The Problem:
My students love to write summary. At times, when working through a batch of essays, I think my students must write summary on purpose, like if they do, I’ll step in and rewrite their papers; I’ll do the thinking for them. I began to assign more structured essays, thinking that a very detailed and specific scaffold, a fool-proof map, would guarantee that they would stay focused on analysis and get to the points that I was waiting for them to make. Structure didn’t work. Even though I provided a big block of space on my beautiful handouts under the bolded heading “Analysis of Quotation,” students happily continued to write summery. At 2002 CATE conference, I attended Jane Schaffer’s session where she discussed the importance of structure. While I’ve not adopted that structure, one item from her session stuck with me: the word commentary.
That single word may not seem like a big deal, but it has changed the way I teach literary analysis to my transfer-level students. I have been able to find suggestions in the field to help students write more lively, engaging essays about literature, and while many of those suggestions sound like fun ideas, I can’t see how the prompts help students write the formal, analytical essays that my students are required to write. I found that most teachers who discuss strengthening student response to literature completely scrap the analytically driven essay. For a moment, I was relieved to find agreement that there is a time and place for the formal essay in Virginia R. Monseau’s book Responding to Young Adult Literature, but I failed to find an explanation on how her creative ideas for responding to literature help students shape those academic essays. For instance, I can see using her assignment to ask students to select a character from the story and select an item that they think the character would donate to a charity auction as a prompt for a quick write. She says the activity helps students “escape the bonds of the traditional essay form” (64). The prompt succeeds in that students cannot summarize the story to answer this question; they have to step outside of the story and consider the character’s values; they begin thinking. But what happens when they begin to compose? I continue to struggle to find a way to include student response to this prompt into character analysis essays.
Sheridan Blau applauds unconventional prompts for opening up student response and encouraging individual analysis. He suggests that well-organized essays, even with sufficient commentary, often fail because they “treat texts as objects requiring mechanical analysis rather than as invitations to genuine human illumination and pleasure” (101). Blau encourages his students to take risks, sometimes turning in a collection of chunks of ideas or notes that need none of the traditional markers like thesis or transitions. He does not discourage the use of “I” because the pronoun helps students to engage with the text (Blau 161). Again, I can see using these techniques to engage a student, but when it comes to asking a student to tackle the traditional thesis-driven essay, any enthusiasm my students were showing drops away.
So how does the word commentary both engage the student and regain their enthusiasm during the composing process of the thesis-driven essay? Because the word gives students confidence that they are often lacking. Blau also notes that writing is a problem “because students don’t always cooperate by having the kind of intellectual experience we anticipate for them” (152). Students fail to satisfyingly discuss the text because analyzing literature is a foreign concept for so many students. Most do not spend their free time reading. Few spend time sitting together with their friends discussing books that they have read. How, then, can we expect them to have any kind of familiarity with what we are asking them to do when we analyze literature? Those two words—analyze and literature—intimidate me; they freeze students. Introducing commentary first and asking them to become commentators, I’ve found, provides students with the confidence to analyze a piece of literature.
What We Do:
Around week three of our eighteen-week semester, I ask my students to make a list of situations where they offer commentary in their everyday lives. I’ve not talked about analyzing stories at all at this point. We have talked about plot structure but not about using the elements to analyze a story. I want to start with what they know first. Students easily come up with a list of places they see commentary: news, sports, politics, fashion, entertainment. These always make the list. I pull sports into a new column, and I ask the student to tell me what a sports commentator has to do. Students note that sports commentators critique, judge, offer insight, reflect, categorize, offer historical context, evaluate, give background, maybe even give personal history of a player.
That said, I ask if we offer commentary on people. If a friend asks our opinion of her new boyfriend, what do we consider when answering? We take note of their motivation, their accomplishments and experiences. We critique how they look, how they act and speak. I’ll ask my students if we can give these opinions after shaking hands with this new boyfriend on his way out the door after a date. Of course not. We haven’t seen enough of the person. At this point, I can confirm that my students are, in fact, very competent commentators, and I can also praise them for knowing that they must spend time with a subject before considering taking up the role of commentator. I also emphasize that commentators are experts in their field. Former ice-skaters give commentary for figure skating events, not nuclear scientists. I respect the knowledge a professional football player has for his craft, but I’d never ask him to critique a dog show. Students must, then, strive to be experts about the story they analyze. To do so, they must read texts all the way through, and they must read texts more than once. Unprepared students cannot possibly take up a position in the commentator’s booth, offering their opinions to hundreds of thousands of people, and they know this.
The sports metaphor also helps me introduce quote selection. Sports commentators also have to select instant replays where they offer in-depth discussion of one moment of the game. We do the same thing while analyzing literature when we choose a quotation. Sheridan Blau created an assignment called “pointing” where he asks students to “call aloud lines or phrases from the text that move[] us, touch[] us or resonate[]for us in any way” (129). I use this exercise because it helps establish what the good action replays are. Not every line of the text is crucial to the whole. Some are much more important, and some are worth hearing again and again. Most importantly, this assignment forces student to select quotations that are crisp and to the point. We don’t have time to sit down and watch the whole game again, and this makes sense to students because they certainly don’t want to read aloud for more that a few seconds.
After reading lines aloud for a minute, Blau asks his students to copy a line from the text onto the top of the page and spend seven minutes writing about the significance of that one quote. The brief one. I used to have problems convincing students to limit their quotations to the most important bit. Now, I walk around as they are writing, and I can note early on, before they become attached, that they need to pare down to the absolute minimum. After the pointing exercise, most do not have trouble jotting down a brief quotation, and once it looks like most of the students have one, I remind them that the audience is listening to them. This is the moment where if the audience member is at home, the viewer is either going to listen or press mute. This is not the time to say that a figure skater who fell just missed his jump. This isn’t the time to say that Serena Williams just hit the ball over the net. We don’t expect a commentator to tell us what we just saw. We want more, and that’s what I want my students to do. I want them to explain the significance of the instant replay they have just selected.
Lastly, I discuss the importance of signal words. We’ve done two pieces that are central to essay writing: we’ve practiced finding strong proof, and we’ve practiced giving commentary on those quotes. So how do we string them together? Writers need to do two things: offer a transition and establish where the reader is in the text. Sports commentators are lucky most of the time: everyone is watching the game together, and the instant replay is, indeed, instant. There is no need to reference when the play occurred. They do, however, need to focus our attention. We’re probably not going to focus on the play as a whole. Most of the time, the commentator wants us to focus on something specific: the way Serena holds her racquet or the amount of space between Michael Jordan’s feet and the ground. Here I ask my students to be as specific as they can about where they want my attention in the quote they just selected. They might want to focus on one word or point out the significance of an action, maybe even noting how the action is different than the character’s normal behavior. If a sports commentator makes this kind of comparison, perhaps by making a reference to an athlete’s prior performance, they would need to alert the audience that they are stepping outside the moment of the game. This keeps viewers from getting confused. Just as sportscasters need to learn key phrases in order to guide the audience, students need to learn the lexicon associated with literary analysis for the same purpose. I like to make a list of transitions that writers often use to lead readers through analysis: in addition, furthermore, one way, just as, this is evident. These words help students to assemble their evidence and construct their essays.
But Does It Strengthen the Essays?
Confidence is everything. When my students believe that they know how to pick apart someone’s actions, which is really what character analysis is all about, they do not feel so intimidated about putting those ideas on paper. Knowing that they are the commentator, offering evaluation of a character in a story or specializing in another literary device such as irony or symbol, they are aware of their job. It is not a foreign thing anymore.
The semester that I explored this new language and approach, I saw a marked difference in the essays. I have taught Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” for years and found that students tended to gravitate toward very similar quotes. Now that I focus on commentary in bits and pieces as I work up to the essay, I find that students select stronger quotes. After equating selection of quotes with instant replays, one student focused on Mama’s wearing overalls. She used the quote to support her idea that Mama really is comfortable with who she is because she does not care about fashion. She then compared Mama to Dee who has donned traditional African garb. In comparing the two and how they dressed, she offered a much more in-depth look at the Mama’s self-confidence.
In addition to students making stronger connections, we also have a shared language. It used to be that when a student summarized, I said, “This is summary. You need to analyze here.” To most of my students, that made as much sense as “Verb tense being marked once and once only on the first element of the verb phrase.” Huh? Now when students summarize, I say, “You just told me that Serena hit the ball over the net. I already saw that for myself.” Before I can even offer a suggestion, they hold up their hand to stop me and ask, “Wait, what about this?” Working within the structure of the analytical essay, they are engaging with the text. Even better, I am enjoying their composing process. I get excited, lean in close, and say, “You’re in the commentator’s booth, and 50,000 people are waiting to hear your opinion on this quotation. What are you going to say?”
Works Cited
Blau, Sheridan, D. The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers. Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003.
Monseau, Virginia R. Responding to Young Adult Literature. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1996.
