Another way to understand what you are reading is to analyze and “unpack” it. We will attempt to do just that by reading deeply into a small passage (an excerpt) of some reading we’ve already done.
If you’d like an example of what your finished paper would look like, I’ve provided one in this week’s module.
Passage-Based Paper (PBP) Assignment
Excerpted / derived from: Carillo, Ellen C. “Making Reading Visible in the Classroom.” Currents in Teaching and Learning, vol. 1, no.2, 2009, pp.37-41.
Description: You will choose one of the the short passages (3-6 sentences) below and write a 1 page “passage-based analysis” on your selected excerpt. Choose an excerpt that you believe to be rich with meaning or significance.
Purpose: The PBP offers you the opportunity to experience the connections between the interpretive practices of reading and writing. These papers give you the opportunity to engage in close textual analysis (a dying art form!) and to grapple with difficult ideas that come up in the texts that we read. The PBP offers practice attending to textual evidence very carefully—a skill often required of many formal and research-based reading and writing contexts.
YOUR PAPER SHOULD BE 350-500 WORDS.
Format:
Transcribe (copy) the passage (A SINGLE PASSAGE, chosen from the options below) onto the top of the page, and include the page number/s from which the passage is taken.
The goal of your analysis is to “unpack” this passage. Focus on helping readers understand both what and how the writer is communicating his or her claim or idea, and how that point is being communicated to readers.
Pay close attention to things like language, word choice, tone, and rhetorical strategies or appeals (see the materials on rhetorical appeals in this week’s chapter). Please note that the point is the Passage-Based Paper is to focus closely on the text itself—which is different from your opinions, reactions to, or feeling about the text. Those are important, too—and we will discuss those elsewhere.
Finally connect the passage you’ve chosen to the rest of the chapter it comes from. In other words, once you have completed a close, textual analysis of the passage, contemplate and explain the meaning of the passage and its place in or contribution to the meaning(s) of the chapter as a whole.
Here are your choices for the excerpts to analyze, taken from the Craig Hulst’s chapter “Grammar, Rhetoric, and Style” (in this week’s module).
“We are born to love language and everything associated with it—rhythm, rhyme, word meanings, grammar. If you want to make a three-year-old child roll on the floor laughing, just tell her a riddle, or alliterative words, or read her Dr. Seuss’s lilting rhythms and rhymes about cats in hats or elephants who are ‘faithful, one hundred percent’ or Sam I Am eating green eggs and ham on a boat with a goat. Listen to a child in a crib entertaining himself by repeating sounds and syllables, playing with language. Think about the games you played in kindergarten by creating strange words like Mary Poppins’ supercalifragilisticexpialodotious. Keep a ten-year old entertained on a car trip by producing odd sentences in a ‘Mad Libs’ game. Then ask an eighth grader what subject she hates most. The answer invariably will be grammar. We’re born to love grammar. We’re taught to hate it. (vii-viii)” (87).
“Grammar doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way. We shouldn’t need someone to tell us that we are wrong, and then to make us memorize a bunch of rules in order to speak or write. What grammar should be is a tool to help us better communicate with our audience—a tool that we are controlling, rather than one that controls us. Grammar should be a tool that we use to fit our language to our purpose and our audience” (87-88).
“When we write, we are entering into a conversation with our reader, and the grammatical choices that we consciously make can show our readers that we understand what they want from us, and that we are giving them what they expect. In your academic writing, the rhetorical situation demands that you make grammar choices that are appropriate for college-level writers. Unfortunately, these grammar choices are not static; they will change—perhaps only slightly, perhaps greatly—as your writing situation changes, as you write for different teachers, courses, or disciplines. In your other writing, the rhetorical situation may call for an entirely different set of grammar choices” (90).
