We all know that analytic verbs are important in text response essays. We want students to analyse and discuss how an author, construction element or text as a whole demonstrates, highlights, reveals (and so on) meaning. While these types of verbs are important to teach, there is another set of equally important verbs in text response writing: cause and effect verbs. Look at this paragraph below from an essay about Oedipus The King:
Most of the verbs in the example paragraph above analyse the text by specifying a character’s actions, where they come from or where they lead to. Let’s have a look at another example. The paragraph below is from an essay about Twelfth Night. One of the verbs (‘depicts’) is a classic analytic verb that is used to analyse how Shakespeare conveys meaning. However, many of the other verbs in blue focus on discussing character actions or responses to events:
The age old wisdom ‘don’t summarise a text’ when writing a text response essay carries with it the implication that we shouldn’t really discuss what characters do. Yet, good analytic writing will often do exactly that. The trick is to be specific about a character’s actions and what are the causes and effects of these (that’s the analytic part). One way we can teach students to do this is by regularly using a ’cause and effect analysis’ thinking routine when we unpack scenes or moments from a text. This routine has the two steps outlined in the resource below (it can be downloaded from here):
Basically, after reading or watching through a scene, we want students to take notes about what characters (or groups) do, don’t do, think or feel in that scene. For instance, having read over the opening to Oedipus The King, students might note down about Oedipus in the ‘do’ and ‘want’ column:
*Talks a lot
*Takes centre stage
*Wants his people to see him as a leader
Next, students consider how to take this notes about actions and feelings and turn them into a cause and effect analytic sentence using any of the sentence starters and vocabulary in step 2. So, they might write:
Oedipus seeks to be centre stage at the beginning of the play, highlighting his hubristic and arrogant nature.
