
Writing Literary Analyses guides your students step by step through the process of analyzing a work of high school literature. Students can focus their analyses on any story element: plot, character, setting, conflict, or theme, or a combination of these. Instructions, activities, examples, interactives, and downloads help students learn new skills for analyzing literature. You can also present this unit right from your interactive whiteboard.
First students warm up by exploring the classic plot line. Then they read a sample literary analysis about the novel Watership Down. After responding to the sample analysis, students work step by step through the process of writing their own character analyses:
- Prewriting activities help students select a work of literature, focus on an important story element, and gather key details about it.
- Writing activities help students write a beginning that grabs the reader's interest, gives the title and the author, and provides the thesis for the analysis. The middle paragraphs develop main points that support the thesis, using quotations and other evidence from the literature. The ending paragraph thoughtfully wraps up the analysis.
- Revising activities help students correctly use literary present tense and smooth their analyses using transitions. Students also get a peer review and use a checklist to improve their analyses.
- Editing activities help students correct subject-verb agreement and punctuation of quoted evidence from the literature. An editing checklist includes common errors for students to correct.
- Publishing activities help students create a clean final copy of their analyses and reflect on what they have learned.