How to Incorporate a Grammar Lesson into Literary Analysis

In an English lit class, especially at the high school level, you usually don't get intense instruction on grammar. At least, that was my experience. There are too many topics to cover. However, there is a way to incorporate grammar lessons into literature lessons.

In an honors English class I took in high school, the instructor used Dickens to teach us this lesson. The class was instructed to model a passage from A Tale of Two Cities, word for word. The paragraph we wrote had to describe our high school.

To complete this assignment, we first had to analyze the paragraph Dickens wrote: where are the verbs, where are the nouns, etc. Once we understood the structure of each sentence, we could then create our own sentences with the same structures. The real challenge was not only creating new sentences with the same structure, but having the sentences create a coherent paragraph as well.

This assignment accomplished a few thins. First, it helped us understand Dickens' writing style. It also helped us understand grammar and sentence diagramming. This modeling assignment also helped us with our creative writing.

The modeling assignment is flexible, too. Since this assignment would work with any classic literature, you can choose a paragraph from a work that is par with the grade level you're teaching.

For clarification, here is an example of how the assignment should look. This is my model of the beginning of chapter seven in A Tale of Two Cities.

"Jordan High by South Towne Mall is a new-fashioned school, even in the year two thousand. It is very large, very bright, very clean, and very convenient. But it is an evil place, furthermore, in the ethic trait that the teachers in the School are haughty of its largeness, haughty of its brightness, haughty of its cleanness, haughty of its convenience. They are even magniloquent of its distinction in these datums, and are fueled by a precise condemnation that, if it were more reputable, it would be less repugnant. This is no inert credence, but an over-stimulated armor which they brandish at less suitable places of learning. Jordan High (they say) desires breathing room, Jordan High desires no darkness, Jordan High desires no contamination. Skyline High might, or Alta High might; but Jordan High, thank Goodness!

Any one of these teachers could suspend their students on the query of marring Jordan High. In this manner the School is much on equal footing with the Government; which quite frequently does punish its subjects for proposing reforms in legislature and habits that have long been greatly repugnant, but are wholly the more reputable.

Consequently it has come to pass, that Jordan High is the euphoric supremacy of repugnancy. Following the rupturing open of a double-door of moronic massiveness with a solid pole in its middle, you stumble into Jordan High down a hallway, and return to your right mind in a doleful diminutive classroom, with one modest desk, where the sternest of teachers make your assignments tremble as if the breeze ruffles it, while they cross-examine the answers by the most fluorescent of lights, which are always emitting a low buzz of sound from nowhere, and which are made the brighter by their own smooth glass covering, and the ominous shadow of the teacher ...

... Stuffed in all sorts of bright classes and laboratories at Jordan, the most worked of students continues on the work soberly. When they take a young teen into Jordan High School, they conceal them somewhere until she or he seems old. They keep them in a dingy place, like a sour Guinness, until they have the full Jordan flavor and malted scent upon them. Then only are they allowed to be viewed, impressively poring over colossal texts, and slinging their Lucky's and Skechers into the common influence of the institution."