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.

A chunk is the combination of concrete detail and commentary. It describes the part of the response to literature paragraph that includes one sentence concrete detail and two or more sentences of commentary. It isn’t the whole paragraph; it is the section that comes between the topic sentence and the concluding sentence. One student remembered it as the part between the blue bookends.

Ratio, on the other hand, compares the amount of concrete detail to the amount of commentary in a body paragraph. The ratio we are looking for in a response to literature paragraph is 1:2+. In other words, for every sentence of concrete detail, we want two or more sentences of commentary. The plus (+) is critical. Students may always write more than two commentary thoughts. People have asked how the ratio between concrete detail and commentary came about.

We had scored essays at holistic sessions, including the Advanced Placement® (AP®) English exam; the old SAT writing test (now part of the SAT I); the California state writing assessments for middle and high school; and, local district writing assessments. We wondered if there were magic numbers we could teach students to give them signposts — number of words, sentences, paragraphs. So we started counting everything and discovered that there was, indeed, a numerical yardstick that could guide students. The ratio turned out to be this: Papers that held to this ratio earned higher scores than those that did not. Again, students can always develop their thoughts more; the plus (+) in the ratio means they can include more sentences of commentary. After one student asked, “Is it OK if I have a third thought?” we laughed at ourselves and learned to encourage them even more. However, the textual evidence is important, and novice writers tend to go off topic if they write too many commentary sentences. What happens is that they become so far removed from the CD that they 1) leave the point they were trying to make; and 2) have a difficult time returning to their original thought. Simply monitor.