor. In children narratives, children must be informed two main tasks, coherence, and cohesion in stories development. Coherence talks about children using their traditionally shared knowledge to temporarily organize a narrative into a series with meaning to themselves and their listeners. This means that the parts of the story must be well organized to bring out the entire sequence in a more meaningful way. This is accomplished by determining the schematic information of the narrative and the content through the grammar.

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Cohesion, on the other hand, is developed with linguistic styles like connectivity, which tie sentences together to form a complete sentence. Therefore, the story coherence is the degree of the structure of a narrative fulfills how well a story has been formed while cohesion talks about how linguistically connected are the propositions and how characters are referred in the narrative.

There are contradictory research results about child’s capability to construct and tell the coherent and cohesive story. Some researchers report that young children cannot tell narratives that coherent and cohesive. Whereas others admit that even preschoolers can have the ability to tell coherent and cohesive stories. The requirements of a good structural one- episode story involves the following, (a) beginning devices and orientation to introduce a character and setting, (b) initiating events that motivates internal responses from protagonist, (c) attempts to achieve the goal, (d) consequences, (e) reactions to goal attainment and ending. But most preschooler’s scripts and descriptions do not show this format but instead are based on events sequences of their knowledge about the world. This due to the overload of working memory or the results might require more cognitive efforts than they can. At the age of 6years, most children will provide a narrative with a relevant setting, with initiative action highlighted, well develop the plot and a with a referred character goal. With time and age, they begin to incorporate dialogues and characters engaged in several social interactions. According to Stein and colleagues children’s narrative ability is linked to the development of specific cognitive skills making children stories more complete with time. In the age of 3-5 years children basically tell stories that are of general description of the protagonist actions without order of presenting information, but at the time they enter kindergarten, they begin to develop skills necessary to share well-structured goal based stories that are complete coherent and cohesive.

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The integration of syntax, semantics and pragmatics are guided or motivated by the notion that pragmatics as to the point of departure in natural language interface and that pragmatics can only be successfully explored in connection to syntax and semantics. Pragmatics cannot exist without these two aspects of natural language. A pragmatic approach is interested in the purpose which determines the meaning of utterances. Syntax approach, on the other hand, organizes the sentence based on the underlying principles while semantics derives meaning from the well-structured sentence so to pragmatically communicate the same meaning to meet a certain goal or objective. Therefore for children narratives to convey the relevant information there need for well-structured sentenced guided by the parent if at an early age, with a mean so as to transmit information that’s complete and beneficial to themselves and their listeners.

In conclusion, oral storytelling is a discourse that has been used across most societies in which norms and culture are embedded in the way that stories are shared. Communities also tend to differ in the way children and adults take part in the creation of stories and how these narratives contribute to socialization in the societies. As the children engage in daily interaction with their caretakers, they learn the culturally preferred ways of constructing and structuring narratives. As these children get early exposure to this type of discourse use, there is a high predictor for high literacy skill development in future. Thus, narratives are viewed as typically emergent literacy skill. Contemporary work on early narrative development has taken roots on mother’s role in narrative scaffolding as they involve their children in discussions about their personal experience. Maternal elaboration has been regarded here has the main scaffolding feature, particularly for children development of literacy skills and narrative development skills.

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Home Essay Samples Sociology

Discourse Community Essay Examples

Discourse community essay is an essential part of academic writing that requires students to explore a specific group’s communication methods and practices. To write a successful discourse community essay, you need to understand the group’s language, values, and beliefs. Here are some tips on how to write a discourse community essay that stands out.

Firstly, before writing, conduct thorough research on the discourse community you wish to write about. Understanding the group’s communication methods, practices, and language is essential. Take time to observe the community’s communication methods and the roles of its members. Conduct interviews with members of the group to gain insights into their communication practices and understand their perspectives.

Next, brainstorm discourse community essay topic ideas that align with your research. This should help you identify the unique aspects of the discourse community that you would like to focus on in your essay. Ensure that your essay is well-structured and well-researched to make it informative and easy to read. You can also use the research to draw comparisons and contrasts between the discourse community you are writing about and other groups.

To make your essay stand out, include relevant discourse community essay examples to illustrate the communication methods and practices you are discussing. This will give your readers a better understanding of the group you are writing about and make your essay more engaging. You can also include personal experiences or stories that relate to the discourse community to make your essay more relatable.

In conclusion, writing a discourse community essay requires a lot of research and attention to detail. However, with the right approach and techniques, you can produce a well-structured and informative essay that highlights the unique communication practices of the group. Always remember to include relevant examples and personal experiences to make your essay more engaging.

The Soccer Discourse Community: Passion, Identity, and Global Connection

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The Nursing Discourse Community: Shared Knowledge and Collaboration

Nursing is a noble and demanding profession that thrives on collaboration, empathy, and the exchange of knowledge. Within the vast healthcare landscape, the concept of a nursing discourse community emerges as a dynamic network of professionals who share a common language, values, and goals. This...

Highly Resistant Hegemonic Discourses in the Sport

This essay will look at highly resistant hegemonic discourses in sport that relate to ethnicity and race, and whether these discourses have been successfully challenged by the promotion of alternative discourses in recent years. Therefore, both the highly resistant discourses and the new alternative discourses...

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The Discourse Community Analysis Of A Football Team

I came to UC Merced and joined Writing 001 with no knowledge of what a discourse could be. Now in Lovas’s class reading “Superman and Me” by Sherman Alexie. I had no idea what a discourse community was, the idea of this is very well...

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Exploring the Discourse Community of Personal trainers or Fitness instructors

Introduction As a newly certified Coach and professional personal trainer, I am writing this report for the new comer to the discourse community of personal trainer. What is the history of this community? What are its primary mechanisms of intercommunication? What kind of threshold levels...

The Communities That I Belong To

The concept of a discourse community is ambiguous in nature. Despite that, one thing can be said for sure—that most of us, in one way or another, belong to one. As defined by John Swales, discourse communities are people who use communication to reach a...

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Multi-discourse Modes in Student Writing: Effects of Combining Narrative and Argument Discourse Modes on Argumentative Essay Scores

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Zhan Wang, Ming Ming Chiu, Multi-discourse Modes in Student Writing: Effects of Combining Narrative and Argument Discourse Modes on Argumentative Essay Scores, Applied Linguistics , Volume 45, Issue 1, February 2024, Pages 20–40, https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amac073

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Although many studies modelled writing quality by analysing basic skills (spelling, grammar, etc.), few focused on top-down compositional strategies at the discourse level. We propose that using both narrative and argument discourse modes in an argumentative essay (a multi-discourse mode [MDM] strategy) capitalizes on their complementary advantages, yielding higher quality argumentative essays. We tested whether MDM strategy and linguistic features were linked to essay scores in 695 Chinese high-stakes exam essays by upper secondary school students. Path analyses showed that essays with the MDM strategy had higher scores. MDM essays also featured more words, shorter sentences, more infrequent words, and more concrete words—all contributing to higher essay scores. Additionally, essays written from a picture prompt (versus a text prompt) had higher scores. This study captures how discourse strategies can improve essay writing.

Writing is an important social and cognitive skill that affects students’ academic and professional performance and outcomes ( Bazerman et al. 2018 ; Ferretti and Graham 2019 ). However, few students write well; only 27 per cent of 8th- and 12th-grade students in the USA wrote proficiently and 20 per cent of them lacked basic writing skills, with no improvement across a decade ( NCE 2012 ). According to cognitive models of writing development, the development of written composition typically progresses from (i) answers to wh-questions or expressing author knowledge ( knowledge telling ), to (ii) organizing and integrating ideas to actively constitute knowledge for the author’s benefit ( knowledge transforming ), and to (iii) considering how audience(s) might interpret the text to inform planning, reviewing, and revision of it ( knowledge crafting ; Kellogg 2008 ; Bereiter and Scardamalia 2013 ). During knowledge crafting, skilled writers routinely revise texts and might make structural changes to aid readers ( Sommers 1980 ). However, not everyone attains this last stage of knowledge crafting ( Kellogg 2008 ; Bereiter and Scardamalia 2013 ).

From a process perspective, good writing involves conceptualizing ideas, organizing them into a coherent plan, translating them into text, and reviewing and revising the written translation ( Hayes and Flower 1986 ; Kellogg 2008 ; Graham 2018 ). In addition to linguistic knowledge, this process involves writers’ top-down conceptual skills and sociocultural knowledge (e.g. schematic, pragmatic, register, and world knowledge). Hence, understanding advanced top-down writing strategies is critical for improving the instructions and assessment of writing, which can, in turn, inform student learning. However, most studies, particularly those on automatic essay scoring (AES) systems, focus on lexico-grammatical indices or extracting bottom-up linguistic features; few focus on how top-down compositional strategies or discourse features (e.g. rhetoric, cohesion [ McNamara et al. 2015 ], style or register [ Biber et al. 2016 ]) affect essay quality ( Deane 2011 , 2013 ).

Thus, this study theoretically proposes a new construct, a multi-discourse mode (MDM) strategy, and empirically tests its effects on student essays. Specifically, we define MDM strategy as integrating or moving between multiple discourse modes (e.g. narrative and argumentation; Smith, 2003 ) in writing. Then, we discuss the benefits and costs of using a MDM strategy. Notably, a MDM strategy can achieve the respective rhetorical purpose of each discourse mode within a single written text (e.g. narratives, recount events, and arguments persuade audiences). We test whether essays with both narrative and argument discourse modes differ from essays with only one discourse mode in (i) overall essay score, or (ii) essay attributes (total words, sentence length, concreteness, and word frequency). We use high-stakes examination essays by 695 high school seniors (12th graders).

Discourse modes and a multi-discourse mode strategy

Smith (2001 , 2003 , 2013 ) introduced the notion of discourse modes: levels of local text structures with distinguishable linguistic forms. Discourse modes’ linguistic forms include temporal and aspectual properties of verb classes, such as verbs indicating events and states (e.g. go, run, plan) and verbs indicating abstract knowledge and beliefs (e.g. think, believe, feel). For example, narrative discourse contains situational verbs concerning specific events located in and organized by time (see Table 1 ). Conversely, argumentative discourse contains regular patterns and verbs concerning abstract knowledge or beliefs. The linguistic forms of discourse modes also include indicators of clause-level progression. For example, a temporal sequence of narration can progress clauses in time and space/location (e.g. ‘One morning, Little Red Riding Hood set off from home to visit her grandmother. Along the way in the woods, she noticed some lovely flowers …’). An argument can locate and progress clauses metaphorically through a domain via, for example, reasoning from premises to conclusions (e.g. ‘Smith promises to cut taxes for the poor, and my wages are low, so I’ll be voting for her.’). Hence, discourse modes can be classified according to these linguistic forms.

Discourse modes of narrative and argument by Smith (2001)

Source; Adapted from Smith (2001 : 197–202).

Smith (2003) posited five common discourse modes in written texts: narrative, descriptive, reporting, informative, and argumentative/commentary. Discourse modes often align with genres. For example, the narrative discourse mode is paramount in the narrative fiction genre and the argumentative–commentary discourse mode is common in the editorial genre; however, a text can employ multiple discourse modes (‘the discourse modes cut across genre lines’; Smith 2001 : 185). For example, the paragraph below transitions from an argumentative to a narrative mode (using an MDM strategy):

[Argument:] I feel reasonably certain of the final verdict on the current impeachment affair because I think history will see it as the climax of a six-year period marred by a troubling and deepening failure of the Republican party to play within the established constitutional rules. [Narrative:] It was on Election Night 1992, not very far into the evening, that the Senate minority leader, Bob Dole, hinted at the way his party planned to conduct itself in the months ahead: it would filibuster any significant legislation the new Democratic President proposed, forcing him to obtain 60 votes for Senate passage ( Ehrenhalt 1998 , cited in Smith 2001 : 203, notation added at the beginning of the sentences).

The first sentence employs an argumentative discourse mode with a first-person proposition of belief (‘I feel …’), supported by reasoning using another belief (‘because I think …’). Then, it shifts to a narrative discourse mode in the second sentence; this is marked by temporality and events related by verb tense and aspects (‘It was …’) that are common in story narrative genres. Smith (2001) argues that transitions between discourse modes are universal across languages.

A social practice approach to language learning ( Barton 2007 ) might explain the origin of students’ MDM writing strategies. Language learning often occurs when people use language in their daily lives rather than in a vacuum or in the order of grammatical forms taught at school ( Barton and Lee 2013 ; Barton and Potts 2013 ). In addition to classroom instructions in school, students constantly engage in meaning-making processes on social media, reading and writing with text, images, videos, and emojis combined in a single text (i.e. multimodal texts, Jewitt and Kress 2003 ; Bateman et al. 2017 ; Bezemer and Cowan 2021 ). This multimodal literacy shapes how students learn and use language ( Kress 2003 ; Kress and Rowsell 2018 ). For example, the traditionally separate genre activities of viewing and producing picture sharing, story narration, and commentary making now often occur in integrated genre activities on social platforms (e.g. Instagram, TikTok, Tweets, WhatsApp, and Youtube). Such social practices might increase students’ use of MDM strategies, particularly regarding the combination of narrative and argument discourse modes in students’ writing; online video/picture sharing often accompanies story narration (mainly narrative discourse) and commentary (mainly argument discourse) together (see an example in Figure 1 ).

An example of multimodal text, ‘the face of guilt’. Notes. Shared by DOG@Instagram ( https://www.instagram.com/p/CcD4WjCJIUe/ ) on 8 April 2022. The left of the figure is a photo with the title ‘the face of guilt’, in which a golden retriever is holding a teddy toy with a guilty face. The caption on the photo says, ‘When dad has to go back in the store to pay for the toy he didn’t notice you grabbed and carried out…’ [narrative discourse mode]. The right of the figure shows laughing emojis and textual commentaries from others (e.g. ‘Dogs don’t have rights, so can’t be held accountable for theft’ [argument discourse mode]).

Advantages of using a multi-discourse mode strategy

An MDM strategy capitalizes on the complementary strengths of each discourse mode. For example, argumentative writing aims to inform and persuade readers; thus, reasoning is paramount ( Perkins et al. 1991 ; Walton 2005 ). Conversely, narrative recounts a plot of events in a specific way ( tellability , Brunner 1991 ) to be comprehensible, memorable, and persuasive and to arouse emotions ( Labov and Waletzky 2003 ). The detailed particulars of a narrative discourse mode can support the reasoning process and strengthen the claims of the argument ( Bruner 1991 ). Consider the following argument discourse mode with Toulmin’s (2003) argument structures.

Claim: Honest people tend to be more successful. Evidence: They often get more opportunities and make more money than dishonest people. Warrant: Companies try to hire and promote honest people. Backing: Companies do not want their employees to cheat them. Rebuttal: However, some employees successfully hide their dishonesty.

In this example, the writer draws our attention to a claim and its evidence, warrant, backing, and rebuttal ( Toulmin 2003 ). It begins with a claim (honest people tend to be more successful) for which there is possible counter or opposing claims ( debatable claim , Stein and Miller 1993 ). Then, the writer presents observational evidence to support the claim (they often get more opportunities and make more money than dishonest people). This evidence is warranted by another observation (companies try to hire and promote honest people) and backed by a reason (companies do not want their employees to cheat them). Finally, the claim ends with a rebuttal invoking contradictory evidence in favour of an opposing claim (some employees successfully hide their dishonesty).

Next, consider this story of young George Washington and the cherry tree within Labov’s narrative structures ( Labov and Waletzky 2003 ):

Orientation: When George was six years old, he had an axe, and chopped everything in his way. Temporal organization: When George’s dad saw his favourite cherry tree chopped down, he angrily asked, ‘who did it?’ George hesitated but said, ‘I can’t tell a lie, Pa; I cut it.’ To George’s surprise, his dad praised him, ‘Your honesty is worth more than a thousand trees.’ Coda: Being honest is a golden character in young George. He stayed honest and true, eventually becoming the first US president.

In this example, the narrative contains a temporally ordered sequence of situational particulars that answer wh-questions (e.g. who, when, what: George, six years old, chopped down the cherry tree); thus, readers who are familiar with most of the particulars can readily understand it (comprehensible). Readers can store this sequence of particulars in episodic and long-term memories within their cerebral cortex (memorable). The expressed emotional particulars (angrily, hesitated, surprise) arouses the reader’s emotions and motivations, linking their memories stored in the cerebral cortex to their emotions in the amygdala (emotional arousal). Finally, the coda uses elements such as morality (being honest is a golden character in young George) and implications (he stayed honest and true, eventually becoming the first US president) to transmit moral models concerning social situations, thereby promoting social values (persuasion, Deane et al. 2015 ). Thus, the tellability of this narrative coheres with the rhetorical purpose of the argument.

An MDM strategy is a deliberate top-down organization strategy for writing an essay. A discourse strategy that uses both argument and narrative enjoys the rhetorical benefits of the complementary strengths of each. Consider the following example:

[multi-discourse mode strategy with argument followed by narrative] Honest people tend to be more successful. As companies don’t want their employees to cheat them, they try to hire honest people (though some employees successfully hide their dishonesty). Also, honest people are often regarded as trustworthy at work, so they get more opportunities for promotion, compared to dishonest people. It’s like ‘George Washington and the cherry tree’. The six-year-old George stayed honest and true after he chopped down his father’s cherry tree. His father praised his honesty, and he eventually becomes the first US president. [Moral implications:] So, be honest to succeed.

In this MDM strategy example, the argument in the first three sentences is followed by a narrative (the subsequent four sentences), which strengthens the episodic memory effects to make the argument’s reasoning more memorable, comprehensible, emotionally arousing, and persuasive. After the narrative, further argumentation explicitly specifies the narrative’s moral implications (be honest to succeed), making the essay more persuasive ( Labov and Waletzky 2003 ). Therefore, we hypothesized that MDM essays outscore single-discourse essays (H-1):

H-1. Essays with an MDM strategy have higher scores than those with a single-discourse mode strategy.

To date, no published study investigated the relationship between the use of MDM strategy and student essay scores. As discussed above, the MDM essays enjoy the rhetorical benefits of employing the narrative’s situational particulars to make an argument more memorable and more persuasive. Hence, we predict that essays with MDMs have higher scores than those with a single-discourse mode.

Disadvantages of the multi-discourse mode strategy

Although an MDM strategy can improve the quality of an essay, its disadvantages are the additional time and effort that a student needs to implement it, including selecting and organizing the discourse modes. The writer first selects appropriate discourse modes and content. After choosing to employ, for example, argumentative and narrative discourse modes, the writer must select appropriate content for each mode that fit together. For example, the moral value of the cherry tree story should fit the argumentative claim that ‘honest people tend to be more successful’. Furthermore, the writer considers the macrostructure of the essay, regarding the proportions of the respective discourse modes (primarily argumentative, primarily narrative, or balanced) and where to place the content of each discourse mode: argument followed by narrative, narrative followed by argument, or interleaved. Next, the writer constructs suitable transition(s) between the two discourse modes to maintain the flow of the writing with cohesive devices such as connective words and bridging sentences (e.g. it’s like George Washington and the cherry tree).

To accomplish these additional tasks in MDM writing, writers need better writing skills and typically produce longer essays. Previous studies have shown that longer essays (with more words, H-2a, Kobrin et al. 2007 ; Crossley et al. 2015 ), and essays that used more cohesive devices (such as connective words) often received higher scores (H-2b, McNamara et al. 2010 ). Also, essays with higher syntactic complexity (longer sentences, H-2c) or lexical complexity (lower frequency words, H-2d, and higher lexical diversity, H-2e) often have higher scores ( Crossley and McNamara 2010 ; Crossley et al. 2011 ; McNamara et al. 2013 ). Hence, we hypothesized that, (i) compared to single-discourse mode essays, MDM essays have more words, more cohesive devices, higher syntactic complexity, and greater lexical complexity, and (ii) these attributes mediate the link between MDM essays and higher essay scores (H-2a, b, c, d, e). Additionally, narrative discourses that recount simple, temporally ordered stories may include more concrete words ( narrative particulars; e.g. ‘flowers, perfumes’ as the tokens of ‘gift’, Bruner 1991 : 6). Also, essays by older (often advanced) writers often have more concrete words in their essays ( lexical concreteness , H-2f, Crossley et al. 2011 ).

H-2a. More words mediate the link between the MDM strategy and higher essay scores. H-2b. Proportionally more connective words mediate the link between MDM strategy and higher essay scores. H-2c. Longer mean sentence length mediates the link between MDM strategy and higher essay scores. H-2d. Words that are less common (greater lexical complexity) mediate the link between MDM strategy and higher essay scores. H-2e. Proportionally greater measure of textual lexical diversity (MTLD) mediates the link between MDM strategy and higher essay scores. H-2f. Proportionally more concrete words mediate the link between MDM strategy and higher essay scores.

Participants in this study chose one of two essays with different prompts (picture or text, see Method) which could affect the essay score ( Way et al. 2000 ; Yang et al. 2015 ; Shi et al. 2020 ). Tasks with higher reasoning demands might elicit more lexical and syntactic complexity to yield superior performance (H-3a, cognition hypothesis; Robinson 2001 , 2003 ). As writers must decode spatial, casual, and intentional relations in picture-prompt tasks but not in text-prompt tasks, the higher reasoning demands of the picture prompt may yield more complex writing (e.g. MDM strategies, more words, greater syntactic complexity, greater lexical complexity) and, therefore, better task performance (e.g. higher essay scores). Hence, we proposed hypotheses H-3a and b.

H-3a. Essays using the picture-prompt task receive higher scores than those for the text-prompt task. H-3b. The MDM strategy, the total number of words, and syntactic and lexical complexity mediate the link between prompts and essay scores.

The present study

We found no published studies on MDM strategies in writing essays. Our study tested our three sets of hypotheses regarding whether an MDM strategy is related to linguistic complexity and essay scores in a high-stakes language exam.

Data and tasks

The data for this study were drawn from previously completed, required examination essays by Grade 12 secondary students. The native Chinese students wrote Chinese language essays during the examination. We randomly sampled 695 anonymous essays with either a text ( n  = 332) or picture ( n  = 363) argumentative essay prompt. The requirement for both essays was the same: choose one prompt and write a 650-word essay in 1.5 hours ( Figure 2 ).

The text-prompted and picture-prompted writing topics in this study. Notes. The text-prompted task: write an essay entitled ‘Not to be the first and not to be the last either’ to express your opinion of this attitude toward lives. The picture-prompted task: write an essay entitled ‘The sun and the shadow’ according to the pictures.

Essay scores

Grade 12 students in Hong Kong write an essay during a Diploma of Secondary Education exam, and students use these scores on their applications to universities in Hong Kong. Our data consisted of the essays and official essay scores for 695 students. Scores were given by two experienced examination markers who independently assessed each essay on a 7-point rating scale (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5*, 5**, ordered from lowest to highest) using a rubric with four dimensions: (i) content, (ii) expression, (iii) structure, and (iv) mechanics and handwriting. If two markers disagreed, a third marker scored the essay and the closest, highest pair of marks was used ( Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority [HKEAA] 2019 ).

Coding of the MDM strategy

Operational definition..

We defined an MDM strategy in an essay as including more than one discourse mode. For the scope of this paper, we only focus on the MDM strategy of employing both narrative and argumentation discourse modes. We coded an argumentative essay as an MDM essay if it has at least one occurrence of a narrative discourse mode that supported the writer’s argument by recounting an event or experience ( Labov and Waletzky 2003 ). We did not code the quantity, proportion, or structures of narrative components.

Coding results.

Two coders coded the essays by dividing them into MDM essays with both narrative and argument discourse modes, versus those with only an argument discourse mode. As anonymous government-employed raters scored the essays in an earlier year, we could not hire them to do additional coding. The first author of this paper coded all 695 essays and divided them into MDM essays with narrative components versus one-discourse mode essays using only argument discourse mode (with no narrative components). The second coder, a senior research assistant with a postgraduate degree in linguistics, coded half of the essays (173 text-prompt essays and 174 picture-prompt essays). For a small effect size of 0.2 and α  = 0.05, a sample of 322 is sufficient to yield 95 per cent statistical power, so the second coder coded half of the essays (347) rather than all of them. They worked independently and coded the essays separately. As shown in Table 2 , the two coders showed high inter-rater reliability (99 per cent agreement, Krippendorff’s (2012) α  = 0.977). Disagreements were resolved through discussion until they reached a consensus.

Reliability of coding multi-discourse modes (MDM) essays (N = 695)

Notes. MDM refers to essays that employ the multi-discourse mode strategy.

Measures of linguistic complexity

We used the Chinese Coh-Metrix tool ( Graesser et al. 2011 ; Lu et al. 2017 ) to measure the linguistic complexity of the essays, including the total number of words, syntactic and lexical complexity, and connectedness. Past studies showed that these measures were connected to essay quality ( Crossley and McNamara 2010 ; Crossley et al. 2011 ; McNamara et al. 2013 ). See measures in Table 3 .

Measures used in this study

Notes. All measures were computed using the Traditional Chinese Coh-Metrix except for essay score, picture prompt, and the MDM strategy ( http://cohmetrix.com/ ).

a Mean sentence length was measured by a ratio of total words to sentences ( Cai 2013 ). In Chinese, a word can be one, two, three, or even four characters long.

Data analysis

We ran hierarchical sets of regressions followed by a structural equation model to test whether MDM essays outperformed one-discourse mode essays, controlling for linguistic features. As the prompt type might affect the writing of the essay, we entered it first, before the essay measures. Then, we entered the top-down MDM strategy, followed by holistic features of essay discourse (‘Total number of words’ and ‘% Connectives’). Next, we entered the syntactic variable (‘Mean sentence length’), followed by the smaller lexical complexity variables (‘Content word frequency’, ‘MTLD’, and ‘Word concreteness’). As omitting non-significant variables did not cause omitted variable bias, we safely removed them to increase precision and reduce multicollinearity ( Kennedy 2008 ).

To test for multiple mediation effects simultaneously, we ran a structural equation model via Mplus 7.4 ( Muthén and Muthén 1998–2015 ). To assess the goodness of fit, we used the comparative fit index (CFI), Tucker–Lewis index (TLI), root mean square error approximation (RMSEA), and standardized root mean square residual (SRMR), which minimize Type I and Type II errors under many simulation conditions ( Hu and Bentler 1999 ). We used two-fit thresholds: good (CFI and TLI > 0.95; RMSEA < 0.06; SRMR < 0.08) and moderate (0.90 < CFI and TLI < 0.95;0.06 < RMSEA < 0.10;0.08 < SRMR < 0.10).

Descriptive statistics

Approximately half of the students chose the picture prompt (52 per cent, see Table 4 ). Among these essays, 77 per cent employed the multi-discourse (narrative and argument) modes. The mean essay score was 4.28 ( SD  = 2.54, range: 1–7). The mean essay length was 641 words ( SD  = 165), close to the maximum of 650 words allowed.

Descriptive statistics and correlation–variance–covariances of variables (N = 695)

Notes . Correlations at 0.075 or higher are significant at p <  0.05; the lower-left triangle contains the correlations, the bold numbers along the diagonal are the variances, and the upper-right triangle contains the covariances.

Explanatory model

All results discussed below describe the first entry into the regression, statistically controlling for all previously included variables. Ancillary regressions and statistical tests are available upon request.

Prompt, MDM strategy, total words, sentence length, and lexical complexity variables were related to essay score (see Table 5 ). Compared to text-prompt essays, picture-prompt essays had higher scores on average ( b  = 1.048; range: 1–7; see Table 5 , model 1), supporting hypothesis H-3a. MDM essays had higher scores than one-discourse mode essays on average ( b  = 2.253; Table 5 , model 2), supporting H-1 (see Table 6 ). Longer essays (more total words) often had higher scores ( b  = 0.008; Table 5 , model 3); an essay with 125 more words than another achieved on average a score one level higher (0.008 × 125 = 1), supporting H-2a. Essays with longer sentences than others showed lower scores ( b = −0.196; Table 5 , model 4), contradicting H-2c.

Significant unstandardized parameter coefficients of hierarchical linear regressions predicting essay scores

Notes. Standard errors are in parentheses.

** p  < 0.01; *** p  < 0.001.

Hypothesis test results

Lexical complexity variables (content word frequency, word concreteness) were also related to essay score. Essays that used more common words (high-frequency words) had lower scores ( b  = −3.158; Table 5 , model 5), supporting H-2d. Essays with more concrete words (instead of abstract words) had higher scores ( b  = 1.165; Table 5 , model 3), supporting H-2f. Altogether, these explanatory variables accounted for 53 per cent of the variance in essay scores.

The structural equation model showed a moderate fit (see Figure 3 ; CFI = 0.967, TLI = 0.885, RMSEA = 0.087, SRMR = 0.045, χ 2 [6] = 37.67, p  < 0.001, R 2 for Essay score = 0.491). Total words and syntactic- and lexical-complexity variables also mediated the link between prompt and essay score. Students who chose the picture prompt more often wrote essays employing the MDM strategy (+0.15, supporting H-3b), fewer words (−0.11), shorter sentences (−0.10), infrequent words (−0.19), and more concrete words (+0.69). The total number of words and syntactic and lexical complexity also mediated the link between the MDM strategy and essay score, supporting H-2a and H-2d. Students who employed the MDM strategy wrote essays using more words (+0.36), shorter sentences (−0.11), infrequent words (−0.17), and more concrete words (+0.14). All other explanatory variables, interactions, and mediation tests were not significant. Notably, the percentage of connectives and MTLD were not significant.

Standardized parameters of significant explanatory variables in a structural equation model of essay scores. Notes. The corresponding value of each arrow is the standardized parameter coefficient. To simplify the view, non-significant paths are omitted. The solid and dashed arrows indicate positive and negative effects, respectively. A thicker line indicates a larger effect size. * p < 0.05; ** p < 0.01; *** p < 0.001; CFI = 0.967; TLI = 0.885; RMSEA = 0.087; SRMR = 0.045; Χ 2 (6) = 37.67; p < 0.001; R 2 for Essay score = 0.491.

Discourse samples

Among these time-limited examination essays, those with longer sentences had lower scores, contradicting H-2c, so we examined several examples of longer versus shorter sentences (see translated Excerpts 1 and 2).

Excerpt 1 . 若求平凡，因第一十分困難，如要做全球首富，可能你工作一生都賺不到現時首富十分之一，那便放棄。(If peace is the desire, because being first is hard, if wanting to become the world’s richest person, maybe you could not earn ten percent of the wealth of the richest person after you work for your whole life, then to give it up). Excerpt 2. 不做第一，最顯而易見的益處固然是避免自己風頭過盛，以致招來禍患。(Not being first has the most obvious benefit of avoiding a high profile, which can otherwise cause a disaster.)

Excerpt 1 is a long sentence from a low-scoring essay. It has five segments separated by commas (a simpler paraphrase is ‘Few people can be first in their fields in society, so living a peaceful life isn’t a bad choice for an ordinary person’). Excerpt 2 is an example of a shorter sentence from a high-scoring essay. It contains fewer words than Excerpt 1, segmented into three sections (theme, benefit, and counter-consequence); it is more concise and easier to understand than the longer sentence. In these examination essays, weaker writers often wrote longer, incoherent sentences, while superior writers wrote concise, coherent ones.

As no published study had examined how an MDM strategy affected essay scores, this was the first study to show that (i) essays written using such a strategy (i.e. combining argumentation and narrative) had higher essay scores and (ii) the total number of words and the lexical and syntactic complexity mediated the link between the MDM strategy and essay score.

Direct and indirect effects of the MDM strategy on essay scores

Essays with an MDM strategy combining narrative and argument discourse modes had higher essay scores, which aligns with our theoretical model regarding the benefits of integrating multiple discourse modes. Our results are consistent with our claim that integrating narrative discourse with argumentation in an essay enables temporal and situational ‘particulars’ (narrative) to strengthen the argumentative reasoning, making it more memorable, comprehensible, emotionally sustainable, and persuasive ( Labov and Waletzky 2003 ).

Furthermore, the MDM strategy has a direct effect on essay score, even after controlling for the total number of words and lexical and syntactic complexity. This direct effect suggests that the MDM strategy is a distinguishable, separate writing skill. Future studies can test whether writers develop MDM strategies at the later knowledge-crafting stage, in which they show greater awareness of the relations between the author, the text, and its readers ( Kellogg 2008 ; Bereiter and Scardamalia 2013 ).

The total number of words, sentence length, word frequency, and concreteness mediated the positive link between the MDM strategy and essay score. Compared to one-discourse mode essays, the MDM essays often contained more words, which coheres with our hypothesis that MDM essays require more content. Infrequently used words (suggesting more difficult vocabulary) occurred more often in MDM essays than in one-discourse mode essays, which aligns with our hypothesis that greater writing skills (such as mastery of more complex vocabulary) are required to write MDM essays. Furthermore, shorter sentences and concrete words are suggestive of narrative effects ( Bruner 1991 ). Sentences were shorter in the MDM essays (argument and narrative) than in one-discourse mode essays (argument only), which is consistent with the view that narrative essays typically contain simpler sentence structures and, therefore, shorter sentences. Additionally, concrete words occurred more often in the MDM essays than in one-discourse mode essays, which aligns with the view that narrative essays often describe concrete events and, therefore, use many concrete words. We present an example of the MDM strategy in Appendix A ( Supplementary Material ).

Effects of linguistic complexity on essay scores

Linguistic complexity was also linked to essay scores. Essays with more words or more infrequent words had higher scores than other essays, cohering with the findings of previous studies ( Crossley and McNamara 2010 ; Crossley et al. 2011 ; McNamara et al. 2013 ). In these time-limited examination essays, those with longer sentences had lower scores. Under time pressure, superior writers constructed concise, coherent sentences, while weaker writers constructed longer, incoherent ones. In untimed essays written outside of class, those with greater syntactic complexity achieved higher scores ( McNamara et al. 2010 ). Possibly, writers who have sufficient time to plan/organize their ideas can construct better, longer sentences ( Graham and Perin 2007 ; Graham and Sandmel 2011 ; Graham et al. 2015 ).

Picture prompt and essay scores

Our results showed that the picture prompt was linked to MDM strategy, fewer words, shorter sentence length, more uncommon words, and more concrete words. These results are consistent with the view that different cognitive demands across tasks (e.g. prompts) can activate different prior knowledge to yield greater (or less) complexity in a student’s writing ( Yang et al. 2015 ; Shi et al. 2020 ). They support Robinson’s (2001 , 2003 ) cognition hypothesis: tasks with higher reasoning demands elicit more lexical and syntactic complexity to yield better performance. Hence, task designers and assessors can vary the cognitive demands of a task by using different task prompts in language assessment ( Robinson 2001 , 2003 ). Regardless of the task or prompt, examination essay is a special genre (‘timed-impromptu writing’, Perelman 2014 ) that differs from real-world language use, so essay performance might not generalize to other genre contexts ( Bachman 2002 ).

Implications for writing instructions and automated essay scoring

Although writing is critical to literacy and socioeconomic success in modern society ( National Research Council 2006 ), writing is notoriously difficult to learn and teach ( Bazerman et al. 2018 ). This study contributes a new construct to the relevant literature: an MDM writing strategy. Furthermore, this study shows that among these examination essays, those with multiple discourse modes had higher scores. As this MDM strategy capitalizes on the strengths of each discourse mode to achieve rhetoric purposes, teaching students to effectively use it might improve their writing; future intervention studies can test this idea and collect and analyse qualitative data regarding students’ MDM learning and use processes. For example, researchers can do ethnographies to identify students’ relevant social contexts (online or offline) and understand how they integrate them in their narratives and arguments in an MDM essay; such information can inform educators’ design of lessons about MDM strategies.

This study also has implications for writing assessment. The results show that six variables (prompt, the MDM strategy, total number of words, sentence length, content word frequency, and word concreteness) accounted for 53 per cent of the variance in essay scores, a substantial improvement over past models using only linguistic complexity and discourse cohesion indicators (whose explained variances ranged from 22 to 44 per cent; McNamara et al. 2010 , 2013 ). If future studies show similar, superior results, then later automated essay scoring algorithms can use the MDM strategy to assess essays with greater accuracy. More generally, this study supports Deane’s (2011) call for further investigation of writers’ top-down conceptual strategies and sociocultural knowledge (e.g. schematic, pragmatic, register, and world knowledge). To further advance our understanding of writing and writing strategies, and the relevant instructions and assessment, future studies can examine literacy learning in school contexts and students’ language use in their daily life, especially on social media (social practice perspective).

Our study has limitations concerning the scope of the MDM strategy, languages, student ages, and essay sampling. First, in this paper, we focus only on the combination of narrative and argument discourse modes in argumentative essays. Future studies can study MDM strategies involving more combinations of discourse modes. For example, such studies can study students’ (i) reports that combine report and description discourse modes or (ii) stories that combine narrative and description discourse modes ( Smith 2003 ). As these tasks reflect students’ real-world language uses, they are particularly worth studying for pedagogical purposes. Second, we only analysed essays written in Chinese by native Chinese speakers; future studies can examine essays in other languages and those written by natives and/or second-language writers. Third, we only studied essays written by upper secondary school students; future studies can investigate essays written by students of different ages, which might illuminate age constraints concerning the use of MDM strategies. Researchers can also conduct qualitative studies on whether advanced writers tend to use more MDM strategies, and what interventions for teaching MDM strategies can succeed. Fourth, our essay sample only included two essay topics from a high-stakes examination; future studies can examine more topics and concerning different stakes (e.g. freewriting in a journal, class assignment, creative writing competition). Fifth, our data do not include students’ school lessons (such as whether teachers taught MDM strategies), textbooks, or home learning environment, so future studies can collect such data to test a richer explanatory model—for example, using controlled experiments to investigate whether short-term or long-term teaching of MDM strategies improves students’ essay writing or literacy development.

The authors would like to thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. They also want to thank Tsz Wing Choi, Yik Ting Choi, Sze Ming Lam, Alice Liu, Ka Yee Mak, Magdalena Mo Ching Mok, and Alex Morakhovski for helping with the data collection, coding, and analysis.

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The False Narrative of Settler Colonialism

The rise of an academic theory and its obsession with Israel

O n October 7 , Hamas killed four times as many Israelis in a single day as had been killed in the previous 15 years of conflict. In the months since, protesters have rallied against Israel’s retaliatory invasion of Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. But a new tone of excitement and enthusiasm could be heard among pro-Palestinian activists from the moment that news of the attacks arrived, well before the Israeli response began. Celebrations of Hamas’s exploits are familiar sights in Gaza and the West Bank, Cairo and Damascus; this time, they spread to elite college campuses, where Gaza-solidarity encampments became ubiquitous this past spring. Why?

The answer is that, long before October 7, the Palestinian struggle against Israel had become widely understood by academic and progressive activists as the vanguard of a global battle against settler colonialism, a struggle also waged in the United States, Canada, Australia, and other countries created by European settlement. In these circles, Palestine was transformed into a standard reference point for every kind of social wrong, even those that seem to have no connection to the Middle East.

One of the most striking things about the ideology of settler colonialism is the central role played by Israel, which is often paired with the U.S. as the most important example of settler colonialism’s evils. Many Palestinian writers and activists have adopted this terminology. In his 2020 book, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine , the historian Rashid Khalidi writes that the goal of Zionism was to create a “white European settler colony.” For the Palestinian intellectual Joseph Massad, Israel is a product of “European Jewish Settler-Colonialism,” and the “liberation” referred to in the name of the Palestine Liberation Organization is “liberation from Settler-Colonialism.”

Western activists and academics have leaned heavily on the idea. Opposition to building an oil pipeline under a Sioux reservation was like the Palestinian cause in that it “makes visible the continuum of systems of subjugation and expropriation across liberal democracies and settler-­colonial regimes.” When the city of Toronto evicted a homeless encampment from a park, it was like Palestine because both are examples of “ethnic cleansing” and “colonial ‘domicide,’ making Indigenous people homeless on their homelands.” Health problems among Native Americans can be understood in terms of Palestine, because the “hyper-­visible Palestine case …  provides a unique temporal lens for understanding settler colonial health determinants more broadly.” Pollution, too, can be understood through a Palestinian lens, according to the British organization Friends of the Earth, because Palestine demonstrates that “the world is an unequal place” where “marginalised and vulnerable people bear the brunt of injustice.”

Although Israel fails in obvious ways to fit the model of settler colonialism, it has become the standard reference point because it offers theorists and activists something that the United States does not: a plausible target. It is hard to imagine America or Canada being truly decolonized, with the descendants of the original settlers returning to the countries from which they came and Native peoples reclaiming the land. But armed struggle against Israel has been ongoing since it was founded, and Hamas and its allies still hope to abolish the Jewish state “between the river and the sea.” In the contemporary world, only in Israel can the fight against settler colonialism move from theory to practice.

T he concept of settler colonialism was developed in the 1990s by theorists in Australia, Canada, and the U.S., as a way of linking social evils in these countries today—such as climate change, patriarchy, and economic inequality—to their origin in colonial settlement. In the past decade, settler colonialism has become one of the most important concepts in the academic humanities, the subject of hundreds of books and thousands of papers, as well as college courses on topics such as U.S. history, public health, and gender studies.

Read: The curious rise of settler colonialism and Turtle Island

For the academic field of settler-colonial studies, the settlement process is characterized by European settlers discovering a land that they consider “terra nullius,” the legal property of no one; their insatiable hunger for expansion that fills an entire continent; and the destruction of Indigenous peoples and cultures. This model, drawn from the history of Anglophone colonies such as the U.S. and Australia, is regularly applied to the history of Israel even though it does not include any of these hallmarks.

When modern Zionist settlement in what is now Israel began in the 1880s, Palestine was a province of the Ottoman empire, and after World War I, it was ruled by the British under a mandate from the League of Nations. Far from being “no one’s land,” Jews could settle there only with the permission of an imperial government, and when that permission was withdrawn—­as it fatefully was in 1939, when the British sharply limited Jewish immigration on the eve of the Holocaust—they had no recourse. Far from expanding to fill a continent, as in North America and Australia, the state of Israel today is about the size of New Jersey. The language, culture, and religion of the Arab peoples remain overwhelmingly dominant: 76 years after Israel was founded, it is still the only Jewish country in the region, among 22 Arab countries, from Morocco to Iraq.

Most important, the Jewish state did not erase or replace the people already living in Palestine, though it did displace many of them. Here the comparison between European settlement in North America and Jewish settlement in Israel is especially inapt. In the decades after Europeans arrived in Massachusetts, the Native American population of New England declined from about 140,000 to 10,000, by one estimate . In the decades after 1948, the Arab population of historic Palestine more than quintupled, from about 1.4 million to about 7.4 million. The persistence of the conflict in Israel-Palestine is due precisely to the coexistence of two peoples in the same land—­as opposed to the classic sites of settler colonialism, where European settlers decimated Native peoples.

In the 21st century, the clearest examples of ongoing settler colonialism can probably be found in China. In 2023, the United Nations Human Rights office reported that the Chinese government had compelled nearly 1 million Tibetan children to attend residential schools “aimed at assimilating Tibetan people culturally, religiously and linguistically.” Forcing the next generation of Tibetans to speak Mandarin is part of a long-­term effort to Sinicize the region, which also includes encouraging Han Chinese to settle there and prohibiting public displays of traditional Buddhist faith.

China has mounted a similar campaign against the Uyghur people in the northwestern province of Xinjiang. Since 2017, more than 1 million Uyghur Muslims have been detained in what the Chinese government calls vocational training centers, which other countries describe as detention or reeducation camps. The government is also seeking to bring down Uyghur birth rates through mass sterilization and involuntary birth control.

These campaigns include every element of settler colonialism as defined by academic theorists. They aim to replace an existing people and culture with a new one imported from the imperial metropole, using techniques frequently described as genocidal in the context of North American history. Tibet’s residential schools are a tool of forced assimilation, like the ones established for Native American children in Canada and the United States in the 19th century. And some scholars of settler colonialism have drawn these parallels, acknowledging, in the words of the anthropologist Carole McGranahan, “that an imperial formation is as likely to be Chinese, communist, and of the twentieth or twenty-­first centuries as it is to be English, capitalist, and of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.”

Yet Tibet and Xinjiang—­like India’s rule in Kashmir, and the Indonesian occupation of East Timor from 1975 to 1999—­occupy a tiny fraction of the space devoted to Israel-­Palestine on the mental map of settler-colonial studies. Some of the reasons for this are practical. The academic discipline mainly flourishes in English-­speaking countries, and its practitioners usually seem to be monolingual, making it necessary to focus on countries where sources are either written in English or easily available in translation. This rules out any place where a language barrier is heightened by strict government censorship, like China. Just as important, settler-colonial theorists tend to come from the fields of anthropology and sociology rather than history, area studies, and international relations, where they would be exposed to a wider range of examples of past and present conflict.

But the focus on Israel-­Palestine isn’t only a product of the discipline’s limitations. It is doctrinal. Academics and activists find adding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to other causes powerfully energizing, a way to give a local address to a struggle that can otherwise feel all too abstract. The price of collapsing together such different causes, however, is that it inhibits understanding of each individual cause. Any conflict that fails to fit the settler-colonial model must be made to fit.

I srael also fails to fit the model of settler colonialism in another key way: It defies the usual division between foreign colonizers and Indigenous people. In the discourse of settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples aren’t simply those who happen to occupy a territory before Europeans discovered it. Rather, indigeneity is a moral and spiritual status, associated with qualities such as authenticity, selflessness, and wisdom. These values stand as a reproof to settler ways of being, which are insatiably destructive. And the moral contrast between settler and indigene comes to overlap with other binaries—­white and nonwhite, exploiter and exploited, victor and victim.

Until recently, Palestinian leaders preferred to avoid the language of indigeneity, seeing the implicit comparison between themselves and Native Americans as defeatist. In an interview near the end of his life, in 2004, PLO Chair Yasser Arafat declared, “We are not Red Indians.” But today’s activists are more eager to embrace the Indigenous label and the moral valences that go with it, and some theorists have begun to recast Palestinian identity in ecological, spiritual, and aesthetic terms long associated with Native American identity. The American academic Steven Salaita has written that “Palestinian claims to life” are based in having “a culture indivisible from their surroundings, a language of freedom concordant to the beauty of the land.” Jamal Nabulsi of the University of Queensland writes that “Palestinian Indigenous sovereignty is in and of the land. It is grounded in an embodied connection to Palestine and articulated in Palestinian ways of being, knowing, and resisting on and for this land.”

This kind of language points to an aspect of the concept of indigeneity that is often tacitly overlooked in the Native American context: its irrationalism. The idea that different peoples have incommensurable ways of being and knowing, rooted in their relationship to a particular landscape, comes out of German Romantic nationalism. Originating in the early 19th century in the work of philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Johann Gottfried Herder, it eventually degenerated into the blood-­and-­soil nationalism of Nazi ideologues such as Richard Walther Darré, who in 1930 hymned what might be called an embodied connection to Germany: “The German soul, with all its warmness, is rooted in its native landscape and has, in a sense, always grown out of it … Whoever takes the natural landscape away from the German soul, kills it.”

For Darré, this rootedness in the land meant that Germans could never thrive in cities, among the “rootless ways of thinking of the urbanite.” The rootless urbanite par excellence, for Nazi ideology, was of course the Jew. For Salaita, the exaltation of Palestinian indigeneity leads to the very same conclusion about “Zionists,” who usurp the land but can never be vitally rooted in it: “In their ruthless schema, land is neither pleasure nor sustenance. It is a commodity … Having been anointed Jewish, the land ceases to be dynamic. It is an ideological fabrication with fixed characteristics.”

In this way, anti-Zionism converges with older patterns of anti­-Semitic and anti­-Jewish thinking. It is true, of course, that criticism of Israel is not inherently anti-­Semitic. Virtually anything that an Israeli government does is likely to be harshly criticized by many Israeli Jews themselves. But it is also true that anti-­Semitism is not simply a matter of personal prejudice against Jews, existing on an entirely different plane from politics. The term anti­-Semitism was coined in Germany in the late 19th century because the old term, Jew hatred , sounded too instinctive and brutal to describe what was, in fact, a political ideology—­an account of the way the world works and how it should be changed.

Wilhelm Marr, the German writer who popularized the word, complained in his 1879 book, The Victory of Judaism Over Germanism , that “the Jewish spirit and Jewish consciousness have overpowered the world.” That spirit, for Marr, was materialism and selfishness, “profiteering and usury.” Anti-­Semitic political parties in Europe attacked “Semitism” in the same way that socialists attacked capitalism. The saying “Anti-­Semitism is the socialism of fools,” used by the German left at this time, recognized the structural similarity between these rival worldviews.

The identification of Jews with soulless materialism made sense to 19th-century Europeans because it translated one of the oldest doctrines of Christianity into the language of modern politics. The apostle Paul, a Jew who became a follower of Jesus, explained the difference between his old faith and his new one by identifying Judaism with material things (­the circumcision of the flesh, the letter of the law) and Christianity with spiritual things—­the circumcision of the heart, a new law “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”

Simon Sebag Montefiore: The decolonization narrative is dangerous and false

Today this characterization of Jews as stubborn, heartless, and materialistic is seldom publicly expressed in the language of Christianity, as in the Middle Ages, or in the language of race, as in the late 19th century. But it is quite respectable to say exactly the same thing in the language of settler colonialism. As the historian David Nirenberg has written, “We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of ‘Israel,’” except that today, Israel refers not to the Jewish people but to the Jewish state.

When those embracing the ideology of settler colonialism think about political evil, Israel is the example that comes instinctively to hand, just as Jews were for anti-Semitism and Judaism was for Christianity. Perhaps the most troubling reactions to the October 7 attacks were those of college students convinced that the liberation of Palestine is the key to banishing injustice from the world. In November 2023, for instance, Northwestern University’s student newspaper published a letter signed by 65 student organizations—­including the Rainbow Alliance, Ballet Folklórico Northwestern, and All Paws In, which sends volunteers to animal shelters—­defending the use of the slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” This phrase looks forward to the disappearance of any form of Jewish state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan, but the student groups denied that this entails “murder and genocide.” Rather, they wrote, “When we say from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, we imagine a world free of Islamophobia, antisemitism, anti-­Blackness, militarism, occupation and apartheid.”

As a political program, this is nonsensical. How could dismantling Israel bring about the end of militarism in China, Russia, or Iran? How could it lead to the end of anti-Black racism in America, or anti-Muslim prejudice in India? But for the ideology of settler colonialism, actual political conflicts become symbolic battles between light and darkness, and anyone found on the wrong side is a fair target. Young Americans today who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers on college campuses are not ashamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews—because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.

This essay is adapted from Adam Kirsch’s new book, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice .

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