the meaning of a key term over the course of a text: When first introduced, certain words establish a general idea that the author, through repeated and careful use, refines in an attempt to invest in it more meaning and importance each time it is used.
Planning to Teach: What to Do—and How
Reading Standards: Craft and Structure
Reading 5: Analyze the structure of texts, including how specific sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text (e.g., a section, chapter, scene, or stanza) relate to one another and the whole.
9–10 Literature
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.
11–12 Literature
Analyze how an author’s choices concerning how to structure specific parts of a text (e.g., the choice of where to begin or end a story, the choice to provide a comedic or tragic resolution) contribute to its overall structure and meaning as well as its aesthetic impact.
9–10 Informational Text
Analyze in detail how an author’s ideas or claims are developed and refined by particular sentences, paragraphs, or larger portions of a text (e.g., a section or chapter).
11–12 Informational Text
Analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the structure an author uses in his or her exposition or argument, including whether the structure makes points clear, convincing, and engaging.
9–10 History/Social Studies
Analyze how a text uses structure to emphasize key points or advance an explanation or analysis.
11–12 History/Social Studies
Analyze in detail how a complex primary source is structured, including how key sentences, paragraphs, and larger portions of the text contribute to the whole.
9–10 Science/Technical Subjects
Analyze the structure of the relationships among concepts in a text, including relationships among key terms (e.g., force, friction, reaction force, energy).
11–12 Science/Technical Subjects
Analyze how the text structures information or ideas into categories or hierarchies, demonstrating understanding of the information or ideas.
Source: Copyright © 2010. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers. All rights reserved.
Common Core Reading Standard 5: What the Student Does
9–10 Literature
Gist: Examine how an author’s choices about structure and narrative design affect the plot, pacing, and perceptions of the reader, focusing on how techniques such as flashbacks, parallel plots, or nonlinear-episodic narratives, create a sense of wonder, anxiety, or awe in readers.
Why did the author use or put that sentence or larger section in that place?
How is time, location, mood, or purpose affected by the author’s arrangement of events, details, or time?
How does the author structure the story, poem, or play—and to what end?
11–12 Literature
Gist: Analyze how an author uses and places specific elements of a text such as where and how the story begins or ends, examining why the author chose a nonlinear structure such as in media res, for example, and how that choice impacts the story and the reader’s experience of it.
Why does this author begin the story in this way?
How would you describe the overall structure of the story in terms of its impression or effect on the reader?
Which choices regarding structure most contribute to the story’s meaning and aesthetic impact?
9–10 Informational Text
Gist: Concentrate on how the author arranges details, evidence, or events to support and develop a claim or idea, analyzing how the writer begins and then refines the idea by connecting sentences, paragraphs, and larger chunks (sections, chapters) as they explore and advance their idea(s) and claim(s).
What idea or claim does the writer examine or advance?
How does the author develop or refine these ideas or claims at the sentence, paragraph, section, and chapter level?
How do these structural elements add meaning, clarity, or coherence?
11–12 Informational Text
Gist: Assess how an author’s choices about structure affect clarity, cogency, and coherence, analyzing the degree to which choices about how to organize sentences, paragraphs, 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
