Step One:
Put Away the Text |
Step One: Start by Putting Away the Text
Let's say your teacher gives you a fairly typical lit-paper question:
Instead, start with your mind. I'm naturally going to assume you've read the text. When you read the question, what's your answer? Do you think Grendel is evil? Why? Write Down Why You Think So If you do (or don't) think Grendel is evil, what part in the text gave you that idea? What image comes to mind to back up your thought here? Whatever it is, WRITE IT DOWN. Now do it again...and again. Unless you can come up with about 3-5 separate pieces of information, you might not have a strong enough case. If you don't, choose another question or develop one of your own. Checkpoint:
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Step 1B:
Even Better, Develop Your OWN Question |
A better (and stronger) strategy is to develop your own question. What that will mean is keeping track, like in a reading journal, of any quotes that jump out at you. By the end of your reading, you should have at least 10-12 quotations that seemed interesting, relevant, pertinent, weird, or eye-catching in some way.
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Step 2:
Write Down the Evidence and Find the Pattern |
Write Down the Evidence and Find the Pattern
Write down the evidence you've found. Find AT LEAST 4-6 quotations you can work with. Now, with the multiple quotes you've chosen, you probably are seeing patterns emerge -- similar clusters, ideas that seem to revolve around the same thing, or even words that are similar in some way. Example: Let's say you were analyzing Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and some words or phrases were jumping out at you.
Pattern: A pattern you see is that Swift seems to be using ideas from animal husbandry to refer to the poor. Even if you don't know the term "animal husbandry," use terms or ideas you DO know, even if it's something like "farm terms." The point is that YOU know what it means. In your pattern column, write down "Farm terms" or "Animal husbandry." |
Step 3:
Add Strong Verbs! |
One of the most important parts here is to determine what the pattern is DOING or what the author is DOING with it. For that, you'll need strong verbs. Ask yourself what the author is DOING.
Strong Verbs List NOTE: Use strong action verbs. YOU MAY NEVER USE "USES," "DISPLAYS" or "SHOWS." Those are not particularly strong verbs. Here are better ones. Some of these will be more applicable to AUTHORS and some will be more applicable to CHARACTERS. You'll need to choose what's best for your work.
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Step 4:
Write a Function Sentence
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"X [Strong Verb] Y In Order To"
At this point, you're ready to write a function sentence. This function sentence can be a decent topic sentence for a paragraph. Use This Template!
We're going to get to that "phrase of at least seven words" thing in a minute. For now, take a look at examples for the first part of this template. Example:
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Step 5
Include "In Order To" |
Now Add "In Order To"
Here's where you actually go beyond the obvious. This part needs work and it can't be done in two seconds. You need to answer some questions to brainstorm about your responses to this part of the chart. Example Okay, so you've found some farm terms Swift is using to describe the Irish poor. What did he use those terms for? Of course he had alternatives. Always assume that the author does EVERYTHING for a reason, especially when they're doing the same thing more than once. (If they weren't, we wouldn't see a pattern, right?) Ask yourself...
Example All right, so Swift could've said, "A child just born from its mother" rather than "A child just dropped from its dam," but what would we lose? Well, we'd lose the farm-ness of "dam," right? Okay, so that's important. What is Swift suggesting by that word? He's essentially saying, "These people are basically livestock." Pretty harsh, right? Aren't we generally supposed to think of and treat the poor better than that? Sure, but do we? Do we do that right now? Are poor people or disempowered people treated with the same respect as wealthy, influential people? If you're saying, "Swift talks about them like they're farm animals and that's unfair because..." then you're on to something. Swift is pretending to be a wealthy British landowner here, so maybe at that point, you can come up with this: "Swift talks about the Irish poor like they're farm animals, revealing that their treatment by British landowners was deeply unfair." Yeah, that's your "in order to" right there. Here's your sentence: [Author] + [strong verb phrase] + in order to [phrase of at least seven words].
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Step 6:
Could This Be a Thesis? |
Yeah, absolutely. If you had seen more patterns, you could add on to your thesis, like so:
In describing the Irish poor, Jonathan Swift sarcastically deploys the language of farm animals and calculates human lives as if they were no more valuable than livestock in order to... You could keep adding, of course. Each unique idea would represent one body paragraph, so the thesis above is a two-body composition. |
Step 7:
You Need the MOWAW |
You Need the MOWAW
To make this more effective, you need to reach for that larger meaning BEYOND this moment or beyond just this text. What's the larger message or point or universal insight or (my favorite) uncomfortable truth that the author is USING this text to communicate? Example With the MOWAW Emphasized
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Your Claims Must Match Your Thesis
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The Thesis Must Match the Claims
In this crucial classroom step, especially the first time you do this, it will be necessary to check the thesis and (when the claim sentences for the body paragraphs are written) to check that the thesis matches the claims (the topic sentences) both in content and in order. For example, if the thesis for a prompt about the 18th-century writer Lord Chesterfield prompt reads like this, then the key ideas highlighted in pretty colors MUST be featured in the claim sentences AND IN THAT SAME ORDER. Example HUMOROUS Thesis In a personal letter to his son traveling abroad, Lord Chesterfield threatens his son with endless downloads of Justin Bieber videos, belittles his son's attachment to Nickelback, and ignores his request for a tribal tattoo in order to emphasize the importance of style and status in the life of an English nobleman. _____________________________________________________________________ The Claim Must Match the Thesis If this is the thesis, then your FIRST claim absolutely must have the words "Justin Bieber" in there. Your SECOND claim absolutely must mention Nickelback, and the third claim has to have the words "tribal tattoo" or a close synonym. Students often have a hard time seeing that the thesis is a kind of itinerary for the essay itself, but it is: Just as an itinerary spells out "Monday: Paris, Tuesday; London, Wednesday: Lithuania," leading us to suspect that on Tuesday, we will be in London, so too does the thesis spell out the two to three major ideas we will be addressing. |
Write Your Body Paragraph
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Template: Example of a Body Paragraph, by Timm Frietas
What, Why, Where, How? Now, my next template is mechanical and repetitive, but it FORCES the students to provide analysis focused on the central purpose of a piece. I FORCE my students to use this template for the first half of the year, and then I show them how to provide variation. This analytic template works for literature as well, and I have included an example that I created. Basically, I force the students to pull everything they write about in their body paragraphs word-for-word from their thesis. I call this template my What/Why, Where, How? Structure. I created it based on reading too many rhetorical analysis essays for AP Lang, and question 1 and 2 essays for AP Lit. (I teach both and those prompts on the Lit exam are constructed the same manner as the rhetorical analysis.) All of the best papers seemed to have topic sentences that identify what an author was doing and why. They followed with the example in the text, and then they explained how the example related to why the author was doing what s/he does in the piece. BODY PARAGRAPH TEMPLATE
Claim Sentence (What/Why):
Data (Textual Evidence /Where):
Warrant (Analysis/How): Here is a suggested template for doing a warrant along with a specific example below so you can see how this all looks when put together.
REPEAT DATA AND WARRANT AS NEEDED. YOU WILL NEED A MINIMUM OF TWO DATAS PER PARAGRAPH. |
Example Paragraph: Portia and Brutus
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First, Portia challenges Brutus’s devotion to their marriage in order to get Brutus to feel guilty for not telling her the reason for his agitation and unrest. Take, for example, the moment in which Portia, after asking Brutus the reason for his emotional turmoil and getting a dishonest response, moves to question if she, “Dwell[s]…but in the suburbs of [his] good pleasure?” (II.i.285), or in other words, she wonders whether she is only a peripheral interest in his life, a question she asksin order to lead Brutus to feel guilty because this question exposes the degree to which Portia feels like she is being mistreated. When Portia essentially calls his love and their marriage into question, she knows Brutus wouldn’t want his wife to believe that she isn’t “in [his] good pleasure,” so Brutus should be moved to prove his love by telling her his secrets. Portia, in this instance, makes it seem as though the only manner in which Brutus can prove his love to her is by revealing the reason he is so troubled, and if he doesn’t, it must mean he does not love her. Knowing that he does love her, Brutus should feel guilty for even moving Portia to consider that she is unloved, and since this is the case, he may be potentially moved to reveal his secret. When Brutus doesn’t reveal the information she wants, Portia follows this question with the assertion that if he cannot tell her, “Portia is Brutus’ harlot, not his wife” (II.i.287), essentially askingwhether she is truly his wife, or only a prostitute, a statement Portia makes to evoke guilt from Brutus because, by keeping secrets from his wife, he is causing her to devalue herself; she says he is treating her as if she were a "harlot," not as if she were an equal partner. Seeing as Brutus he views Portia as a “true […] honorable […and…] noble wife” (II.i.275, 291), it’s implied that Brutus would never want his wife to feel so excluded and devalued. Knowing Brutus as she does,Portia implies that if Brutus tells her his secret, she will no longer feel so unequal, thus prompting a potential revelation from her husband. Next, Portia submissively postures herself in order to get Brutus to feel guilty for not telling her the source of his anxiety. Take, for example, how after all of her other tactics fail, Portia approaches him “upon [her] knees” (II.ii. 270). This gesture of submission should cause Brutus to feel guilty because his wife is embracing a posture a lowly beggar. By humbling herself in such a manner, Portia dramatizes the fact that Brutus is being so cold that she has no other choice but to vulnerably position herself as a slave or commoner, not his wife. She strips herself of her status, and in doing so, hopes to evoke pity from Brutus because if he pities her, he may tell her the reason for his unrest.
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