Huckin has found it useful to carry out critical analysis in two stages. First he reads a text trying to play the role of an ordinary reader. Then he takes a step back and revisits the tect at a number of different levels, raising questions about it, imagining how it could have been constructed different, mentally comparing it to other texts . in this second stage he typically goes from larger text level features through to smaller word level ones. At the whole text level, huckins begins by deciding what genre the text represent and to what extent the text conforms to it. This may not be clear cut. For example a text may look like one genre, but in fact be another (an advertisement for a restaurant written as restaurant review.). equally there may be something left out of the text that normally occurs in a particular genre. This could have been done on purpose, leading him to wonder why this moght be,. He also considers to what extent the producer of the text has gone beyond the normal boundaries for the genre to create a particular effect.
Another whole text aspect that might be considered is framing : that is how the content of the text is presented and the sort of angle or prespective the writer is taking. Closely related to this is the notion of foregrounding : that is what concepts are emphasized as well as what concepts or issues are played down or backgrounded. Equally important is what background knowledge, attitudes or point of view the text presupposes.
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