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Lesson 3

We will analyze how one writer has built an evidence-based paragraph to support his claims, and we will develop a claim-based paragraph to express, explain, and support our position.

Lesson Goals

  • Can I identify and compare the claims and supporting evidence presented in literary analysis arguments?

  • Can I generate and develop a position for a literary analysis argument?

  • Can I develop and clearly communicate meaningful and defensible claims that represent valid, evidence-based analysis?

  • Can I sequence and group sentences and paragraphs and use devices, techniques, descriptions, reasoning, evidence, and visual elements to establish coherent, logical, and well-developed narratives, explanations, and arguments?

  • Can I use devices, techniques, descriptions, reasoning, evidence, and visual elements to support and elaborate on coherent and logical narratives, explanations, and arguments?

Texts

Core

  • Tradebook
    • The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Scribner, 1925
  • Unit Reader
    • “The Trouble with Nick: Reading Gatsby Closely,” excerpt from Fitzgerald and Hemingway: Works and Days, Scott Donaldson, Columbia University Press, 2009

Materials

Tools

Reference Guides

Question Sets

Editable Google Docs

Activity 1: Read – Discuss

We will analyze a claim-based paragraph from Scott Donaldson’s literary analysis essay to better understand how to use evidence to support our own analyses and claims.

Closely read Paragraph 17 from Donaldson’s essay, “The Trouble with Nick: Reading Gatsby Closely,” which begins by contrasting Nick’s imagined “glamorous encounters” with Gatsby’s efforts to “capture the rest of his dream.” Identify statements in the paragraph that you see as expressing the author’s central claim (Note: the claim may not come at the start of the paragraph). Discuss the following questions with a reading partner:

  1. What is the central idea or claim that Donaldson is presenting in this paragraph? Where is it most directly stated?

  2. What repeated sentence pattern does Donaldson use to express and link his statements about why Nick can “almost forgive,” “pardon,” and “efface from memory” Gatsby’s transgressions? What opening phrase is repeated?

  3. What do you notice about how Donaldson uses, integrates, and cites evidence from the text to support his analysis of Nick and his observations about the “only time in his life” that “Nick makes a commitment to himself”?

Discuss your observations about Donaldson’s paragraph with other students in the class.

Activity 2: Read – Discuss – Write

We will examine how Donaldson integrates quotations from the novel in his essay.

Read the following sentences from paragraph 17 of “The Trouble with Nick: Reading Gatsby Closely,” taking note of how Donaldson integrates quotations from the novel with his own writing:

Because of it, too, he can temporarily efface from memory Gatsby’s tactless offer of a chance to “pick up a nice bit of money” in return for arranging the meeting with Daisy (p. 65).

After his death, in fact, “it grew upon me [Nick] that I was responsible, because no one else was interested—interested, I mean, with that intense personal interest to which every one has some vague right at the end” (pp. 127-28).

With a partner, discuss the following questions:

  1. How does Donaldson integrate quotations from the novel with his own writing? How does he excerpt quotations and manipulate syntax?

  2. In the second quotation, what do the brackets Donaldson uses to enclose Nick’s name indicate? Why are brackets important to use in this scenario?

  3. How does Donaldson cite the quotations he uses from the novel? What punctuation does he use?

In your Learning Log, jot down two or three takeaways from your discussion as reminders of how you might integrate quotations effectively in your literary analysis. Review one of the responses you wrote in previous lessons or Section Diagnostics. Choose a sentence to revise by integrating the quotations more effectively.

Activity 3: Write

We will form a claim and develop it into a paragraph, using evidence from the text (quotations, examples, and paraphrases) to explain and support the claim. We will model the development of our paragraph after Donaldson or another literary critic we have read.

Form a claim about either Gatsby or Nick that is relevant to your Culminating Task question and position. (Note: You might use and revise a previous claim you have written from Lesson 2 of this section or other lessons in Sections 1-4.)

Using a blank copy of the Organizing Evidence Tool or your Learning Log, make a list of relevant evidence from the text that has led to your claim or that can help you explain, develop, and support your claim.

For each piece of evidence that you might use, think about whether you will want to include a direct quotation, a paraphrase, or a summary explanation of the evidence.

Draft a paragraph that is modeled after Donaldson’s Paragraph 17, using the repeated sentence starter “Because of” to present and link the textual evidence you want to include in support of your claim. You might want to begin your paragraph with your claim statement (as Donaldson does in most of his paragraphs), but you might also state your central claim at the end of the paragraph, as Donaldson does in Paragraph 17.

Activity 4: Read – Write

For homework, continue identifying evidence from the texts or your notes that you can use to develop and support other claims related to your Culminating Task question and position.

Continue gathering evidence and forming claims to develop and support your literary analysis and the position you are taking about how Fitzgerald uses the novel’s elements, devices, and point of view to convey a theme about perceptions, illusions, and dreams.