KEY TERMS!
CONVENTION
A convention is a customary way of doing something. For example, when you write a letter, you will follow certain conventions regarding how you set it out; if it is a business letter you will also choose a suitably formal style quite different from that of a letter to a friend and so on. The conventions of newspaper publishing include setting out the text using headlines and columns, and so on. There are so many conventions and many of them are "invisible" in the sense that we do not notice or think about them. Grammar is a set of rule-like conventions that provide us with the know-how to form a clear and meaningful structure for the sentences we use.

What is interesting about some of the conventions we follow is that, because we grow up with them as an unquestioned part of normal, everyday life, we fail to recognise them or question them in any way. This means such conventions appear to be entirely natural or 'common sense', when they are anything but. This makes some conventions worthy of analysis and study as the convention might be acting in ways that promotes a certain ideological way of thinking. It was once conventional for men to do certain jobs and women to do others, for example. Recognising, questioning and even challenging conventions can form an important part of your analysis of certain texts and, because this is a subtle form of analysis, it will be rewarded highly.