Writing Unit 3: "Baby" Literary Essay
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS:
How can I develop ideas about a story and support them with evidence from the text?
How can I learn to structure an essay in a way that will best support my claim?
How can I independently draw on all that I know about essay writing and independently write an essay from beginning to end?
SKILLS:
1-Writers can grow ideas about stories and support them with evidence from the text by:
Studying what characters say, think, and do, and why (character motivations).
Studying how a character changes across a text.
Locate evidence from the beginning, middle and end of a story.
Writers structure their essays by:
Looking for the evidence that is the strongest and thinking about which evidence is most important.
Tracking one idea across multiple parts and writing about how a character changes.
Using checklists to self-assess the structure of their essay.
Writers can raise the level of their essay writing by:
Making precise and true statements about characters by seeking out the best word to describe who that character really is as a person.
Writing a theme essay by thinking about the lesson(s) the character is learning.