Analysing Written Texts

This chapter deals with the most collected text genre in qualitative research: written texts. We discuss writing as a mode of communication, which is largely monologic, requires a writing system and some form of literacy, and how it is integral to doing textual analysis. Amid the myriad written texts can be analysed, we focus on some Discourse Studies (DS) approaches that may be relevant to Forced Migration contexts, including basic linguistic analyses, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Critical Discourse Studies. Case studies of data from Malaysia and Spain and the exercise at the end help the readers understand how analytic concepts from DS may be used to undertake micro-level discourse analysis.