Exegesis: Structural Analysis

If you want to see the "syntactical bone structure" (as Prof. G. K. Beale calls it) of a text, a sentence flow is one way to do it. The following summary steps to take are taken from Gordon Fee's New Testament Exegesis (3rd ed., pp. 41-58):

1. Begin with the subject, predicate, and object to the extreme left.

2. Subordinate by indenting all adverbial modifiers and adjectival and noun clauses under the word or word group being modified.

3. Coordinate by lining up corresponding elements directly under one another.

4. Isolate structural signals (i.e., conjunctions, particles, relative pronouns, and sometimes demonstrative pronouns), either above or to the left, and highlight in order to draw lines from the structural signal to the the element(s) to which it is related.

5. Color-code recurring words or motifs in order to trace themes or ideas crucial to the flow of the argument.

6. Trace the argument by annotation.