November Unit: Analysis 101
A unit to start your students down the road of textual analysis with fundamental skills.
I was so excited when a community member reached out to ask if I had a unit plan on analytical writing. I love this stuff. In fact, I wrote a book on it.
But before we get into this month’s unit plan, let me give you the Cliffs Notes version:
We are preparing our students to be analytical thinkers and writers, not English majors. (Of our students who go on to higher learning, less than 2% of our students will go on to study literature.)
The skills of analysis are universal regardless of what you are analyzing: writing with passion, developing ideas (claims and evidence), using a logical and persuasive structure, and using an authoritative voice (which includes grammatical conventions).
Student writers are rarely successful when they are trying to learn these analytical writing skills through literary analysis. They aren’t literary experts. And they end up spending most of the experience struggling to understand the text, not becoming strong analytical writers.
Students learn these transferrable skills of analysis best when they are encouraged to first learn them through texts on which they are experts (sports, music, tv, movies, video games, etc.) and then apply them later to literary texts if that is an important aspect of your curriculum.
And so, this Analysis 101 unit (look for Analysis 201 as our December unit!) shares 8 lessons that teach students the fundamentals of analytical writing:
What is analysis? And what kinds of texts can we analyze?
Finding an idea you care about
What do writers do when they analyze YOUR kind of text?
How to break a text down into smaller pieces for examination.
How to articulate a claim
How to support your claim with a variety of evidence
How to find an authentic, logical structure for your ideas
How to find and use authoritative word choice
Alright, here it is: