
Evaluation
Whenever you evaluate a text’s principal elements, you are making a determination about which ones matter more and which ones matter less. How you do this, in turn, depends on the criteria you use for assessing their relative importance. You decide what does (or doesn’t) make something important,in other words, by deciding on a particular standard for measuring its value. Do you want to base the importance of an element on how eye-catching or attention-grabbing it is? How entertaining? How thought-provoking? Should an element’s importance depend on what it enables you to do? On how it makes you feel? On what it makes you think? How you answer these kinds of questions ultimately determines the basis on which you evaluate a text.