The Rhetorical Spectrum: A Back-Pocket Strategy for Rhetorical Analysis

My students always struggle with rhetorical analysis writing. It takes a lot of practice and hard work to transition them away from wanting to cherry pick rhetorical devices as if they are playing Where's Waldo. In the beginning, my students always want to write a few sentences explaining the function of said devices, and call it a day. After chatting with other AP Lang folks at #APLangchat on Twitter last school year, I realized my students were among the majority. My students were skimming the passages instead of deeply interpreting the writer’s moves. Instead of grimacing and gritting my teeth each time I read practice timed writes, I decided to change up my instruction to combat these rookie mistakes. I developed this simple activity last spring right before the exam, but decided to be much more intentional with my delivery of it this school year.

The biggest hurdle for successful, thorough rhetorical analysis writing was teaching students to consider the scope of the entire essay; they merely wanted to provide commentary on whatever stood out to them. I needed a quick, put-it-in-your-back-pocket, easy trick to keep them focused and engaged with the entire text. That is how I developed the Rhetorical Spectrum.

Each time my students read an essay, a passage, or even just a paragraph, I have them keep beside them. In the middle of the scratch paper I have them draw a downward facing arrow from the top of the page to the bottom. This is their rhetorical spectrum. The line of the arrow represents the entire essay (beginning to end). 

This is how we use it:

Step 1: Read the essay in its entirety.

Step 2: Divide the spectrum so it correlates with the various sections of the text.

Note: This might be indicated by a tone shift, a topic change, or by the use of a specific rhetorical mode. Regardless, whenever the writer shifts, students should draw a horizontal line through their spectrum to indicate the change. Some readings will have multiple shifts and some readings may have none!

Step 3: At the top of the left side of the spectrum, have students write “What the Writer is Saying.”  In this column students should document a summary of each section (as completed in step 2). They should also indicate where the writer’s thesis and key evidence is located within the reading as it correlates on the spectrum.

Step 4: On the right side of the spectrum, have students write “What the Writer is Doing.” In this column students should document the most significant rhetorical moves the writer is making within each section. Perhaps the writer uses an engaging anecdote? Or an entire paragraph is structured with the use of anaphora? We don’t want a list of every rhetorical strategy in use, just the ones that are most effective or important to the writer’s purpose.

Step 5: At the bottom of the spectrum (under END) students should write a 20-word or less statement that identifies the writer’s purpose. I like to have students wordsmith this as much as possible, because it forces them to key into the text.

Step 6: As a class or small group, I ask students to discuss and answer the following questions:

1. Go section by section on your spectrum. Why does the writer make those specific moves in that specific section?

2. Are there any moves the writer repeats? What is the purpose and effect of repeating those moves?

3. How do the writer's moves help him or her accomplish their purpose?

While this during/after reading strategy is simple, it forces the student to slow down and focus on a writer's moves. You may find that it is helpful for students to review SOAPStone or Jolliffe's Rhetorical Framework before you ask them to complete the Spectrum to help them build their confidence. I have found that the more my students practice using it, the quicker and better they can analyze a text. The best thing about the Spectrum is that it asks the students to look at how the reading is organized and structured in addition to purposeful diction and syntax.

In the beginning, I have students read and complete the spectrum the day before they time write. I allow them to use the spectrum on the timed writes because I want them to understand that for most prompts, students are expected to comment on the development of the entire argument, not just a specific passage. In addition to preparing for timed writes, I also suggest using the spectrum as students prepare for Socratic seminar discussions or any other activities that ask them to take notes and analyze a text.


Here is a sample Rhetorical Spectrum chart for Brian Doyle's essay, "Joyas Volardores."

We Are Students of the World

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One of the most interesting things about AP Lang is its relevance to real world thinking and writing about a multitude of topics.

But one of the most challenging things about the exam is that it's not on any specific topic. Unlike many other AP classes, I can't teach my students the exact content of the exam they're going to take; it's all meant to be cold-read, cold-thinking, cold-writing. I have no way of knowing what issues they'll be asked to consider or what subjects their reading passages will be on. My goal is to teach them how to do the thinking so that when they take the exam, they'll be able to apply it to whatever subject they're given.

One of the keys to success on the exam is, as I tell them, "know a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff." The more background information you have to pull from, and the more practice you have wrestling with ideas, the more likely you're going to be able to do it quickly and efficiently in a high-stakes environment. I have a poster on my wall that says, "Be a Student of the World!"

This is how I live my life, getting excited to learn anything new, any time, any place. And I think it's valuable, and I want to pass that thirst on to my students. But I've always struggled with how to do so effectively.

What does it look like in practice? Do I make them read current events articles and write certain responses? Do I create a REHUGO project that they do with a final product? How do I make sure they're doing this important work without assessing minutiae along the way and overwhelming myself with the load? Is it even meaningful trying to put a point value onto something so organic?

I've tried different things over the years, iterations of all of the above. But the most powerful I've found is to encourage it always, but not put any stakes on it. I use our LMS, Schoology, to create a big group for all of my sections of AP combined; I call it "Think-Pieces." I describe it to them like this:

This should be a collaborative space where we can all share things we read or see that make us want to say "Hey, check this out. This is interesting." My goal is that this year we are all seeing connections outside of the classroom, viewing the world through the lens of rhetoric, and being able to share that excitement with each other.

In our group, everyone has posting and commenting privileges (it is very similar to Facebook interface), so students can easily share an article, write a little blurb, and the class can comment on it.

A screenshot of our group, with all identifying info and student content blurred

If your school doesn't subscribe to an LMS, you can sign up for Schoology on your own, or use other sites like Edmodo or Wikispaces. You could even use Facebook or Twitter to create something similar; the particular platform doesn't matter as long as students are able to share things and interact with each other.

So you're probably asking, are there requirements? Are the points for posting? How do you make students do it? The short of it is, there aren't, and I don't.

I try to remind my classes that what they get out of a class is largely dependent on the thinking and practice effort they put in. I can guide them and provide the opportunities, but in reality their learning is going to come down to their own efforts, whether that ends up being leaps or baby steps.

Sure, some kids won't do it if there aren't points involved; this is a reality that English teachers face each time we assign out of class reading or preparation work. But the ones who truly want to learn for the sake of learning will respond to my frequent reminders of, "Hey, read anything interesting? If so, share it with our group!" And inevitably, those are the students who will be growing by leaps and find themselves most successful on the exam and in college.

Honoring Culture

Last school year, I had ethnically diverse students from the Caribbean, South America, Mexico, New Zealand, Africa, Hawaii, Europe, and Native American tribes. Some students took rigorous classes before AP, while others started as Juniors in AP Lang.  In addition, several students were the first in their family to consider post-secondary education.  Others had parents who did not finish elementary school.

Building on diverse backgrounds engages students in discussion and values their culture.  Our discussions are rich because of the variety of perspectives students express. By using texts from their cultures and contrasting them with other texts, we develop rhetorical analysis and argumentation skills. Students weigh different perspectives to craft arguments and address synthesis questions.  I find the single best preparation for college and success on the AP Language Exam is to focus on writing skill development through intensive process writing using mentor texts.

 

First semester is an essay writing boot camp centered on modes of arrangement—narration & description, cause & effect, classification & division, comparison-contrast, definition, exemplification, and process analysis. Within each mode we write, we study mentor texts.  I seek texts showcasing the mode and also find authors from students' cultures. We examine the rhetorical moves the author makes to accomplish his or her purpose in mentor texts.  We make lists of moves.  Students write using specified moves for each essay, yet choose their own topic. Revision workshops center on rhetorical analysis—does the author's choice of writing strategies accomplish the purpose set for the essay? Students build rhetorical analysis skills while honing writing craft through a combination of mentor text analysis and integrating moves in essay writing.  Students learn which modes of arrangement suit different purposes and how one can combine modes within argument, rhetorical analysis and synthesis essays.  The annual College Board/Atlantic Magazine student essay contest combines modes of arrangement. I also seek additional authentic writing experiences for students to develop writing skills.

While I honor a student's ethnicity, by integrating authors from his or her culture, I also honor a student's intellectual culture.  Students are more engaged in the process because they choose topics for writing. My AP Lang class comprises artists, musicians, scientists, mathematicians, philosophers, and economists.  If mathematicians can better understand a subject as an equation, they create the equation during textual analysis. If I can bring in mentor texts to address intellectual interests, students are more engaged and other class members learn concepts for argumentation evidence.

How do you include culture in your classes?  What essays would you add to the files? Add your comments to the post below.

The link to the files is goo.gl/Ci7hxk

Robin Bucaria

Using Songs with 'The Great Gatsby'

A few years ago I was at a two-day workshop for AP Language, and my presenter walked us through a few things she did with The Great Gatsby. This excited me because I love teaching that novel, and I am always looking for ways to improve what I am already doing with my students. In her session, she talked to us about how she uses Coldplay’s “Yellow” at the novel’s conclusion.

I loved this idea, and it encouraged me to think about how to incorporate songs into more of my lessons. I took her idea, I used it, and added a couple of my own songs to the teaching of the novel. And today I’m going to share those songs and how I use them in my classroom.

First, let me share how I use Gatsby in my class - I use this novel to meet students where they are comfortable (with fiction) and I use it to evaluate where they are in their annotation skills as well as analysis.

With the recent movie version and with Jay-Z as executive producer of the soundtrack, I turned to it for inspiration. (Side note: this is one of my favorite soundtracks, hands down, so narrowing it to just a couple of songs to use proved daunting.)

I use a song for the first time with chapter three. It is the first time readers meet Gatsby, and it is the party scene. How fun can pairing a song here be? “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody (All We Got)” with that chapter seemed like an obvious choice for me.

How I set it up (one class meeting, on block schedule)

1.      The class meeting after they are assigned to read Chapter three, they are given a copy of the lyrics.

2.      I have students draw a line from left to right between each stanza of the song.

3.      On the left side of the page, I have students read each stanza and write a small phrases that summarizes what the song is literally saying.

4.      On the right side of the page, I have students connect the lyrics to the novel, working with anything they have learned between chapters one to three. They cannot use anything past chapter three in their connections.

5.      Once they have completed this part of the assignment, students move on to the graphic organizer. The organizer asks students to think about their five best connections to the novel, write them, and then build on their use of commentary.

This allows me to see if students have been reading while allowing me to offer feedback on their annotations, their connections to the novel, and their commentary. It gives me a place to start building future lessons for them.

Students always ask to listen to the song as they’re working through lyrics, but I tell them I want them to embrace just the words on the page. If time allows, we will listen to it, but by the time they have worked through the song and graphic organizer, there is not time.

Note: Last year I included a sheet to help students think about their annotations. My students sit in groups of 4 to 6, depending on class size. Last school year they sat in groups of 6 to accommodate my class of 36. I created the annotation help sheet so I could move around the room, answer basic questions for students, offer encouragement, but still have something to guide those who were either too shy to ask for help.

My next use of songs happens the class meeting after the assigned final reading. Since my presenter used “Yellow” at novel’s end, and that’s where I started with using songs with Gatsby, that’s also where I started; however, with the soundtrack release, I added a second song as well, and I have loved the results, “Young & Beautiful.”

How I set it up (one class meeting for songs, on block schedule)(video start of next class)

1.      Each song has a graphic organizer that accompanies it. I photocopy the song on the left side of the page with the graphic organizer on the right; I photocopy this assignment front and back.

2.      I ask students to work with “Young & Beautiful” first; however, we view this song as a farewell letter from Daisy to Gatsby. I ask students to draw lines from left to right between each stanza. On the left side of the page, I ask students to write small phrases to tell me what Daisy is literally saying to Gatsby. On the right side, I ask them to connect the stanza to the novel as a whole.

3.      This is fun for me because it results in a lot of interesting conversations among the students. They have great ideas, and it is a way for me to tell almost instantly who has done their readings and who has not.

4.      For the graphic organizer, I want students to work with text evidence and commentary. This time I ask them to pull lyrics from the song to place in the left column; the right column is for their commentary.

5.      Students repeat the entire process above with “Yellow,” except this time they read it as a farewell letter from Gatsby to Daisy.

6.      At the conclusion of this assignment, we watch Coldplay’s video. I ask students to imagine Chris Martin as Gatsby singing to Daisy. We watch the video with no comment, and at video’s end, I ask students what they noticed about the colors, about his body language, about the rain, about looking over his shoulder, etc. It becomes a very interesting conversation.

Ladies and gents, this is how I use songs with The Great Gatsby. If you are interested in having a copy of either of these two lessons, please email me and I will be happy to send them to you as PDFs. 

UPDATE: You should be able to click on the link and it should take you to the assignment now. If you use it, I would love for you to revisit this post and share how it went.

There are so many ways to incorporate songs into our lessons in AP Language. I love using songs because songs define who we are as humans, and it is a common language that goes across generations.

I assign a song project with The Things They Carried as well. This project can be found in our #APLangChat Google folder. I included the assignment, the song list, and pictures of sample projects.

Last school year I used “Man in the Mirror” to teach my students how to notice shift, and this year I have written two lessons from the musical Hamilton, and each lesson ends with an argument prompt.

I would love to hear from you - do you use songs? If so, what do you use and how?

Happy Teaching!

          - The Hodgenator

My Favorite Technology for AP Lang

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Before 2013, I had always hated document cameras.

The first time I'd ever seen one was in college in the mid-2000's and they seemed utterly useless. Our professors would clunk around with it to show us something out of a textbook or a handout, and that was about it. I'd heard they could be really useful for science classes to show an up close version of an experiment or specimen... but I couldn't in any way see them being useful in English class because they just seemed to hard to manage, so dimly lit, etc.

That all changed when my school sent me to a Reading Apprenticeship training, ostensibly to help me with my struggling readers in my low level classes. Our amazing trainers used a document camera to interact with what they were putting on the screen. Writing on paper and having it projected for all to see! Creating handwritten brainstorms with us that we could all look at together! Inviting us up to add to the document! They weren't just using it to put something in front of us the way my college professors had. They were modeling for us what we could do with our students, as is the RA goal.

And with that, a lightbulb went on in my head.

I realized that what my AP students had always struggled with was close reading and annotation. Of course their challenges were on a different level from the Foundations level students, but ultimately they also needed to be an apprentice. And an apprentice needs a "master" to show them, to demonstrate how to do it. Reading Apprenticeship taught me how to think out-loud to model my own close reading skills, which was something my students had never really seen in detail before.

It seems so simple looking back, but so often I think English teachers get into a trap thinking "I assigned _____," so that means I taught it. RA highlighted that teaching and assigning are very different things. So I knew what I needed for the next school year, and I knew I wasn't only going to use it with my foundations students.

My document cam, or Elmo, has revolutionized my teaching in all of my classes, but especially in AP Lang. I have to be the model thinker in the room and the Elmo helps me do that.

At the beginning of the year, I have students bring in visual advertisements out of a magazine. I pick one at random, that I've never seen before and put it under the Elmo. I tell them to time me for two minutes while I do a close-reading/think-aloud of that advertisement. They say "whoa." They had never seen anything like my analysis done at such length before. And I had the proof that this was a first read. It wasn't something I'd already had on my computer, because they'd seen me pick it out of their stack. They heard a true demonstration of what it's like to do a close reading: misreads, roadblocks, and all. Then one of them comes up and tries it with a different advertisement. Then they do it on their own with a partner.

A little bit later in the year, we transition into doing the same thing with written texts. At this point, I both think aloud and annotate the text; I use lots of circles and underlines and arrows, but I also scribble all over the margins and in between the lines. One of my favorite texts to use for this is the beginning of Vladimir Nabokov's "My Father's Butterflies" because it's really hard; the students see what it's like to need close reading just to decode a text. Then I switch gears and use the first few paragraphs of Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak; I show them how I can also close-read a very easy text, but the value is that I dig into it rather than just getting the plot. Here my think-aloud and my annotations demonstrate noticing things she's doing with her language. Sound important for Lang?

I can also have students write in class and then immediately put them up on the cam for review. As a class we talk through each example, pointing out strengths and weaknesses. It's so immediate and accessible.

Last year I even found myself using it for our daily agenda. I used to write the agenda in my plan book, and then copy it onto the white board. By the end of the year, I would just put my plan book under the camera for all to see. Same with bell-ringers. It saved me a few precious minutes and sanity. I could have that up while not sacrificing my laptop screen to the projector while I was also trying to take attendance.

So you might be asking yourself, "But can't you do the same thing with a SmartBoard?" You probably can, but I would argue with not quite the same ease. In my experience, writing with those electronic markers is clunky at best. Sure, I could probably underline or circle, but could I write in the margins and have it readable? The thick lines of the pixels and the inevitable distance between where I put the pen vs. where it shows up on the screen? I don't know about you, but I get frustrated with that really quickly. When I annotate in the margins, I want to be able to fit a lot into those margins, not have each word be three inches high and in really awkward handwriting with letter parts missing. And I definitely couldn't put up student work instantaneously with a SmartBoard.

I'm positive that many teachers have and use SmartBoards really effectively in AP Lang. But if you've always been frustrated with the SmartBoard's limitations or are getting the opportunity to choose a new technology for the first time, I recommend checking out a document camera for a less expensive and perhaps more seamless experience.

Have you ever used a document camera for any cool activities? Comment below to share your experiences!

Developing Voice using the Classic Essay

As I prepare to begin a new year, I’m struggling with the teaching of writing in my AP Lang (and Lit) classes. There is a difference between the variety and types of essays they read, and the types of essays they write in preparation for the exam. Late this summer I picked up the book The Journey Is Everything by Katherine Bomer on the recommendation of Liz Matheny (@matheeli). In that book, she argues that we should teach the essay as Montaigne originally conceived it and as most professional writers continue to write it. As Bomer writes,

An essay does not offer to help us install window shades, it does not claim to know the major causes of the Civil War, and it does not try to win a debate for or against the death penalty. Instead, an essay gives its author the space, time, and freedom to think about and make sense of things, take a journey of discovery, and speak her mind, without boundaries besides those imposed by the writer herself (and perhaps by the rules of polite society, but not always) (Bomer 18).

This inquiry based approach, rather than a response to a prompt, is the type of writing often done both in college and in the wild. Am I failing my students if I don’t also prepare them for this (in addition to literary criticism, rhetorical analysis, reports, arguments, etc)? My students typically take so long to master the forms of rhetorical analysis, argument, and synthesis that I wonder if I will have the time. 

As the opening of the school year fast approaches for me (September 1st for my and many other schools up here in the Pacific Northwest), I’m playing with the idea of opening the year with a short unit on the personal, inquiry-based essay as conceived by Montaigne. Perhaps coupling that focus with Nancy Dean’s Discovering Voice (I use her original Voice Lessons in AP Lit) will help my students develop the strong voices they need to help them move up into the 7+ range on the test. 

The reason I think this might work is this: real voice comes from confidence and agency. If students can find that in themselves by being given freedom in their writing they aren't used to having, but are still guided toward a high and laudable end, it should be much easier to apply when writing in the forms required on the test.

I think it’s an experiment worth trying. What do you think? Does anyone have experience with such an approach? Please share in the comments.

#aplangchat Fall 2016 Chat Schedule

Welcome back! As we kick off #aplangchat for the 2016-17 School Year, here is a “plan” for the rest of 2016.

We’ve decided to bring back our monthly combo chat with the AP Lit folks on the first Sunday of every month during their regular time slot from 9-10pm ET. We’ll be using the hashtag #apengchat for those sessions only.

On weeks when we do #apengchat on Sunday, we will not do a formal Lang Chat the following Wednesday. During our regular time slot that week, feel free to jump on and chat with each other about your needs using the #aplangchat hashtag during our regular time (8-9pm ET), but there will be no formal questions.

All other weeks we will be on our regular Wednesday schedule, except breaks for holidays as noted below. I’m asking the #aplangchat community to assist with hosting duties once per month. Please send me a message if you would like to host on one of the dates indicated below

Here’s a chart for each month to help clarify.