Definition

What It Says/What It Does is a simple way of pulling a lot of critical, complex information from an article, chapter reading, or other text. It’s especially useful for texts that are making arguments and texts that are complicated in structure because What It Says/What It Does helps you to think about how smaller parts, such as paragraphs, function within the longer text.

Purpose

What It Says/What It Does helps you analyze the function of each paragraph or selected piece of text. It helps you identify rhetorical devices that an author relies on. It helps you understand how an author develops an argument, if the purpose of the text is to persuade. It helps you to evaluate the author’s credibility. It helps you follow the structure of the text and to evaluate the author’s organizational choices. Finally, it adds to your own toolkit as a writer, since it enables you to see how an author consciously chooses words, information, and strategies to create meaning.

Task

Create a table with three columns in a document or on a blank piece of paper. The columns should be headed, “Original Text,” “What It Says,” and “What It Does”:

Original Text	What It Says	What It Does

Read the article or chapter, and select short passages and/or paragraphs that seem important. The passage should develop the meaning or argument that you think the author is making.
In the far-left column (Original Text), write or type the full paragraph or passage as a quotation. Include the page number, if available, or the paragraph number (ex. para. 12).
In the middle column, summarize the selection. Your summaries can be very brief, focused just on recording the main idea of the selection.
In the right-hand column, explain what the function of the paragraph is and how the author presents the information in that paragraph. For example:
- how does this paragraph fit within the text?
- how does the author use evidence?
- how does the author use analytical techniques such as cause and effect or compare and contrast to highlight important ideas?
- what ideas are being implied?
- how does this paragraph or selection connect to other parts of the article or chapter?

Example

Video demonstration of What It Says/What It Does:

Model: From The Address Book, Chapter 7, “Korea and Japan: Must Streets Be Named?” by Deirdre Mask

Paragraph from the essay	What the paragraph “says”	What the paragraph “does”
But Shelton was surprised when he found out how his wife, Emiko, learned to write. Emiko is from Japan; her writing paper looked nothing like the paper both he and I remembered. Japanese has three different kinds of scripts, but the bulk of written Japanese uses kanji, characters borrowed from Chinese. Kanji are logograms—each character represents a word or idea. Though the character’s shape may provide a clue to its meaning, for the most part, kanji simply have to be memorized; they cannot be “sounded out.” (Mask 131-2)	Japanese children learn to write differently than British and American children. Japanese write most often in kanji, which are logo-type characters, each of which carries meaning and must be memorized.	This paragraph connects directly to the previous paragraph by contrasting the way that Japanese children learn to write their language against how British and American children learn. It supports the idea that Japanese addressing – or the lack of it – may be based on the writing system. To get here, I have to remember that earlier, Mask explained that in urban Japan, blocks are more important than the streets that make them up. Blocks have meaning within themselves that is greater than any one building and also carry meaning in relationship with other blocks in a neighborhood. Kanji have meaning in themselves, as well, and like blocks, which work together to make up a neighborhood, kanji work together to make meaning in a text. The ideas in this paragraph support the author’s argument in later paragraphs that the tradition of language and writing may influence the way that Japanese people think about addressing and mapping.