1. By Ms.Teref, Roosevelt High School

2.  Use your weapon – pen/pencil to annotate!  Look for shifts (e.g. however, but, yet, ironically, oddly enough…)  Look for natural breaks:  Is one stanza or paragraph significantly longer than the others? (That must mean there’s an overwhelming emotion in that part.)  Is there a sentence which is significantly longer than others? Why?

3.  Is there a list or a litany (a negative list)? Could that list be making the long sentence so long? (Think of Hamlet’s soliloquies.)  Chase subject and verb combinations (find the verb first and see what it’s linked to) + bracket the interrupters or nonessential information)  If a sentence/line sounds odd, unscramble the word order (perhaps the line starts with a verb and its subjects is far apart)

4.  When faced with a difficult sentence or verse, circle the words you know or the key words, and pay attention to what you know.  Pay attention to punctuation: ! ? - (something is emphasized, dramatized…)  When stuck and don’t know what else to write, start with “When (character does something…), i.e. summarize and then analyze.

5.  For the thesis: CFC, parallel structure, correlatives (no sooner… than, not only… but), archetypes, does the character change from beginning to the end?  Alliteration, metaphor, extended metaphor (conceit), simile (what’s their function? don’t just identify them)  Connotation (connote), denotation (denote)  Euphony, cacophony

6.  Sonnet, Italian sonnet, English sonnet, stanza, blank verse, volta, iambic pentameter, iamb, rhyme scheme (abba abba cdc cdc), couplet, heroic couplet (rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter: aa bb cc dd…) quatrain.  Humor: humorous/comic (not “funny”): - exaggeration/hyperbole/hyperbolic - irony, sarcasm - diction  tone - shifts - satire: we must know the original (e.g. “My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”)

7.  Anti-hero (Hamlet, Lucifer), protagonist, antagonist/villain (King Claudius), foil, major vs. minor characters (characters “in transit” – what’s their function?)  Speaker vs. persona vs. narrator (never the author – this is only for non-fiction)

8.  1. THESIS: In your thesis, identify what similar concern/problem/issue the speakers have, and then explain how their conclusions about that concern are different.  2. ANALYZE COMPLETELY THE POEM YOU UNDERSTAND BETTER FIRST.  3. Transitional paragraph: connect poem 1 with poem 2.  4. Begin analyzing the other poem and occasionally ping-pong between poem 2 and poem 1 to make connections between them.  5. Conclusion