Analysing the text: author's purpose, essay design & a video on thesis statements vs topic statements

Our focus this week is reviewing our derived grade exam essays and rewriting them to be more effective at analysing aspects of the text convincingly and perceptively.

Step 1: write your question out (on paper is good - use every tool to embed the precise wording deep into your brain). e.g. "Analyse how a character's experience reflects a truth of society."

Step 2: Define the terms.  This is easy for some questions, and harder for others.  You want to define the terms simply. e.g. A truth of society is that in small white Australasian towns, most people are ignorant of white privilege.

Step 3: Develop your approach.  This is how you will answer the question, and turns into your thesis statement.  e.g.  Charlie Bucktin's experience of being jolted out of his naivety and ignorance reflects a truth of society regarding how little we consider the experiences of our marginalised peers.  Craig Silvey uses Charlie's journey to take us all on a journey of exposing white privilege in both Corrigan, and potentiall in our own lives.

Step 4: As you plan and write your main body paragraphs, consciously use analysis-related terminology.  This can include language techniques (e.g. imagery, hyperbole, parallel construction), elements of the novel (e.g. ideas, characterisation, themes, symbolism, structure) and vocabulary/phrases for precise analysis (e.g. Silvey uses symbolism to highlight..., dialogue is used to expose the level of Charlie's naivety, an example of the author positioning us to empathise with Jasper is when he arrives back at Charlie's window, battered and bruised from an enforced few days in the police cells.)

Focus on language techniques

 I have shared a Sigma glossary of literary terms with you (copyrighted, so not linked on this public blog -  I do have the licence to share it with each of you though).

Here are some more resources - these ones will give you some new options to show off with at Level two!

Matrix Education Literary Techniques Toolkit

BBC Bite size revision language techniques

In groups today, I will give each of you a topic.  You need to develop a piece of writing or drama which uses at least five language techniques, including one new one that I will give you with the instructions.  Have fun!

Greta Thunberg speech analysis

 ENL212 students - you have a printed copy of the speech transcript, plus you have a write-on copy of the questions in your ENL212 folders on google drive.

Greta Thunberg speech analysis - unfamiliar text practice

Your big question is: analyse how Thunberg develops a sense of urgency about climate action.

To prepare to answer this question, plan out answers to the following questions:

1. What is Thunberg’s key message to her audience?
2. What language choices does Thunberg make at the opening of her speech which shows her sense of power and links her to young people throughout the world?
3. Find examples of the following language features/techniques and for each one, explain what it emphasises or develops: parallel structure, alliteration, second person narrative, statistics, rhetorical question, threat, emotional appeal.
4. How does Thunberg finish her speech to maximise the sense of power of young people in the climate action challenge?

Once you have notes on the four questions above, you will be ready to write 3-4 paragraphs answering the main question: analyse how Thunberg develops a sense of urgency about climate action.

Climate activist Greta Thunberg, 16, addressed the U.N.'s Climate Action Summit in New York City on Monday. Here's the full transcript of Thunberg's speech, beginning with her response to a question about the message she has for world leaders.

My message is that we'll be watching you. This is all wrong. I shouldn't be up here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I'm one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear. How dare you continue to look away and come here saying that you're doing enough, when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight. You say you hear us and that you understand the urgency. But no matter how sad and angry I am, I do not want to believe that. Because if you really understood the situation and still kept on failing to act, then you would be evil. And that I refuse to believe.

The popular idea of cutting our emissions in half in 10 years only gives us a 50% chance of staying below 1.5 degrees [Celsius], and the risk of setting off irreversible chain reactions beyond human control. Fifty percent may be acceptable to you. But those numbers do not include tipping points, most feedback loops, additional warming hidden by toxic air pollution or the aspects of equity and climate justice. They also rely on my generation sucking hundreds of billions of tons of your CO2 out of the air with technologies that barely exist.

So a 50% risk is simply not acceptable to us — we who have to live with the consequences.

To have a 67% chance of staying below a 1.5 degrees global temperature rise – the best odds given by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] – the world had 420 gigatons of CO2 left to emit back on Jan. 1st, 2018. Today that figure is already down to less than 350 gigatons.

How dare you pretend that this can be solved with just 'business as usual' and some technical solutions? With today's emissions levels, that remaining CO2 budget will be entirely gone within less than 8 1/2 years. There will not be any solutions or plans presented in line with these figures here today, because these numbers are too uncomfortable. And you are still not mature enough to tell it like it is.

You are failing us. But the young people are starting to understand your betrayal. The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you. We will not let you get away with this. Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.

Thank you.

 

Jasper Jones - the end of the novel

 Two parts to the end of the novel:

1. The scene at Jack Lionel's.

2. The fire at the Wishart house.

Which do you think is more important for our impression of Charlie?

What do we learn about Eliza from the fire?

What happens at the end which is exactly what Jasper predicted?

The destruction of Mr Lu's garden

The destruction of Mr Lu's garden

Charlie spends a lot of time thinking and reading about the world, and trying to make sense of it.  But it is the practical action of the destruction of Mr Lu's garden which forces the people in Corrigan to make a decision about whether they want thugs to rule their town.

1. Describe the destruction of Mr Lu's garden and the attempted attack on Mr Lu himself in your own words.  You could do a brief summary, or write it as a newspaper report where you have collected statements from eye witness accounts, including Charlie, Mr Bucktin, the young thugs and the other neighbours.
2. What is Craig Silvey wanting us to understand about the young men who attacked Mr Lu?
3. Mr Lu's flower garden is a symbol of the man himself - quiet, very carefully tended, respectful of others, containing exotic beauty from another place that isn't Corrigan.  The garden is something that all passers by can enjoy, and gardening is something that many other Corrigan residents also enjoy.  When the garden is destroyed, something beautiful is destroyed that was bringing only pleasure to the world. This outrageous incident, and the physical violence towards Mr Lu, prompts people to bring plants around over the next few days to show sympathy.  See page 220:                                                                              If Mr Lu's garden is a symbol of beauty and hope in Corrigan, then by contrast, what is symbolised by Mrs Bucktin making Charlie dig a hole in the backyard and then fill it in for no good purpose?  
4. On page 213 (copy with the forest on the front), Mr Bucktin describes Mick Thompson, the young man who attacked An Lu, as a coward and a fool.  "he's a man who's trapped in his own gutter." - can you explain this phrase in your own words?  Who else is "trapped in their own gutter" in the novel?  What strength is needed to get out of our own gutter, and how does Silvey show that this is possible in the novel?

Cricket & short-lived inclusion

This morning we discussed why Craig Silvey wrote such a long chapter describing the big Saturday cricket match between Corrigan and Blackburn.  Indeed, cricket is a staple ingredient of Australian culture, and indeed cricket is a very long game to watch.

Sport is a space where both Jeffrey and Jasper get fleeting acceptance in Corrigan.  Jasper is an excellent rugby player, but leaves the grounds as soon as the game is finished, and none of his team mates talk to him outside of the game.  Jeffrey lives for cricket, but is only given the opportunity to play when the team are completely out of alternatives.  He turns the game around for Corrigan, and is the star of the game, a legend in the making.

We finish the chapter on the cricket match on a high.  Eliza and Charlie's romance is blossoming, Jeffrey is a cricket star, and everyone has had a break from their fears about Laura Wishart for an afternoon.

But just as Silvey lifts us up, so he also brings us down with a crash.  In the chapter on An Lu's garden, we see just how low Corrigan can go in racist, ignorant nastiness.  After you have read the chapters on the cricket match and on An Lu's garden, then please write a paragraph for each of the words below, relating each one to a character, event or object in these two scenes.  

Beauty

Skill

Acceptance

Ignorance

Fear

Jealousy

Rage

Speech assessment & Learning for Friday 7 August 2020

Here is the speech assessment.  Read, think and send me your questions.

Jasper Jones 

- ka mau te wehi to those of you who made the brainstorm on the novel earlier in the week., and for sharing it with everyone!

- keep reading, keep thinking

- next note taking focus is on the Minders Hall scene:

The miners' hall scene: language features, distress & ignorance

"From inside the hall, I heard a single scream, a crockery crash, the gasp of a crowd, then a sustained barrage of sobbing and screeching.  It was loud and unintelligible.  Heads turned."

Who, what, where, when, why?

What does Charlie learn about Corrigan from this event?