The following has been adapted from Beyond Literary Analysis: Teaching Students to Write with Passion and Authority About Any Text.
In this video, authors Allison Marchetti and Rebekah O'Dell talk about their book, breaking down how the book is organized and how it can best be transferred into reading and writing units in the classroom.
In this book, we invite you to explore your teaching of analytical writing from a new perspective. To open your mind to the real world of analytical writing and challenge traditional notions about what students should be analyzing and how they should write. In short, we invite you to arrive where you started and know it for the first time—and to share this journey with your students and celebrate the writing that is born where passion and analysis meet.
A world of exciting, authentic analytical writing is at your fingertips if you just look for it. It’s waiting for you on your Twitter feed and in your inbox. You listen to it on the drive home as NPR plays in the background. It’s on the podcast you savor in quiet evening hours after a day’s work. It’s in the writing around the sports stats your students track as often as they breathe. Even literary analysis—the kind you thought lived only in dusty library books in
the reference section or inside students’ binders in the form of five-paragraph essays—
exists if you look for it.
When you open your eyes and ears to the real world of analysis, you will discover powerful writing full of voice and passion. You will discover the smartest writing about your favorite players and your favorite movies and your favorite books. Writing that makes you think. Writing that inspires.