ABSTRACT
Literary criticism uses chosen parts of chosen texts to exemplify things outside of those choices – things like ideas, themes, or patterns. Text-analysis tools, including the 487 tools in the text analysis portal for research, enable scholars to compare, annotate, segment, analyze, model, and visualize text. The artificial language that text-analysis tools parse with artificial schematics is the work of human thought, ultimately apprehensible only to human readers. More robust digital scans of more texts can reveal more evidence that rhetorical schemes reveal cognitive habits. The Rhetorical Schematics tool would take the initial critical gesture – marking a noteworthy passage – and suggest passages with similar linguistic structures. It would operate alongside future critics' reading habits and could be embedded into texts as subtly as a footnote. Rhetorical schemes are patterns with discernible similarities across texts: a gradatio in Marlowe has the same repetitive structure as one in Middleton.
