The essay considers two analogies that help to reveal the limitations of value-added modeling: the first, a comparison with batting averages, shows that the model’s reliability is quite limited even though year-to-year correlation figures may ...

In this essay I investigate how image metaphors – metaphors that link one concrete object to another, such as “her spread hand was a starfish” – promote visualization in the reader. Focusing on image metaphors ...

In this lesson, students engage with one approach to metaphor and then apply that learning to metaphors in Great Gatsby. To start, students learn about I. A. Richards’s definition of metaphor as the link between ...

In this lesson students are introduced to the basic elements of magical realism, a genre that combines fantastical events with the mundane normalcy of life. Students examine Octavio Paz’s short story “My Life with the ...

In this lesson students meet three key rhetorical schemes – anaphora, antithesis, and chiasmus – in a fun, engaging way. The students share some common concerns related to school (e.g., too much homework, not enough ...

The purpose of this project is to allow students to use their (developing) skills of poetic explication and close reading, combined with research and analysis, to discover and establish a solid case for a poet ...

This exercise engages students with questions of diction, connotation, and sound patterns. Students discuss the field of product branding, and learn how much certain product names (e.g., Blackberry, Pentium, Swiffer) were considered in light their ...

This exercise helps students learn about poetic style by challenging them to write poetry in different styles. To make stylistic differences most obvious, students write about the same topic in four different ways (casual, formal, ...

This challenging lesson gives students practice in analyzing quotations very closely. The exercise begins with the premise that quotations never “speak for themselves,” and that writers need to explain what quotations mean. To prove this ...

This exercise is designed to give students practice in creating and understanding topic sentences. Rather than asking students to create their own paragraphs headed with topic sentences, this exercise gives students the paragraphs and asks ...

This activity is a fun and even bizarre response to John Barth’s highly self-referential story “Lost in the Funhouse.” In that story, Barth comments extensively on the writing as it happens (as he makes it ...

The Fairy Tale project is a group project that captures the key distinctions in literary style that we analyze in our Modern World Fiction class. In that class, we look at fiction through the lens ...