Class Agenda: Close Reading Day

ENG 102 Close-Reading

Lesson Goal: The goal for today’s lesson is for you to practice successful direct quotations, quotation paraphrases, and quotation explications (close-reading), or what’s often called critical thinking.

Directions

1.      First, let’s go over the Claude McKay poem “If We Must Die” (it’s his most famous) as a class. We will write a class sentence that gives a basic claim about the poem so that we can move forward in our practice. Each group will use this claim to guide their work.

2.      Next, let’s remind our selves what we do with direct quotations in a paper.

3.      Now, let’s get into groups to practice writing the kinds of sentences we need to make in our ENG 102 essays. To do this, each group will do the following:

-          find a manageable quote you believe supports the poem’s overall meaning and brings out new meanings from the poem’s message (or makes a finer point about it)

-          successfully put this phrase into a direct quotation sentence

-          paraphrase the quote in a sentence (someone in the group should be the secretary at this point)

-          explain the significance of the poem in a sentence. To do this, choose one or different kinds of interpretive strategies:

o   say why the image, word choice, metaphor, or phrase is so significant to you;

o   connect the phrase to another phrase or line in the poem, and thereby how it creates a meaningful theme in the poem;

o   and/or expand on the quoted phrase by clarifying for the reader how the phrase connects to a larger theme within McKay’s work (thus far that we’ve read). 

4.      When you’re done, I’d like every group to read at least three sentences to the class: the direct quotation sentence, the paraphrase, and the ‘significance’ of the poem sentence(s).

Everyone in the group should take notes and write the sentences down so that they have models for themselves going forward. Indeed, I’ll ask each student to practice these skills on their own by the end of the class.