Draw evidence from literary and informational texts for analysis, and write routinely over long and short time frames

Learning goal: Draw evidence from literary or informational texts to support analysis, reflection and research. Apply the grades 9-10 reading standards to literature, for example by analyzing how an author alludes to and transforms source material, and to literary nonfiction, for example by delineating and evaluating an argument and its specific claims, assessing whether the reasoning is valid and the evidence relevant and sufficient, and identifying false statements and fallacious reasoning. Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes and audiences.

Why this standard is a writing standard. Reading standards ask you to analyze a text. This writing standard asks you to put that analysis on the page with evidence the reader can check. Drawing evidence means selecting the words, details or claims from a text that support a point, quoting or paraphrasing them accurately, citing where they are, and explaining how they support the point. The same move serves three purposes: analysis (how a text works), reflection (what a text means to you and why) and research (what a text contributes to answering a question).

Applying reading standards to literature: allusion and transformation. An allusion is a reference, usually brief and unexplained, to a well-known person, story, text or event. When a writer does more than refer, when they retell, reverse or reinterpret the source, they transform it. Writers have always done this. Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream includes a comic play about Pyramus and Thisbe, lovers whose story he found in the Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphoses. To analyze a transformation, you need three things: what the source says, what the new work keeps, and what it changes, and then an explanation of why the change matters to meaning.

The source for the poem below is the story of Daedalus and Icarus. In Ovid's version (Book VIII), Daedalus, a craftsman kept on Crete in a long exile because King Minos controls the land and the sea, makes wings of feathers, bound with thread in the middle and wax at the base, for himself and his son. He warns Icarus to fly a middle course: not too low, where the water will clog the wings, and not too high, where the sun's fire will scorch them. Icarus, delighted by flight, climbs toward the sun; the wax melts, and he falls into the sea. The story is usually retold as a warning against overreaching, and retellings often leave out the other half of the father's warning.

Original poem — The Other Half of the Warning.

My father taught me the story backwards.
Not the boy who climbed until the wax ran,
everyone keeps that one, the bright fall,
the feathers on the water like a torn letter,
but the sentence before it,
the half nobody paints:
Not too low, either. The sea will drink your wings.

He has flown low his whole life.
Kept the job he hated because it was close to the ground.
Checked the stove twice, the locks three times,
the weather every hour of every trip we never took.
Nothing melted. Nothing burned.
The spray just rose, a little every year,
until the feathers were too heavy to lift.

So when I told him about the scholarship,
four hundred miles and a plane ticket,
I watched him reach for the old story,
the sun, the wax, the boy who would not listen,
and I said, Dad. Tell me the other half.

He was quiet a long time.
Then he said the middle is the hardest place to find,
and you only find it flying.

Model analytical paragraph (literature). The poem alludes to the Icarus story and transforms it by shifting the danger from flying too high to flying too low. The speaker states the shift directly, recalling "the half nobody paints": "Not too low, either. The sea will drink your wings." The second stanza then applies that neglected half to the father, whose caution becomes the sea spray: he "[k]ept the job he hated because it was close to the ground" and checked the weather "every hour of every trip we never took." The phrase "every trip we never took" is the key evidence, because it shows that his care prevented not danger but living. The transformation also reverses the roles. In the source, the father warns and the child fails to listen; here the child asks the father to "[t]ell me the other half," and the father, not the child, is the one who learns. The last lines, "the middle is the hardest place to find, / and you only find it flying," keep the source's ideal of a middle course but change its meaning: the middle is no longer a limit on ambition but something reached only by taking off. The poem thus uses a story usually told against ambition to argue that too much caution is also a way to fall.

Applying reading standards to literary nonfiction: delineate and evaluate an argument. To delineate an argument is to lay out its parts: the central claim, the specific supporting claims and the evidence for each. To evaluate it is to judge whether the reasoning is valid (does the conclusion follow from the reasons?), whether the evidence is relevant (does it bear on the claim?) and sufficient (is there enough of it?), and whether any statement is false or any reasoning fallacious. A fallacy is a pattern of reasoning that looks persuasive but does not support its conclusion.

Original opinion column — Pouches Are a Solution Looking for a Problem (invented author, simulated Linden Ridge sources).

(1) Linden Ridge is about to spend 31,200 dollars locking up our phones, and it should not. (2) Start with what students think: the survey found that 60 percent of the school opposes the plan. (3) That should settle it. (4) The adults pushing pouches say the pilot proved they work, but the pilot log recorded no drop at all; two classes for six weeks is a story, not evidence. (5) My cousin's school tried pouches, and everyone just broke them within a week, so ours would break too.

(6) The real choice is simple: either the school trusts students or it treats them like prisoners. (7) And if we accept pouches for phones, next it will be laptops, then smartwatches, then the library computers, until nothing we carry is ours. (8) Teachers who want pouches should ask themselves why they cannot hold a class's attention without them.

(9) There are serious concerns here. (10) Forty-one families have asked how they will reach their children in an emergency, and the school has not published an answer. (11) That question deserves a written protocol before anyone votes. (12) Spend the money on something students asked for, and answer the families first.

Model evaluation (literary nonfiction). The column's central claim is that Linden Ridge should not adopt the pouch policy. Its supporting claims are that students oppose it (2), that the pilot showed no drop (4), that pouches will break (5), that the policy disrespects students (6-7), that teachers are to blame (8) and that the emergency question is unanswered (10-11). Sentence 2 contains a false statement about what the survey found: the survey found that 384 of 640 respondents, 60 percent of those who answered, oppose the plan, not 60 percent of the school. The school-wide share is unsupported rather than known to be wrong: 384 of 1,140 students, about 34 percent, are known to oppose; 192 respondents support the plan and 64 are unsure; and the views of the 500 who did not answer are unknown, so the true share could lie anywhere from about 34 to about 78 percent. Sentence 4 is also false as stated: the log recorded a drop from 9 to 2 redirections per period. The writer could fairly argue that a before-and-after count in two classes cannot show the pouches caused the drop, but not that no drop was recorded, and "not evidence" overstates the point: limited evidence is still evidence. Sentence 5 is a hasty generalization from one unverified case. Oakmere's report, a different district where 90 of 750 pouches were replaced for damage or loss, cannot confirm or disprove what happened at the cousin's school, but it suggests outcomes vary and gives no support to "everyone." Sentence 6 is a false dilemma, since the school could, for example, adopt a class-period rule with lunch access. Sentence 7 is a slippery slope: it predicts a chain of events without evidence for any link. Sentence 8 attacks teachers instead of their reasons. By contrast, the reasoning in sentences 10-11 holds and is supported: the letter from 41 families is real in the scenario, the concern is relevant, and a protocol is a reasonable condition. The column's strongest point is its weakest-sounding one: the families' question, which the writer should have made the center of the argument.

Writing routinely over extended and short time frames. Writing is a skill that grows with frequent practice across many kinds of tasks. An extended task, over days or weeks, leaves time for research, reflection and revision: the research report, the argument essay, the narrative. A short task happens in a single sitting or a day or two: an analytical paragraph on a poem, a reflection after a discussion, a timed response to an argument, a letter. Both matter. Extended writing lets you develop a complex idea; short writing trains you to plan fast, choose evidence quickly and finish. A range of tasks (analysis, argument, narrative, summary, email, reflection), purposes (inform, persuade, explore, record) and audiences (teacher, peers, a board, a public reader) keeps you from writing everything in one voice.

A plan for a single sitting. For a 45-minute on-demand analysis: 5 minutes to read the prompt twice, underline the task words and choose a claim; 5 minutes to select three pieces of evidence and jot a one-line plan; 28 minutes to draft; 7 minutes to reread against the prompt, fix any evidence that does not support the claim and correct conventions. The times add to 45. Spending all 45 minutes drafting, with no plan and no reread, can easily cause on-demand writing to miss the task.

Worked evidence selection (literature): Claim: the poem transforms the source by making caution, not ambition, the danger. Weak evidence: "the boy who climbed until the wax ran" (line 2). It is part of the source story the speaker sets aside, so it does not show the transformation. Strong evidence: "the weather every hour of every trip we never took" (line 11). It shows the father's caution and its cost in one phrase. The analysis explains the phrase: "every trip we never took" shows that his care prevented living rather than danger.

Worked delineation (literary nonfiction): Central claim: do not adopt the policy. Supporting claim A: students oppose it; evidence: "the survey found that 60 percent of the school" opposes (false report of the survey, which found 60 percent of 640 respondents, 384 students; the school-wide share is unknown). Supporting claim B: the pilot log showed no drop (false: it recorded 9 to 2). Supporting claim C: pouches will break; evidence: one cousin's school (unverified and insufficient for a generalization; Oakmere's separate report of 90 of 750 replaced suggests outcomes vary). Supporting claim D: the emergency question is unanswered; evidence: the 41 families' letter (relevant and sufficient for the modest claim that a protocol is needed). Laying the argument out this way shows that its best-supported claim is D.

Worked correction of a false statement: 384 divided by 1,140 is about 0.337, so the students known to oppose are about 34 percent of the school. An accurate version of sentence 2: "Of the 640 students who answered the survey, 384, or 60 percent, oppose the plan." This keeps the writer's point without the false statement, and it claims nothing about the 500 who did not answer.

Worked short-time-frame response: Prompt (45 minutes): "Evaluate the reasoning in sentences 6 and 7 of the column." Read and plan (10 minutes): claim, both sentences rely on fallacies; evidence, sentence 6 offers only two options, sentence 7 predicts an unsupported chain; alternative, a class-period rule with lunch access shows a third option exists. Draft (28 minutes) and reread (7 minutes). A one-sentence thesis written in the planning minutes keeps the timed draft on task.

Evidence log: For one literary text and one argumentative nonfiction text from your current unit, keep a two-column log of at least five entries each: exact quotation or precise paraphrase with its location, and the point it supports. For the nonfiction text, add a third column labeling each claim as supported, insufficiently supported, false or fallacious, with the reason.

Independent performance (two time frames): Extended: over one week, write a 700-word analysis of how a text you are reading alludes to and transforms an earlier source (a myth, a scripture passage, a fairy tale, a Shakespeare play or another work the teacher approves), stating what the source says, what the new work keeps and what it changes, and why the change matters; revise it once after peer response. Short: in one 45-minute sitting, delineate and evaluate an argument the teacher provides. Success criteria for both: a clear claim; evidence drawn accurately with locations; explanation after every piece of evidence; for the argument, the central claim and supporting claims laid out, reasoning judged valid or not, evidence judged relevant and sufficient or not, and every false statement and fallacy named with the reason. Keep both pieces in a portfolio that by the end of the term shows at least four tasks, three purposes and three audiences.