Draw evidence from a story and a historical account of the same period, and from an argument text, to support analysis, reflection and research

Learning goal: Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection and research. Apply grade 7 Reading standards to literature, for example by comparing and contrasting a fictional portrayal of a time, place or character and a historical account of the same period as a means of understanding how authors of fiction use or alter history; apply grade 7 Reading standards to literary nonfiction, for example by tracing and evaluating the argument and specific claims in a text, assessing whether the reasoning is sound and the evidence relevant and sufficient to support the claims. Write routinely over extended and shorter time frames for a range of discipline-specific tasks, purposes and audiences.

Evidence from texts is quoted or paraphrased, cited to its place and explained. Every lesson in this unit has used evidence; this one takes it from texts. To draw evidence from a text is to find the sentence or detail that bears on your point, bring it into your writing by quotation or paraphrase, say where it is, and then explain what it shows. The explaining sentence is the analysis. Three original texts follow: a short story set during the flood of March 1913 in Dayton, Ohio; a short informational account of the same flood; and an opinion column about the Fernbrook field. The story and the column are wholly invented. The account was written for this lesson from commonly reported facts about the 1913 flood and states only what is widely recorded; where a figure is disputed among sources, the account says "hundreds" or "more than" rather than giving a number. Its dates and main facts were checked against the sources listed at the end of this lesson, and a reader should check them the same way rather than take the account on trust.

Original story — The Second Floor

On the March morning in 1913 when the Great Miami came over the Dayton levees, Ada Kessler was twelve and had been sent upstairs for a dry pair of stockings, which is why she was at the window when the street turned into a river.

It did not rise; it arrived. One moment Ludlow Street was rain and wet brick, and the next a brown wall was pushing a wagon sideways past the house, wheels up. Her father shouted from below. She heard the front door go, not open but go, and then the sound of water finding every room at once.

They went to the attic, all five of them, up the ladder her father had been meaning to fix. Her mother carried the baby and a loaf. Her brother Emil carried the cat, who did not want to be carried. Ada carried the stockings, still, because nobody had told her to put them down.

From the attic window the city was roofs and water. A church steeple, a streetcar sitting in the flood like a boat that had forgotten how. Downriver, a smudge of smoke grew and leaned. "Gas," her father said, and did not say more.

The water climbed the stairs one at a time through the afternoon. Ada counted them. Eleven. Twelve. At fourteen it stopped, and she watched the fourteenth stair for an hour to be sure.

Night came with no lights anywhere. The baby cried and then slept. Emil said the cat had gone to sleep on the loaf and nobody moved it. Ada thought about the stockings and about the sound the door had made and about how she had not been afraid at the window, only surprised, and how the fear had come later, on the ladder, and was still coming.

In the gray before dawn there was a knock, which made no sense, because the street was gone. Then a voice: "Anybody up there?" A rowboat, flat and new, the boards still pale, was tied to the porch post, and a man in a wet coat was standing in it holding the gutter. "Cash register people built her yesterday," he said. "Four at a time. Who's first?"

Her mother handed down the baby. Emil handed down the cat. Ada went last, with her father, and as the boat pushed off she looked back at the attic window and saw, on the sill, the stockings, folded, dry, and she began to laugh, and could not have told anyone why.

Original informational account — The 1913 flood and the dams that followed

In late March 1913, several days of heavy rain fell across Ohio, beginning on Sunday, March 23. The Great Miami River and the smaller rivers that join it near Dayton rose far beyond their banks. On March 25, the levees protecting Dayton failed and water poured into the downtown streets, reaching depths of more than ten feet in places. Broken gas lines started fires that burned in parts of downtown while the water was still high. Hundreds of people died in Ohio during the flood, and many thousands were driven from their homes.

Rescue in Dayton was organized in large part by John H. Patterson, the head of the National Cash Register Company. He turned the company's factory and grounds into a relief center and set its workers to building boats, which were used to bring people down from rooftops and attics. The water stayed high for days, and many families waited in attics and on roofs until boats reached them.

After the water went down, the people of the Miami Valley decided not to rebuild the same defenses. In 1914 Ohio passed a law, the Conservancy Act, allowing communities to form districts to control flooding. The Miami Conservancy District was organized in 1915, and Arthur E. Morgan, the engineer hired after the flood, designed a system of five large dry dams above Dayton and the other valley towns, with levees and improved river channels through the cities. A dry dam holds no lake in ordinary weather; it lets the river pass through and holds water back only in a flood. The system was completed in 1922 and still protects the valley's cities.

Comparing the fictional portrayal and the historical account. The comparison has two questions: what does the story use from history, and what does it alter? The story uses the place (Dayton and a real river), the date (a March morning in 1913), the fires from gas ("a smudge of smoke... 'Gas,' her father said"), and the boats built by the cash register company. Those details come from the record, and a reader who checks them against the account finds them. The story also makes choices a writer of fiction is free to make, and they are of different kinds. It selects: the account says the water stayed high for days and many families waited in attics and on roofs until boats reached them, while this family is rescued at the next dawn. One family's quick rescue could have happened, so the story does not falsify the timeline, but it shows a luckier case than many. It invents: Ada Kessler and her family are made up for this story, and her stockings are the story's, not history's. It narrows its scope: the account counts hundreds of dead across the state and goes on to the dams finished in 1922, while the story shows one attic, no deaths and nothing after the rescue. Understanding how an author uses or alters history means naming what was used, what was selected or left out, and what was invented, and then asking what those choices are for. Here, the single family and the quick rescue make the flood something a reader can live through in a few minutes, which an account of the whole valley cannot do; the cost is that the story cannot show the scale or the years of engineering that followed.

Original opinion column — Plant the bank (from the invented Fernbrook Weekly, by an invented columnist)

Fernbrook's field committee meets next week, and it should choose planting over the drain. First, planting is cheaper: 6,900 dollars against 11,200, according to the facilities memo. Second, the students have spoken: 58 percent of them want trees, and a school should listen to its students. Third, pipes fail. Cedar Bend piped its creek and within three years was paying for repairs, which proves that any pipe will fail. Fourth, everyone knows that trees are better for a creek than concrete. The drain's supporters say it works at once, but that is exactly the kind of short-term thinking that got us a flooded field in the first place. Plant the bank.

Tracing and evaluating the argument. To trace an argument is to list its claim and the specific claims that support it, in order. The main claim: choose planting. Specific claims: it is cheaper; students want it; pipes fail; trees are better for a creek; the drain is short-term thinking. To evaluate is to ask, of each, whether the reasoning is sound and whether the evidence is relevant and sufficient. Claim one is supported by relevant, sufficient evidence (the two estimates) and sound reasoning, if the budget matters. Claim two misreports its evidence: 58 percent is of the 158 who responded, not of "the students," and the column omits the limit; the evidence is relevant but stated inaccurately. Claim three reasons unsoundly: one pipe needing one repair does not prove "any pipe will fail," which is a generalization from a single case. Claim four gives no evidence at all; "everyone knows" is an appeal to what people supposedly believe. Claim five names the opposing view but answers it with a label ("short-term thinking") instead of a reason. The column's conclusion may still be right; the argument lesson in this unit argued the same side with better support. Evaluating an argument judges the support, not the side.

Writing that draws on the evidence. An analysis paragraph on the story might read: The story selects a quick rescue so that the reader can live through the flood in one night. The account records that the water stayed high for days and that many families waited in attics and on roofs until boats came, but in the story the boat arrives "in the gray before dawn" the next day, "built yesterday." The selection is a choice, not an error: it lets the story end in relief while the history it draws on ended, for hundreds of families, without any. Each sentence there quotes or paraphrases a text, says which, and explains what it shows.

Routine writing across time frames. This lesson's writing runs on two clocks. The comparison essay is an extended piece: reading, notes, a draft, a conference, a revision, over about a week. The evaluation of the column can be a single-sitting task: twenty minutes to trace the claims and judge two of them. Both belong in a grade 7 year, alongside the discipline-specific writing other subjects assign: a science conclusion drawing on data tables, a social studies paragraph drawing on a primary source, a mathematics explanation of why a method works. Writing routinely, for a range of tasks, purposes and audiences, is how drawing evidence from texts stops being a special skill and becomes the ordinary way of writing about anything.

Worked evidence sentence: Claim: the story uses a real historical detail. Evidence, quoted and located: the man in the boat says "Cash register people built her yesterday," and the account records that the National Cash Register Company's workers built boats for rescue. Analysis: the story borrows the detail because it is the kind a survivor would remember, and the borrowed fact lends the invented family a real rescue. The sentence has all four parts: the claim, the quotation, its source and the explanation of what it shows.

Worked comparison of a portrayal and an account: Point of comparison: how long the emergency lasts. Fictional portrayal: from a morning to the next dawn, one night in an attic, fourteen stairs under water. Historical account: rain from about March 23, levee failure on March 25, many families waiting days for boats, flood control completed in 1922. Contrast stated: the story selects a family rescued after one night and leaves out the years of engineering that followed. Purpose inferred: the selection keeps the reader inside one family's fear and relief. Cost stated: the story cannot show the scale or the engineering response. Both texts are cited at each step, and the inference about purpose is labeled as inference.

Worked trace and evaluation of one claim: Column claim: "Cedar Bend piped its creek and within three years was paying for repairs, which proves that any pipe will fail." Trace: the evidence is the Cedar Bend log (one school, one repair, 1,800 dollars in year three); the reasoning is that one case proves a universal rule. Evaluate: the evidence is relevant (it concerns a pipe of the same kind) but not sufficient for "any pipe," because a single case cannot establish what all pipes do; the reasoning is unsound because it generalizes from one instance. A supportable version: "Cedar Bend's pipe needed an 1,800-dollar repair in its third year, so a school choosing a pipe should keep a reserve," which claims only what the evidence carries.

Worked single-sitting evaluation: In twenty minutes a student traced the column's five specific claims in a numbered list, then evaluated two: claim two (misreported percentage; limit omitted; relevant but inaccurate) and claim four (no evidence; "everyone knows" is not support). The paragraph ended: "The two supports examined here do not hold, so a reader who agrees with its conclusion should look for better reasons, such as the reserve the cheaper estimate leaves." The task was short, cited the text for each judgment and reached a bounded conclusion.

Evidence record: Make a two-column table for the story and the account with rows for place, date, the fires, the boats, the family, the length of the emergency, deaths and what came after. In each cell write a quotation or paraphrase with its location. Below the table, list what the story uses from history and what it alters, and write one sentence proposing what each alteration is for. Separately, trace the column: list its main claim and five specific claims, and beside each write the evidence given and whether the reasoning is sound and the evidence relevant and sufficient.

Independent performance: Over one week, write a 450-word essay comparing and contrasting the fictional portrayal in "The Second Floor" with the historical account of the same period, to explain how the author uses or alters history and to what end. Success criteria: at least three points of comparison, each with evidence quoted or paraphrased from both texts and located; a clear distinction between what the story uses and what it alters; an inference about the purpose of each alteration, labeled as inference; and a conclusion that says what the fictional form can do that the account cannot, and the reverse. The column above is invented, so it is practice material; W.7.9b asks you to apply the reading standards to literary nonfiction, so repeat the evaluation on a real published opinion piece or essay chosen with your teacher. In a single sitting of twenty minutes, also write a 150-word evaluation of the opinion column that traces its claims and judges at least two for soundness of reasoning and relevance and sufficiency of evidence, citing the column's words. Record for each piece its time frame, task, purpose and audience.