Purpose
In this 20-30 min in-class activity, students practice finding key themes in a text that they can use to unify their essays. The purpose of this is twofold. First, it helps students think critically by first observing details in a text and then identifying larger patterns. Second, in an essay, it helps students ensure their arguments all speak back to a central idea or story, instead of just feeling like a list.
Steps
- Watch or read a short text in class. Choose a text or excerpt of no more than a page or 5 minutes will help students focus on the details.
- In groups, ask students to spend 5 minutes discussing what they noticed in the text. Ask them to look for both specific details and patterns. While they’re discussing, make sure the text is visible. This might mean playing the text silently in the background, keeping the text up on a projector, or ensuring all the students have the printed text in front of them.
- On a piece of paper or whiteboard, write the text’s title in the middle. Preferably, this should be visible to the students.
- Ask students to list techniques the text is using and list those out around the title, preferably in a second color. These might be things like imagery, word choice, music, personification, etc.
- Ask students to list specific examples of the techniques as they appear in the text and list those around the techniques, preferably in a third color.
- Ask students what themes appear in those examples and list those around the examples, preferably in a fourth color.
- Sometimes students will say something that actually fits into a category you are not currently discussing. So a student might list a specific example of imagery before the word imagery is on the board. Be prepared to sort your students examples and discussion as you go.
- Pick one theme and ask small groups of students to write three topic sentences explaining how the text represents that theme in different ways, referencing specific examples from the text. Give students approximately 10 minutes to do this.
Example
Watch Fiji Water’s ad, “Where Does FIJI Water Come From?“
Below is an image that shows techniques (yellow), specific examples (orange), and themes (pink) that students noticed. The image links to a page with the words from the image listed out.
One of the common themes was the idea that Fiji Water is healthy. When writing topic sentences, students chose to write about the words filtered and untouched and the part of the water cycle where the ad explains this is the finest bottled water. Here are three example sentences:
By using the word filtered, the ad implies that Fiji water gets rid of bad toxins, creating a pure water.
The word untouched emphasizes purity, but this time by implying that their natural water doesn’t have bad things in it and is in fact unprocessed.
The image of the final bottle of water implies that by filtering untouched water, the consumer will receive a clean and naturally preserved product.
Variations and Follow-Ups
- Students can pick two themes in order to make a more complex argument
- Ask each student group to organize their information differently. For example, one group writes each paragraph based on a different technique, so one paragraph is about word choice, one about imagery, and one about music. The second group organizes their paragraphs by variations on a theme, so one paragraph is about how healthy water helps the environment, one paragraph is about how healthy water comes from remote water sources, and one paragraph is about how healthy water is created through a careful process. The third group organizes their paper chronologically, so the first paragraph is about the cloud imagery at the beginning of the ad, the second paragraph is about the rain forest imagery that follows, and the final paragraph is about the final image of the bottle of water. This can be followed by a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of each of these organizational structures and which one students would like to use.
- Right after this activity or later in the class, you can ask your students to do the same thing for the text they’re analyzing