ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS RESOURCES

LANGUAGE ARTS :: SECONDARY RESOURCES :: RIGHT DIRECTION 3 :: LEARNING VOCABULARY WORDS

PATTERNS OF AUTHOR'S CRAFT

Planning Points

Approximate Time Needed: 30 minutes for color-coding and one mini-lesson

Lesson Objectives:

Students will color-code a passage in literature looking for patterns. Students will discuss and analyze these patterns.

Materials Needed:

Description

Photocopy the following excerpt for each student in the class. Using colored pencils, ask the students to mark any patterns-any item that is repeated more than once. Then create a legend at the bottom of the page that gives all words of that color a label. In green, for example, they might highlight the words live deliberately, essential facts of life, had not lived, live what was not life, living is so dear, live deep, suck out the marrow of life, live sturdily and Spartanlike, etc. At the bottom of the page, the student could make a green box and label it "pursuit of life."
Ask students to share the patterns they identified and make a list of these, with examples, on the overhead or blackboard.
Select one or more patterns for a focused mini-lesson. Some examples might include diction, parallelism, semicolons, infinitives.
A chart like the one below can help the class analyze why Thoreau made certain stylistic choices.

Pattern	Examples from Text	Analysis (Ask question, Why is the pattern significant? What point or purpose is the author trying to achieve?)

Assessment:

*Adapted from Payne, Lucile. The Lively Art of Writing. Newton, Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon, 1982.

Teacher's Notes:

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