Your Literacy Standards Companion, Grades 9-12. Jim Burke

and larger units (sections, chapters) enhance the clarity and quality of the text, or strengthen the writer’s claims.

       What idea or claim does the writer examine or advance?

       Why does the author use these organizational structures?

       How do the writer’s choices about structure make the text more clear, convincing, or engaging?

      9–10 History/Social Studies

      Gist: Concentrate on how the author organizes crucial ideas, details, or events to emphasize a point or support a claim, noting, for example, how he or she uses chronological, cause–effect, or problem–solution structure to stress how a sequence led to a certain outcome or provided the argument for a course of action.

       What key point(s) does this author attempt to emphasize?

       How does the author organize the information, examples, or evidence within the text to stress these key ideas or advance the argument?

       How effective is the structure the author uses to emphasize or advance his or her key points or claims?

      11–12 History/Social Studies

      Gist: Identify the precise words, phrases, techniques, or structures used to give structure to the content of a primary source document, noting how certain transitions and spatial or other formatting techniques indicate a shift in time, emphasis, or focus within a sentence, a paragraph, or a section of the text as a whole.

       What techniques does this author use to organize information?

       How does the author use these structures to emphasize or advance key ideas in the document?

       Which elements make this text “complex,” and how does that complexity contribute to the text as a whole?

      9–10 Science/Technical Subjects

      Gist: Focus on how the author organizes ideas and information using organizational patterns, strategies, or graphic formats to reveal and emphasize the relationship between details, ideas, and key terms such as force, division, and evolution.

       What big ideas and key terms does the author try to explain?

       How and why does the author structure the ideas and information within the text in this way?

       How effective is the approach the author takes for organizing these details, processes, or terms?

      11–12 Science/Technical Subjects

      Gist: Examine how the author uses hierarchies, categories, or sequences to illustrate the relationship between information and ideas and the degree of understanding the author’s approach demonstrates about that topic or term.

       How does the author structure the ideas and information within the text—and to what end?

       What does this particular organizational approach allow the author to reveal or emphasize?

       What does the author’s approach to organizing information suggest about their knowledge of the content?

      Common Core Reading Standard 5: What the Teacher Does

       To have students analyze the structure of texts, do the following:

       Direct students to determine the author’s purpose, audience, and occasion for this text; then ask them to identify how these factors influence the choices the author makes about the structure of the text.

       Ask them to examine the macrostructure of the text—its layout, format, design on the page or screen, and its features and elements—as part of their analysis of how the text functions to create meaning or achieve the author’s intended result(s).

       Have students identify the organizational pattern or rhetorical mode of this text—compare–contrast, problem–solution, cause–effect, chronological, and so on—and then examine what additional choices the author makes—about tone, style, the use of images, narrative, examples, and embedding of other media—join with the organizational pattern to create a sense of surprise, tension, or mystery when reading the text.

       Model for students how you determine the structure of a complex text and use that knowledge to better understand and analyze the text through close reading.

       Have students locate all structural elements—transitions, subheadings, parallel plots, shifts in time—and analyze how they affect the reader’s response and text’s meaning.

       To have students analyze how specific sentences and larger portions relate, do the following:

       Ask students to annotate a text specifically to identify those sentences that create structure or cause significant moments within the text at the paragraph level. These might be sentences that shift the focus of the text to new topics or to other perspectives on the same subject; they might be sentences that create a point of emphasis on a certain idea, event, or other aspect of the text.

       To have students analyze the author’s choices about structure and order within, do the following:

       Work with students to determine the organizational pattern of the text (e.g., sequential or chronological) and its rhetorical mode (to define, compare, or explain); then, first together, and then, on their own, have students assess how each sentence and the different elements within the text create order and meaning while also helping the author achieve his or her purpose.