ela-2017:RL.9-10.4ela-2017:RL.9-10.5
ela-2017:RL.9-10.4 Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text, including figurative and connotative meanings; analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning, mood, and tone (e.g., how the language evokes a sense of time and place or an emotion; how it sets a formal or informal tone).
ela-2017:RL.9-10.5 Analyze how an author's choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it (e.g., parallel plots), and manipulate time (e.g., pacing, flashbacks) create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise.
Learning goal: Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative and connotative meanings, and analyze the cumulative impact of specific word choices on meaning, mood and tone; analyze how an author's choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it and manipulate time create such effects as mystery, tension or surprise.
Original poem — Notice to Residents, and a Reply
Written for this lesson. The county, the road and the ferry are invented. Lines are numbered in the lesson.
I. The Notice
(1) The County regrets to inform residents
(2) of Lower Ferry Road that, effective June 1,
(3) the river crossing will be discontinued.
(4) Alternate routes are shown on the enclosed map.
(5) The County appreciates your patience.
II. The Reply
(6) Well. So that's the ferry, then —
(7) Hollis's flat old barge that coughed
(8) across the brown water every half hour
(9) since my mother was a braided girl
(10) with a lunch pail and a nickel for the fare.
(11) Discontinued. As if it were a magazine.
(12) As if the river were a subscription
(13) we forgot to renew.
(14) Your map shows the bridge at Carter's Mill,
(15) nineteen miles around by blacktop.
(16) It does not show the heron on the landing post,
(17) or Hollis lifting his cap to every car,
(18) or how, at dusk, the far bank came to us
(19) a little at a time, lamp by lamp,
(20) the way a person you love comes toward you
(21) out of a crowd.
(22) We will be patient. We have had practice.
(23) The river is still there. It is only
(24) the crossing you have taken.
Meaning in context: denotation, connotation and figurative language. A word's denotation is its dictionary meaning; its connotation is the set of feelings and associations it carries. "Discontinued" (line 3) denotes "stopped," but its connotations are commercial and impersonal: products, catalog items and magazine subscriptions are discontinued. The speaker notices this in line 11, "Discontinued. As if it were a magazine." Figurative language means something beyond the literal: the barge "coughed" (line 7) is personification, giving a machine a tired, living body; "the far bank came to us / a little at a time, lamp by lamp" (lines 18-19) is figurative because the bank does not move; lights appearing one by one at dusk make it seem to approach. The simile that follows, "the way a person you love comes toward you / out of a crowd," tells us what that approach felt like: recognition and welcome.
Cumulative impact: why one word is not enough. The standard asks for the cumulative impact of word choices, meaning the effect of many choices working together. No single word creates the tone of Part I. Together, "regrets to inform," "effective June 1," "discontinued," "alternate routes," "enclosed map" and "appreciates your patience" build a formal, bureaucratic tone: polite, distant, and impossible to argue with. Part II answers with an informal tone built just as deliberately: "Well," "So that's the ferry, then," a named person (Hollis), concrete sensory details ("brown water," "lunch pail," "a nickel for the fare"). The contrast between the two registers is the poem's argument: the notice speaks the language of administration; the reply speaks the language of a life.
How language evokes a sense of time and place, mood and emotion. "Since my mother was a braided girl / with a lunch pail and a nickel for the fare" places the ferry in a long local history; the nickel fare and the lunch pail suggest an earlier era without giving a date. "Nineteen miles around by blacktop" makes the new route concrete and tiring. Mood is the feeling the text creates in the reader; tone is the speaker's attitude. The mood of lines 16-21 is tender and elegiac, a feeling of loss; the tone of the last three lines is controlled irony. "We will be patient. We have had practice" turns the county's polite "appreciates your patience" back on it, and "It is only / the crossing you have taken" uses "only" sarcastically: the crossing was everything.
The misconception: tone and mood are the same. A speaker can have a calm tone while the reader feels grief, and a speaker's anger can make a reader laugh. Name them separately and support each with words from the text.
Structure, order and time in fiction. The second half of this lesson turns to a story whose effects depend on arrangement.
Original story — Gate Four
Written for this lesson; the characters are invented. Sections alternate between the present evening, headed by clock times, and the previous year, headed "Before."
7:40 p.m. The board above Gate Four said DELAYED, and then, as if embarrassed, went blank. Mira had been in the station since seven. There was an envelope in her coat pocket, and her thumb kept finding its corner.
Her mother had said, "You don't have to be the one who meets him." Mira had said, "Yes, I do," and had not explained.
Before. Last January. The kitchen smelled of burnt toast. Sam's duffel bag sat by the door where he had dropped it after the fight with their mother, the third fight that week. He was eighteen and had a cousin with a farm three hours north who said he could use help through the spring.
"You don't even want me here," Sam said to Mira. "Nobody does."
Mira remembered what she said next only as a shape, the way you remember the outline of a word you have erased.
7:52 p.m. A bus pulled in. Not his. Twenty-three people got off, and Mira counted them because counting was something to do with her eyes. A woman carrying a birdcage under a blanket. Two soldiers. A boy about Sam's age who was not Sam.
Before. The letters started in March. Sam wrote to their mother every two weeks: calves born in sleet, a tractor that started only if you swore at it, a dog that followed him to the barn at five every morning. Every letter ended the same way. Tell Mira hi.
Their mother read the letters aloud at dinner and left a pause at the end, every time, for Mira to say something. Mira never did.
In September she began a letter of her own. She wrote four pages and tore them up. She wrote two and tore those up. By November it was one sheet, folded into thirds, and she carried it everywhere, and did not mail it.
7:58 p.m. Headlights.
The bus turned in slowly, too slowly, the way buses do when the driver is tired.
It stopped.
The doors did not open.
Mira took the envelope out of her pocket.
Before. Here is the word she erased.
"You don't even want me here," Sam had said. "Nobody does."
And Mira, fifteen, furious at him for making their mother cry, had picked up his duffel bag and put it in his hands and said, "Then go."
He had looked at her for a long moment. Then he went.
7:59 p.m. The doors folded open. Sam came down the steps with the same duffel bag, taller, sunburned in December somehow, looking over the crowd for their mother.
He found Mira instead.
She held out the envelope. He set the bag down to take it, opened it there on the curb, and read the single sheet. There were four pages' worth of reasons she had torn up, and one word she had kept.
"It's one word," he said.
"It took me a year," said Mira.
He folded the paper back into thirds, put it in his shirt pocket, and picked up his bag. Then, after a moment, he handed it to her, and she carried it.
Choices about structure. Structure is how a text is built: its parts and the order in which they come. The author of "Gate Four" orders events by alternating present scenes with "Before" sections. The "Before" sections are flashbacks (see below), but because they run in their own time order and carry their own question, the two timelines work like parallel plots, two lines of action advancing side by side. Strictly, parallel plots usually follow separate storylines, often with different characters, such as the lovers and the craftsmen in A Midsummer Night's Dream; here both lines follow the same two people, so the structure resembles parallel plots rather than being a textbook case of them. The present plot asks "Will Sam arrive, and what will happen?" The past plot asks "What happened between them?" Because each section breaks off before its question is answered, each timeline keeps the other suspenseful.
Ordering events to create mystery and surprise. The author withholds one event, Mira's words to Sam, from the first "Before" section, describing it only as "the outline of a word you have erased." That withholding creates mystery: the reader knows something important was said but not what. Many readers also form an assumption: Sam said "Nobody does," so it seems Mira is the one who was hurt. For those readers, the revealed word ("Then go") creates surprise, because they learn that Mira drove Sam away. Readers who already suspected her from the withheld line and her silence find their suspicion confirmed and made specific. Either response can be defended if it is tied to earlier details. The surprise also re-explains earlier details: why she never answered "Tell Mira hi," why she told her mother "Yes, I do," why the letter took a year.
Manipulating time: pacing and flashback. Pacing is the speed at which story time passes relative to reading time. The present sections move from 7:40 to 7:52 to 7:58 to 7:59: twelve minutes, then six, then one. The final minute gets more text per minute of story time than any other: its actions are set as separate one-line paragraphs ("Headlights." "It stopped." "The doors did not open."), and the white space can make a reader pause on each one. The flashback inserted between 7:58 and 7:59 stretches that minute further. Slowing the clock at the moment of greatest uncertainty creates tension. The "Before" sections are flashbacks, scenes from earlier inserted into the present narrative, and the last flashback is placed between 7:58 and 7:59, so the revelation interrupts the arrival. The reader must wait through the past before seeing the present resolved.
A worked model sentence. By placing the flashback that reveals "Then go" between the bus stopping at 7:58 and its doors opening at 7:59, the author delays the reunion at its most tense moment and forces the reader to reinterpret Mira just before she faces Sam, so that the surprise changes how we read her final gesture.
Worked example 1 (connotation, lines 11-13): "Discontinued. As if it were a magazine. / As if the river were a subscription / we forgot to renew." Denotation: the crossing has stopped. Connotation: "discontinued" belongs to products; comparing the ferry to a magazine subscription exposes how the notice treats a community's lifeline as a consumer item. Cumulative effect: the one-word sentence "Discontinued." quotes the notice back at it, and the two "As if" clauses turn the speaker's tone from resigned to bitterly ironic. The phrase "we forgot to renew" adds the insult that the residents are implicitly blamed.
Worked example 2 (formal versus informal tone): Formal markers in Part I: third person ("The County"), passive and abstract phrasing ("will be discontinued," "are shown"), fixed polite formulas ("regrets to inform," "appreciates your patience"), no named person and no personal memory (it does name a road, "Lower Ferry Road"). Informal markers in Part II: an interjection ("Well."), a dash, first person ("my mother," "We"), second-person address to the county ("Your map"), a named person and personal memories (Hollis; the speaker's mother as a girl), concrete sensory words. A proper name alone does not set the register: Part I names a road and stays impersonal, while Hollis in Part II is a person the speaker remembers. Effect: the formal tone makes the decision seem impersonal and final; the informal tone restores the people and history the notice leaves out.
Worked example 3 (structure and time in "Gate Four"): Question: How does the order of the last two sections create surprise? The author could have told the fight in order, in January, at the start. Instead the key words are withheld until after the bus arrives. By then many readers have taken Sam's line "Nobody does" as the wound, so "Then go" reverses who needs forgiveness; for a reader who suspected Mira, it confirms the suspicion and names exactly what she did. Placing it immediately before the doors open means the reader meets Sam knowing what Mira knows, so the unrevealed "one word" in the envelope reads as her apology, and handing her the bag becomes his answer. Structure, not new information alone, creates the effect.
Craft chart (representation task): Make two charts. Poem: three columns (word or phrase / literal or figurative meaning / connotation and contribution to tone). Fill at least eight rows, four from each part. Under the chart, write two sentences: one naming the tone of each part, one naming the mood of lines 16-21. Story: a timeline with two rows (present, Before). Place each section in order of reading and in order of occurrence; draw arrows showing where the author jumps in time, and label each jump with the effect it creates (mystery, tension or surprise).
Independent performance: Choose one task. (A) Write a 500-700-word analysis of how the cumulative word choices in "Notice to Residents, and a Reply" create two contrasting tones and what that contrast means. Success criteria: at least eight words or phrases analyzed; connotative and figurative meanings both explained; tone and mood distinguished; the conclusion states what the poem suggests about the gap between official language and lived experience. (B) Write a 500-700-word analysis of how the structure of "Gate Four" creates mystery, tension and surprise. Success criteria: names the alternating structure and explains what each timeline withholds; analyzes pacing with the exact clock times; explains how the final flashback's placement changes the reader's understanding; quotes at least five times.
Creative extension: Rewrite the ending of "Gate Four" in strict chronological order (January first, then the station). In three sentences explain which effects are lost.
An adult may read the prompts aloud. Answer independently with words, objects, drawings or a demonstration before opening the answer guide. Award 1 point for a correct result or claim and 1 point for a matching explanation or demonstration; where a question asks only for a result (a corrected sentence, a spelling, a count), a fully correct result earns both points, and the answer guide shows what a complete response contains. Record prompting separately. The total (two points per question) is local practice feedback, not an Ohio proficiency level.
What does "discontinued" denote in line 3, and what connotation does the speaker exploit in line 11? Explain the effect.
It denotes that the crossing will stop. Its connotation is commercial and impersonal; products and subscriptions are discontinued. In line 11 the speaker makes that connotation explicit ("As if it were a magazine"), exposing how the county's word turns a community's lifeline into a consumer item and shifting the tone to irony.
Identify one example of figurative language in lines 16-21 and explain its meaning and effect on mood.
"The far bank came to us / a little at a time, lamp by lamp" is figurative: the bank does not move, but lights appearing at dusk make it seem to approach. The simile "the way a person you love comes toward you / out of a crowd" says the crossing felt like recognizing a loved one. The effect is a tender, elegiac mood that makes the loss of the ferry feel like losing a relationship.
Explain how cumulative word choices make Part I formal and Part II informal. Give at least three examples from each part.
Part I: "regrets to inform," "effective June 1," "discontinued," "alternate routes," "enclosed map," "appreciates your patience" are fixed bureaucratic formulas, impersonal and abstract, with no named person or personal memory (Part I does name a road, "Lower Ferry Road," so names alone do not make language informal). Part II: "Well," "So that's the ferry, then," the name "Hollis," "coughed," "brown water," "lunch pail" are conversational, personal and sensory. Together, not singly, these choices create the contrast between official distance and lived intimacy.
Distinguish the tone of the final three lines from the mood they create in a reader.
Tone (the speaker's attitude): controlled irony and quiet defiance, since "We will be patient. We have had practice" echoes the county's "appreciates your patience" and "only" in "It is only / the crossing you have taken" is sarcastic. Mood (the reader's feeling), as one supported response: sorrow mixed with respect for a community that has endured losses before. Other responses, such as anger on the residents' behalf, are acceptable if grounded in the closing lines. The speaker sounds composed; the reader feels the weight of what was taken.
How do the two alternating timelines in "Gate Four" work like parallel plots, and what does each withhold?
The present plot (clock times) withholds whether Sam arrives and what happens when he does; the past line ("Before") withholds what Mira said to Sam before he left. Because each section breaks off before its question is answered, the two lines advance side by side and keep each other suspenseful, so the reader keeps reading to close both. Strictly, the "Before" sections are flashbacks about the same two people, so the structure resembles parallel plots rather than being two separate storylines.
Explain how the author manipulates pacing between 7:40 and 7:59 p.m. to create tension.
The gaps between present sections shrink from 12 minutes (7:40 to 7:52) to 6 (7:52 to 7:58) to 1 (7:58 to 7:59). The final minute gets the most text relative to story time: the actions at 7:58 are set as separate one-line paragraphs ("Headlights." "It stopped." "The doors did not open."), which can make a reader pause on each, and the "Before" flashback is inserted between 7:58 and 7:59, so reading continues while the story clock barely moves. Stretching the final minute at the moment of greatest uncertainty creates tension.
Why is revealing "Then go" late in the story a source of surprise rather than just new information?
Earlier, the reader heard only Sam's "Nobody does," and many readers assume Mira was the injured one. Revealing that she told him "Then go" reverses that assumption: she drove him away. (A reader who suspected Mira from the withheld line can argue instead that the revelation confirms and sharpens the suspicion. That answer is also acceptable if it uses the same earlier details.) The revelation also re-explains earlier details, her silence after "Tell Mira hi," her insistence on meeting him, the letter that "took me a year," so it changes the meaning of what came before, which is what surprise does.
The story never states the one word in Mira's letter. What effect does this choice have?
It preserves a small mystery at the end and makes the reader supply the word from the evidence (likely an apology or a request to stay), which involves the reader in the reconciliation. The focus shifts from the word to what it cost ("It took me a year") and to Sam's response, handing her the bag, which answers without words.