Materials Needed: pp. 27 and 41 in your Analytical Response to Literature guide; set of pens. Participants will copy the sentence provided on p. 27 and take notes on p. 41.

Commentary (CM), the missing piece, the “so what?”, was born one day during a one-to-one conference with a gifted junior. He was writing an essay about how Lake Erie had changed since he had been a young boy living there. He brought his prewriting to the teacher at her desk. The teacher looked over the list of concrete details and told the boy to analyze his examples — pollution, dead fish, oil slicks on the beach, the fire when the Cuyahoga River burned. The teacher said, “These look good – now go analyze them.”

The boy said, “I have no idea what you teachers mean by analyze.” This was a reasonable statement; he wanted to do the assignment but didn’t know how to begin or what it should look like when he was finished. Then the teacher asked him to say how the experience had changed or affected him. He thought for a few seconds and said, “I realized my past was lost. The cherished days of my childhood were ruined. The halcyon days were behind me.” The boy really said “halcyon.” Schaffer was speechless that a student knew the word and used it correctly. The teacher said, “You did it — what you said to me was analysis. And we’re going to call it commentary because you commented to me about your details.”

"Commentary" is a far more user-friendly word for teenagers than analysis and interpretation. That day began a departmental conversation about what it means to analyze a topic and how to lead teenagers away from plot summary — the bane of English teachers’ existence — and toward deeper thought. Most teachers don’t remember how they learned to write. They often taught themselves and alone made the leap from plot summary to analysis. Some know a certain person who helped them, but most of us have no memory of the moment. We just did it.

That student’s reactions made us realize two points:

1) Talking is the missing link in thinking. Students can say what they are thinking but need help getting it down on paper.

2) We assumed far too much about both content and mechanics, and that has rung true ever since. We thought students knew about topic sentences and indentations and analysis, but we were wrong on every count. We like to think we’ve made unwarranted assumptions less frequently since then.