Ideologies form the values and attitudes that we live by. Why is an understanding of ideology important to your course (and it most certainly is if you want to aim for the highest grades!)?

First and foremost, this is because analysing and discussing a text at the level of its ideologies will gain you more marks and a higher grade! Secondly, it is an idea that, once grasped, fascinates many people - sometimes intensely! You are likely to be one of them!

All texts operate at an ideological level - that is, they are created ideologically and are interpreted ideologically. This applies to texts you would be studying if you were taking English Literature, English Language or Media Studies (and any and all texts you create yourself). The creation and interpretation of all texts relies to a greater or lesser extent upon a shared set of dominant ideological values, that is, shared ways of thinking about the world. These dominant ideologies will have guided the text's creator and equally will guide its reader, viewer or listener's interpretation in very powerful and important ways.

All texts act in ways that reinforce and help maintain society's ways of thinking - our dominant ideologies. Literary texts act perhaps in unique ways to expose society's dominant ideologies and allow their reader to see ideologies in operation in ways little else can. The following extract from a poem by William Blake called 'The Human Abstract' might begin to help you see how literature can expose ideologies. You will soon see perhaps how little has changed ideologically since Blake's days of the early nineteenth century:

Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor:
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we:

And mutual fear brings peace:
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care...

Media texts tend to act in reverse: they hide their ideological values and act powerfully to reinforce and maintain existing ways of thinking about the world and its peoples - existing ways of thinking are called the status quo. To take an example, you will all have seen advertisements for the iPod Nano. Such ads operate at many ideological levels, but perhaps most obviously they act to reinforce and maintain materialist and consumerist ideologies that create in us a world view that might be articulated thus: 'I want it; I deserve it; I'll have it..'. The way such texts work is to create a persuasive construction - a cultural code - of what it means to be "cool" and "modern".

Such texts cat by "calling" their audience to respond as what might be called the ideal reader. Ads tend to work by suggesting that to stay "cool", we need to buy the goods on offer. An attractive lifestyle is created into which the product is inserted and linked.

• You can download a guide that will let you read more about this here. In this PDF document, you will be able to find out more about the thoughts of the key Marxist theorist Louis Althusser.
• Being able to analyse a text at the level of ideology is always rewarded highly in coursework and exams.

You might have seen the word 'ideology' used negatively in the popular press, but it is, in fact, an entirely neutral word. The bias it attracts is because it is sometimes linked with the politics of communism and the perceived failures of that political system.

The next pages introduce you to ideology and then provide a step-by-step analysis of a front page newspaper article. Whilst this is clearly a Media Studies analysis, if you are studying English Language or Literature, fear not - the ideas you will learn apply equally to texts of all kinds, whether fictional or non-fictional, spoken or written. You can apply these techniques to any text, be it still or moving image, including those you produce and write yourself.

• Remember that ideologies operate everywhere, all of the time - but they operate silently, invisibly... and some would say stealthily.