Close Reading Club

After evaluating three classes and their rhetorical analyses of Benjamin Banneker's letter, a common theme began to appear: students were not close reading the text for its overall strategies and were not fully comprehending the prompt. This could stem from nerves at a timed prompt or a lack of experience with how to close read a passage. As there are some of you with ethos in the close reading field and some of you completely foreign to the concept, it is fortunate that we will be spending quality time with close reading a variety of texts over the upcoming weeks.

For those of you who want to foster stronger prompt understanding, close reading skills, and strategy identification sooner rather than later, I will be instituting a Close Reading Club, which will start next week. This is an optional club that will feature passages from articles, essays, and actual AP prompts. Ideally, we will start with a recent article and then do an AP-style prompt to show the transference of strategies in different styles of writing. I highly recommend that you attend any or all of these club days - which will vary according to my after school commitments with Scholar Quiz and meetings - in the upcoming weeks. You will be able to keep all of the passages, and you will be able to discuss these passages with me (of course) but also your fellow classmates in a smaller setting.

The first Close Reading Club will be Monday, September 25. Future club days will be announced via the blog and will not always be on Monday for those of you with commitments on that general day.

The basis of close reading is noting words and patterns in the text. As soon as you start the reading selection, begin to circle words that stand out to you. Eventually, those words create a pattern - a diction shift, repetition patterns, tone shifts, persuasive appeals, and all those frisky upper level strategies that you are learning. Find three patterns and you have three strategies for your essay.

Tomorrow, you will receive your essays for the Banneker prompt. Thus far, two of the classes have improved their average score; one class has dropped in average.  (I'm in the midst of the last class.) While this may be disappointing in the short term, it should be noted that this is a diagnostic prompt and now you know what you need to do to excel in rhetorical analysis writing. And a great deal of lower level essays misread the prompt regarding audience, possibly mislabeled strategies, and continued to create distractions via informal reference to the author/audience, full sentence textual evidence and mechanical issues. All of the aforementioned errors are FIXABLE if you take the time and effort to continue close reading and rhetorical analyses practices. Just as when you struggle with math or chem or any other subject, you often have to do supplementary work to improve. For those willing and needing that supplementary work, you now have another option to help you out.

I shall now return back to the last 23 prompts to evaluate, and I hope to see you on Monday for our first Close Reading Club. Remember, if you are struggling, you need to ask for help and assistance to improve your writing levels.