In the lead up to our workshop on compare and contrast essay writing (see the details here: https://www.tickingmind.com.au/event/teach-compare-contrast-essay-writing-years-10-11-northcote/) we’ve got some more ideas to share about practising complex comparative writing. In our last blog, we spoke about the need for students to make frequent connections between texts. In this post, we want to extend that notion to frequent and deep connections. As always, the trick to extending students’ capacity lies in the way we model and scaffold a process with language. Here is an example of a few sentences which follow a process we call Surface and Deeper Connection:
First statement: | Priam is a character who feels a profound sense of duty in his role as leader. |
Linking sentence: | On the surface, Mandela in Invictus appears to be similarly motivated. |
Surface connection: | Like Priam, Mandela’s sense of duty as a leader in a time of crisis weighs heavily on him and like Priam, Mandela feels the need to do something that is a “suprise” in order to break the cycle of violence and bitterness that has become the norm. |
Deeper connection: | However, at a deeper level these characters are motivated by entirely different aspirations as leaders. For Priam, his primary focus is not to save his people, but to save himself. |
We can model a paragraph like the one above to students and then get them to try writing a paragraph like this themselves. They can starting by doing some thinking and planning in response to a statement about one of the texts with a graphic organiser like this:
Statement about one text | Somax is a character who represents the values and experiences of the everyday, ordinary person. |
Obvious connection to the other text | |
Deeper, less obvious connection |
Students can share their ideas as a class before getting down to the important business of practising writing. At this stage we can give students some sentence starters and and word lists as a scaffold:
First Linking sentence | On the surface
At first glance At their simplest level appears to be…similarly appears to have a…similar… appears to mirror… |
Surface connection | Like
Just as In the same way that |
Second linking sentence | However, on a deeper level
However, beneath this profoundly different significantly contrasting entirely distinct |
Second connection | For…is not…but…
Unlike…which/who, … |