Analytical Writing Skills

I was a college professor for ten years and developed the curriculum for all courses in the department sequence (10 different courses). In the advanced writing course students need to learn analytical skills, such as the ability to analyze one work of literature from multiple different perspectives.

Students are able to not just comprehend literature ("What it says"), but to read a work of literature, and interpret one work through the lens of different literary theories (for instance, psychoanalysis, or post-modern theory, or feminist theory, asking "How would someone from X theory interpret this, and how might that be different than an interpretation from Y theory?").

To meet this goal, students need:

• Practice with seeing a work from multiple perspectives.

• Awareness of tendencies to "pick a position" and only write from that position, which creates bias.

Challenge: most students at the college level aren't excited about reading academic or scholarly works on literary theory or long essays. How can we help them to practice the skill in short exercises that will translate to longer written essays?

Practice Activities:

• Share spoken word poetry videos on YouTube (Daniel Beaty, "Knock Knock"; Taylor Mali, "The Problem With Teachers"; Alicia Keyes, "POW") that are more likely to get student buy-in than longer literary theory essays.

• First, analyze each spoken word piece simply by assessing what the central message is in its most reductive form. At the advanced level, this is typically easy for students (they've tested into, or completed pre-work for, this coursework).

• From there, ask students to assess each of the spoken word pieces from different perspective: a feminist perspective, a republican or democrat perspective, an immigrant perspective, etc.

• We also ask: whose voices are missing? Who isn't in the room?

For homework, students will compare and contrast the perspectives of two of the spoken word poets and turn in a short, 1-page composition.

Later in the semester, students will learn about one theory of literary analysis every other week, and we will turn back to the spoken word pieces and analyze them through a different analysis lens, each week.

Training was delivered in-person to a classroom of advanced placement English students. In addition to the core curriculum, I needed to be aware of the needs of students who spoke English as a second language and those who needed accessibility accommodations.

Through implementation:

• Students become more aware that "analysis" is another form of "perspective taking." They can see the spoken word pieces from different perspectives, and this doesn't mean they have to pick one perspective and argue solely on its behalf.

• Analysis of not just what is said, but also what perspectives might be missing, and this awareness helped students to think critically.

We know that a student is starting to gain more skills in this area when they are able to think critically about the perspectives that might be missing and are able to go beyond just "I agree or disagree with this perspective." This will show up in classroom discussion as well as in written essays where students write from different perspectives.

As a student's skill develops, they'll understand how two different literary theories might interpret the same work differently, and they'll access their own schema for this understanding when we talk about how two different political parties might interpret the same economic policy, differently.

Additional work: students will later develop the ability to not just analyze a point from two different sides, but to write argumentative papers that uses literary theory to argue for two different viewpoints using the same work (eg., a two-part paper that analyzes the work of Charlotte Bronte, first from a structuralist perspective and then from a Marxist perspective).