Warm-Up for Reading and Writing About Literature

© Thoughtful Learning 2018

Numerous tests in high school assess your ability to read and understand literature and poetry. The Common Core assessments for high school English, the ACT and SAT, and the exam for AP English Literature and Composition ask you to read works of literature, answer questions about them, and write thoughtful responses. The activities in this unit will help you develop the skills you need to succeed on these assessments. If you’d like to use these skills on a simulated assessment, see the unit “Practice Test for Reading and Writing About Literature.”

What Is Literature?

We all tell stories—what happened during fifth hour, how the team came back 14 points to win, what the doctor said about your broken arm. . . . These everyday stories help us understand our lives and what is happening around us.

Over thousands of years, some of the best stories have risen to the top as "literature." Despite the lofty title, literature performs the same basic function as everyday storytelling. It helps readers understand what it's like to be alive—where we have been and where we are going. Reading literature also allows you to spend time with some of the most amazing storytellers who have ever lived.

Thinking About Stories

When reporters go out searching for news stories, they try to answer the 5 W's and H. You can use these same questions to think about the basic parts of any story, fiction or nonfiction:

Writing for Assessment

A writing assessment gives you a short time to write in response to a prompt.

To do so, you should use a shortened form of the writing process:

Prewriting (5 Minutes)

Answer the PAST questions.

Purpose? Define imagination and knowledge, tell how they relate, explain Einstein's position and state and support your own.

Audience? The reader of the test

Subject? Imagination and knowledge

Type? Position/argument essay

Write a focus statement.

Imagination and knowledge are like energy and matter: the knowledge is the solid stuff, and the imagination sets it into motion.

Analyzing Writing Prompts

Often tests contain writing prompts that you must respond to. A writing prompt is a specific set of instructions that you must follow to write a well-targeted essay. If you write an excellent response that does not answer the prompt, you will score poorly. To succeed on writing assessments, you must start by analyzing the writing prompt.  You can use the PAST questions:

• Purpose? Why am I writing? (To argue for a position? To compare two concepts? To define key terms?)
• Audience? Who is my reader? (Tester? Classmates? Other citizens?)
• Subject? What topic should I write about? (A problem that must be solved? A key period or discovery?)
• Type? What type of writing should I create? (Position essay? Letter to the editor? Proposal?)

Sample Writing Prompt

Answers to PAST Questions

• Purpose?

  To explain Hawthorne's position and state and support my own position using logic and evidence

• Audience?

  Hawthorne as well as readers of the test responses

• Subject?

  Human societies (specifically Utopias) and the problems that they face

• Type?

  Position/argument essay

Warm-Up for Reading and Writing Assessments

© Thoughtful Learning 2016

Reading is the process of turning 26 letters and a dozen punctuation marks into meaning. Viewed that way, it's almost a form of magic. You decode symbols and transform them into thoughts. But how did those symbols get there in the first place? Writing, of course. Someone had a set of insights and rendered them on the page using just 26 letters and a dozen punctuation marks. The encoding process of writing is just as magical and powerful as the decoding process of reading.

Reading and writing help you learn and think about any subject. They let you succeed in high school, college, and career. Not surprisingly, these skills loom large in all of the key assessments you take now and into the future: the Common Core assessments for high school English, the ACT and SAT, and the AP English assessments. Don't worry. Reading and writing might seem like magic, but you can practice these skills using the specific strategies in this unit. They will help you succeed on assessments and launch into a bright and thoughtful future.

What Is Assessment?

The word assess means to "judge the value" of something. It originally meant "sit beside a judge" to determine the value of a piece of property for tax purposes. In its modern sense, an assessment is a test to measure the value of a set of skills, in this case reading and writing. You've been reading and writing from your earliest days in school, and all that work will help you succeed on the coming assessments you will face. You can also hone your skills with the specific strategies in this unit.

In the following activities, you’ll learn about close reading—reading to understand the thesis statement, topic sentences, details, and vocabulary of the nonfiction texts you’re assigned. You’ll also learn about writing for assessment—writing to express your own ideas during a test. Strong reading skills help you write and vice versa.

In this unit, you’ll learn the reading and writing skills that you need to succeed in nonfiction assessment. If you’d like to use these skills on a simulated assessment, see the unit “Practice Test for Reading and Writing.”

Thinking About Close Reading

To read closely, you need to think about the ideas in a text. You can do this by asking and answering questions:

• Who wrote this text? Who was meant to read it?
• What is it about?
• Why did the person write it (to provide information, to argue for a position, to tell a story, to make people laugh or think)?
• How does the writer communicate the ideas in the text?
• Where and when did this text originally fit? Where and when does it fit now?

Writing the Beginning Paragraph

The beginning first needs to grab the reader's attention. Then it introduces the topic and provides background leading up to your opinion statement. To get started with your beginning paragraph, you can experiment with different lead-writing strategies.

1. Present a startling statistic.

   According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 1 in 10 Americans had a mood disorder last year, and 21 percent will experience one during their lifetimes.

2. Open with an engaging quotation.

   “I try not to worry about the future—so I take each day just one anxiety attack at a time.” 
   ― Tom Wilson, American Cartoonist

3. Create an interesting scenario.

   Imagine that your life had a movie soundtrack. Now imagine that it was the nerve-racking soundtrack to a suspenseful movie. That's what anxiety and depression feel like.

4. Focus on causes.

   Adrenaline is great for fight-or-flight situations, when you need to energize muscles and put nerves on high alert. Adrenaline is less great when there's no threat, but you feel jittery and paranoid anyway, all the time.

Prewriting to Think About Problems

Problems are everywhere in life. You can start to think about problems by considering any aspect of life, from food to families to fun, and think about the problems that can come up in those areas. Start by consulting the Basics of Life List. This list contains all of the essentials of life—general subject areas. Pick one or two subjects that interest you. Then list problems that relate to that subject. You can click on any of these subject areas to find more resources related to it.

One student selected the subject "Personality" to write about and created a cluster to explore pain points with personality. Afterward, the student chose to write about his own struggles with anxiety, depression, and seasonal affective disorder, and the solutions he has found to help him manage his mood states.

Warm-Up for Problem-Solution Writing

When you search for a job, you'll see that employers seek "self-starters" who are "goal-oriented" and "collaborative team members," people who thrive in a "dynamic workplace environment" and take on "diverse challenges." Employers seek problem solvers.

That's a secret to success not just on the job but in life itself: Be the solution person instead of the problem person. The world is filled with problems and with people who love to focus on them. Become one of those rare people who loves to devise solutions—fixing problems and improving life for everyone.

In this unit, you will write an essay that closely analyzes a problem in your community, proposes a specific solution, and argues to convince the reader that it will work. As you develop your essay, you will use the problem-solving process.

What Is the Problem-Solving Process?

© Thoughtful Learning 2018

The problem-solving process is a series of steps that carries a person from knowing little about a problem to creating a satisfying solution. This process switches back and forth between critical and creative thinking, following steps like these:

1. Analyze the problem, exploring causes and effects (critical thinking).
2. Brainstorm solutions—ways to remove or reduce causes and effects (creative thinking).
3. Evaluate possible solutions and choose the best one (critical thinking).
4. Create a plan for implementing the solution (creative thinking).
5. Apply the plan, evaluating each part (critical thinking).
6. Revise, refine, and perfect the solution (creative thinking).

You'll use the problem-solving process right along with the writing process as you create your essay. In fact, they are related. The writing process is one version of the problem-solving process—the steps that take you from knowing little about your topic to having an effective final essay. The lessons in this unit will guide you through both processes. You can get started by thinking about the problems all around you.

Thinking About Problems

"Problem" is a big word. It can refer to something as simple as a hang-nail and something as complex as the national debt. One way to start thinking about problems, big and small, is to focus on "pain points." A pain point is simply something that causes you discomfort. It could be a squeaky desk in second hour. It could be the fact that your best friend is moving to Tucson. Both are problems that need effective solutions.

Editing to Correct Pronoun Usage

A pronoun is a word that stands in the place of a noun or another pronoun (its antecedent). The most familiar pronouns are I, me, my; we, us, our, ours; you, your, yours; he, she, it, they, their, theirs. A pronoun needs to agree with its antecedent. That means both need to have the same person (first, second, or third), the same number (singular or plural), and the same gender (masculine, feminine, neuter, or indeterminate).

Sometimes a singular pronoun replaces a word such as anybody, anyone, everybody, everyone, nobody, no one, somebody, or someone. Notice how these words are third person, singular, and indeterminate, but English has no such personal pronoun to replace it.

You can fix the problem by using alternate pronouns (her or his) or rewriting the sentence to avoid the problem.

Most pronouns change form to create possessives. A personal pronoun with an apostrophe s is a contraction, not a possessive. Make sure to use the correct form.

Revising to Avoid Logical Fallacies

From the first Greek philosophers to today, thinkers have been on the lookout for specific flaws in reasoning—logical fallacies. These errors crop up constantly in advertising, political debates, and lunchroom discussions. You should learn to recognize the following forms of fuzzy logic in the thinking of others and eliminate them from your own thinking.

Logical Fallacies