AP® Literature: 3 Steps to Expanded Commentary

Teaching AP Literature seems like an endless juggle between the forest and the trees. We want to guide students to enduring understandings, essential skills, universal themes, the wide view of the forest as everything works in concert to create meaning. However, we also have to find time to zoom into the trees, the smaller pieces, individual words and phrases, that are integral to the text’s interpretation and a student’s line of reasoning.

We have spent the last several weeks enjoying some incredible, breathtaking views of some splendid forests, but now I know it is time for us to get out our binoculars and focus again on the literary devices that make up these vistas. I find that lack of student commentary again and again seems to be my students’ greatest struggle. I hear it in the hallways as our ninth-grade teachers review the latest interim data, and I reflect on it in the Chief Reader Reports following each AP exam. The scaffolding I am always reinventing is how to leverage our students’ voices and insights to write an analysis that does more than paraphrase the provided quote or identify the literary device.

I would love to share with you a three-step strategy that I have used in my classroom that has helped several students bridge the gap between the second and third point on the second row of the AP Literature Q1 and Q2 rubrics. Worth noting, the Three Steps to Expanded Commentary assumes the following skills on the part of the student:

• An understanding of the prompt’s task
• A defensible thesis
• The ability to incorporate brief snatch quotes into a sentence
• The importance of positional adjectives rather than just descriptions

Here are my 3 Steps to Expanded Commentary:

1. Embed with Purpose
2. Signal Device & Effect
3. Explicitly Link to Task and/or Big Idea

In Step 1, students select short snatch quotes and embed them intentionally into a sentence. I instruct students that their embedding should be purposeful. I have them ask themselves, if the sentence were isolated from the rest of the essay, could you guess the prompt?

Step 2 generally works with a stem such as “This adjective + device name + “even smaller snatch quote” + suggests/highlights/reveals etc. ___________________”

Finally with Step 3, I tell students this is where you link device and effect to function, specifically HOW is this individual word or phrase contributing to the task you are analyzing. When students are stuck here, I encourage them to start with the author’s name.

Here is an example using Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti XXX: “My Love is Like to Ice” (Check out the poem and a prompt here. This sonnet is always a huge hit... especially with prom season just around the corner.)

1. Embed with Purpose

The speaker describes the intensity of their opposite emotions with her cold being “so great” and his passion as being “so hot.”

1. Signal Device & Effect

This parallel word choice reveals the passion the speaker has for his beloved, as well as her fierce opposition to his suit.

1. Explicitly Link to Task & Big Idea (Start with Author’s Name)

Here, Spenser suggests that love is an all-consuming force that drives the speaker to continue to pursue his intended despite her cruel and “cold” rejection. Ironically, her indifference to him only makes his love more violent.

What I find students like most about this approach is that it gives them a platform to integrate their own insights and prevents them from summarizing the text. I also find this system helps students zoom into the literary devices, creating an interpretation that builds upon individual words and phrases. So many of my students walk right up to the door of analysis and fall just shy of actual commentary. This structure provides students with a method of linking device and effect to our ultimate goal–function. I often describe it as a What + How + Why formula for scholars who need abstract reasons for methods.

Curious how this strategy could work for a range of texts? Here are some more examples using this formula with included prompts, including Sandra Cisneros’s short story “Barbie-Q,” the 2003 released FRQ “The Other Paris” by Mavis Gallant, and “To a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

I hope this method will help your students to appreciate and analyze the singular trees as each contributes to the overall forest– and hopefully write a little more commentary along the way.