[A] Are we studying that text and trying to respond in a way that fulfils the requirement of a given course? Reading it simply for pleasure? Skimming it for information? Ways of reading on a train or in bed are likely to differ considerably from reading in a seminar room.

[B] Factors such as the place and period in which we are reading, our gender, ethnicity, age and social class will encourage us towards certain interpretations but at the same time obscure or even close off others.

[C] If you are unfamiliar with words or idioms, you guess at their meaning, using clues presented in the context. On the assumption that they will become relevant later, you make a mental note of discourse entities as well as possible links between them.

[D] In effect, you try to reconstruct the likely meanings or effects that any given sentence, image or reference might have had: these might be the ones the author intended.

[E] You make further inferences, for instance about how the text may be significant to you, or about its plausibility – inferences that form the basis of a personal response for which the author will inevitably be far less responsible.

[F] In plays, novels and narrative poems, characters speak as constructs created by the author, not necessarily as mouthpieces for the author’s own thoughts.

[G] Rather, we ascribe meanings to texts on the basis of interaction between what we might call textual and contextual material: between kinds of organization or patterning we perceive in a text’s formal structures (so especially its language structures) and various kinds of background, social knowledge, belief and attitude that we bring to the text.