The Making Strange Tool

Seeing the Invisible: Unpacking James Paul Gee’s “Making Strange” Tool

Have you ever repeated a common word out loud so many times that it suddenly lost its meaning and sounded like absolute gibberish? This psychological phenomenon, known as semantic satiation, forces our brains to momentarily stop processing the word for its definition and start hearing it merely as a series of strange, arbitrary sounds.

In discourse analysis, we often need to induce a similar effect deliberately—not just with single words, but with entire social situations. In How to Do Discourse Analysis: A Toolkit, James Paul Gee introduces “The Making Strange Tool” (Tool #3). This tool is designed to bypass our cultural conditioning, allowing us to see the deeply ingrained, invisible rules that govern how we speak, interact, and construct our social realities.

For language teachers and applied linguists, this tool is vital. It allows us to step outside of our familiar educational routines and critically examine the language we use to manage classrooms, assess students, and distribute power.

What is the Making Strange Tool?

The Making Strange Tool asks the analyst to pretend to be an outsider—someone completely alien to the culture, the institution, or the social group being studied. By adopting this “Martian” stance, you intentionally strip away the “common sense” or “taken-for-granted” assumptions that usually allow communication to flow smoothly.

Gee designed this tool because human beings are incredibly efficient pattern matchers. When we enter familiar environments—like a classroom, a staff meeting, or a coffee shop—we unconsciously accept a massive set of unspoken rules about who is allowed to speak, what they are permitted to say, and how they should say it. Because these rules feel “natural” to those inside the culture, they become practically invisible. We only tend to notice them when someone breaks them.

Applying the Making Strange Tool involves looking at a piece of text or a transcript of a conversation and actively asking:

• What would someone from another planet find baffling about this interaction?

• What is being treated as “normal,” “obvious,” or “just the way things are” that is actually highly specific to this particular culture or group?

• If I pretend not to know the unwritten rules of this setting, what surprising power dynamics or assumptions suddenly become visible?

By making the familiar strange, we force ourselves to analyze the deliberate choices behind the language, rather than just passively accepting the communication at face value. We stop looking through the language and start looking at it.

Common Misconceptions About Making Strange

For novice discourse analysts, particularly those in applied linguistics or teacher training programs, the Making Strange Tool can be surprisingly difficult to apply effectively. It requires a cognitive leap that goes against our natural human desire to quickly comprehend meaning. Here are three common traps to avoid.

Misconception 1: It’s About Finding Bizarre Behavior

A common trap is assuming the tool is used to analyze weird, deviant, or highly unusual interactions. In reality, the tool is most powerful when applied to the most mundane, boring, and routine discourse possible. The goal is not to find strange behavior, but to make normal behavior strange. If you are analyzing a heated argument between a teacher and a student, the conflict and power struggle are already obvious. But if you analyze how a teacher simply takes attendance or transitions between activities, making that strange will reveal profound, hidden insights about institutional authority and compliance.

Misconception 2: It Means Feigning Total Ignorance

Some analysts confuse “acting like an outsider” with “ignoring the context completely.” They might look at a classroom transcript and say, “Well, as an alien, I don’t know what the word ‘textbook’ means, so I can’t analyze this.” This is a misapplication of the tool. The goal is not feigned ignorance of basic vocabulary. The goal is to refuse to accept the cultural logic of the context. You know what a textbook is, but you refuse to accept the “common sense” assumption that the textbook is the ultimate, unquestionable authority in the room, or that students must inherently care about what is inside it.

Misconception 3: It’s Only for Cross-Cultural Analysis

Because the tool asks you to act like an outsider, people often assume it is only useful when analyzing a culture foreign to their own. In fact, Gee argues it is most crucial when analyzing your own culture or profession. As an English language teacher, the hardest discourse to analyze is a typical ESL classroom, because you are blinded by your own professional familiarity. The Making Strange Tool is the antidote to that professional blindness.

Applying the Making Strange Tool: A Classroom Example

To understand how this works in practice, let’s look at a brief, incredibly common interaction in an educational setting.

Imagine a teacher standing at the front of a room with 30 high school students. The teacher claps her hands twice and says:

“Alright everyone, let’s put our phones away. I need all eyes up here.”

Without the Making Strange Tool, our brains process this instantly and thoughtlessly: The teacher is starting the lesson and getting the students’ attention. It is completely natural. There is nothing to analyze here.

Now, let’s apply the tool. We will pretend to be a researcher from a society with completely different social structures, observing this interaction and refusing to accept the “common sense” rules of traditional schooling.

• The Command Structure: Why does one person have the right to dictate the physical orientation of thirty other people? Our outsider would find it bizarre that the phrase “all eyes up here” is accepted without rebellion. It reveals an invisible, highly asymmetrical power dynamic where the teacher literally controls the physical gaze and bodily autonomy of the people in the room.

• The “We/Our” Paradox: The teacher says, “let’s put our phones away.” As an outsider, we might look closely and ask: Is the teacher actually putting a phone away? Usually, the answer is no. The teacher uses the inclusive “our” to soften a direct, authoritarian command, creating a false sense of solidarity. It masks a direct order (“Put your phones away”) as a collective, democratic action.

• The Devaluation of the Digital: By demanding phones be put away to start the “real” activity, the discourse establishes a clear hierarchy of knowledge. The outsider sees that the physical space (the teacher at the front) is privileged, while the digital space (the phones) is framed as inherently distracting, illegitimate, and non-educational in this specific context.

• The Ritualistic Applause: The teacher claps her hands to start the interaction. The outsider might note that in most other human contexts, applause signifies approval, celebration, or the end of a performance. Here, it is repurposed as an auditory weapon to interrupt student conversations and signal the beginning of an institutional routine.

Conclusion

By using the Making Strange Tool, a mundane ten-second interaction that we experience every day is revealed to be a dense, highly structured web of power dynamics, false solidarity, and spatial control.

This is the core value of James Paul Gee’s approach to discourse analysis. Language is never neutral. Every time we speak, we are relying on a massive, invisible scaffolding of cultural assumptions to make our words make sense. The Making Strange Tool allows us to step off that scaffolding, turn around, and finally see how it is built. For teachers, researchers, and students of applied linguistics, it is a vital step toward critical awareness, reminding us that “normal” is just a set of rules we’ve forgotten we learned.