A Beginner's Guide to Textual Analysis

This article deals with the following questions: What is textual analysis? Are we trying to find the 'correct' interpretation of the text we analyse? Are we trying to measure how accurate texts are? Surely some texts must reflect reality? Why is it important to try to understand the likely interpretations of media texts? If we're interested in likely interpretations of these texts, why didn't we just interview audience members and ask them what interpretations they make? How do we discover the likely interpretations of a text? How do we know which are the important parts of a text? Wouldn't it be better to make the process of textual analysis more standardised? Are there standardised ways of analysing texts without resorting to number-crunching?