Hello, class! I hope you’ve been having a great day! This week, the free teaching material is what I call a “Three-Columned Analysis,” and I am also throwing in a bonus extra in the form of some free images that you can use for anything you wish. If you want to jump straight into the material, the download links are all at the bottom of this post.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, however, i want to say that though this document layout, design, and diction is all my own, the core concept is based off of the “Three Columned Approach” developed by my old high school English teacher, Ben Jones III. He was a huge influence on me, and I want to give him all the credit for the basic premise of this material.

So, let’s get started!

What it is/What it’s Used for:

The “Three Columned Analysis” is a tool for students to use when analysing a work of literature to discover the theme – the meaning – of that work. It is simultaneously designed to help them dissect the material to discover all of the parts, and then explain how those parts make the theme work. While it makes for a solid assignment in its own right, I find it particularly useful for preparing students to write analysis essays as a brainstorming tool.

How to Use it:

Let’s examine how it works. For my example, I will be analysing the poem “Ozymandias,” by Percy Shelly, which was a favorite mine, and of Mr. Jones, when first introducing this material to high school students. I have found it is a good introductory poem for Middle-Schoolers as well, though it might be more beneficial to start students at that grade level with an analysis of a popular song.

As a side note, I will be using the “Online-Editable” version of the form. This version of the form can be copied and provided to students to edit and turn-in electronically. This entirely depends on your classroom’s technology integration, but I wanted to use this version of the form to show what it might look like, rather than a hard copy, which I do still have versions of below.

The first page, which I have posted below, has spots for the student’s name and date as well as the score(grade), if you use printed versions of the document. Under the magnifying glass we have the title and author of the work we are analyzing. To the right of the glass and below the name box, I included a box for the primary topic and a box for secondary topics. Some of my choices here come down to a philosophy of analysis. I believe there are multiple ways to interpret any given work – even one that is as straightforward as “Ozymandias,” even if it simply means a difference in emphasis. Because of that, I included both boxes.

The primary topic box will show you what the student is focusing on, and the secondary topics gives the student ways to express the complexity they may see in the work. It also prevents a phenomenon that I saw happen multiple times where a student would have a legitimate possible topic idea, but it didn’t match up with the teacher’s idea of what the “real” topic was. With multiple boxes, it provides a teacher room to see that a student can see multiple perspectives on the poem, even if the one they focus on is different from what the teacher thinks is the best topic.

From there we get down to the titular three columns. The first column is fairly straightforward, as it is where the student will paraphrase, and summarize the work. This is important because it forces the student to examine and really understand what is happening. Too often I would see students read over a poem and simply let it wash over them and not actually slow down to absorb what was happening. Of course this is a common problem that would probably need to be addressed before ever getting to this tool in the first place. I’d like to note that while I was able to paraphrase the poem down to a very short summary, even keeping it to one page with spaces between paragraphs, some students will struggle to compress the information effectively.

The second column is for “Key Clues” that will help them analyse the work. This is where a lot of the real analysis happens, as the students are asked to identify the various literary elements at play. Of course I talked about diction, Imagery, and figurative language, which I mention in the column instructions, but I also included tone, which is very important to the meaning of this poem, but not an explicit part of my initial instructions in the column.

I would be clear with your students that you would expect them to include any literary element they’ve already been taught in class. This tool is very much a hand-holder in that it is meant to prepare them for the same kind of thought processes that happen for any kind of analysis, but analysis in college tends to happen on a blank page, and not in nice little boxes with headers and instructions, but the second column does demand that they use information not explicitly worded in the instructions. I would also like to note that the bullet points do not come naturally to the document, and that if you want students to be that neat when typing or writing out their thoughts, you will have to tell them so.

The third column is where synthesis begins to happen. In this column I explain what the clues I gathered in column two (as well as my understanding of the poem as a whole from column one), could mean. Why did the author use the diction he did? Why did the author create that image? How does that metaphor contribute to my understanding of the theme? All of these questions are the kind that should be answered here. These answers do not have to directly mention each piece of evidence (that’s what a full essay is for), but they should reference chunks of evidence in a general sense.

I recommend requiring that the explanations be written as full sentences for two reasons. First, it practically guarantees that the student will have to step away from column two’s listing of what was in the poem. By writing a complete thought, they have to start constructing what it all means. Secondly, these full sentences are almost always a good template for topic sentences for an essay. If you explain it this way to your students, it may help them understand what they are supposed to be making these sentences for, as well as what a topic sentence is supposed to do.

Now, I’ll be honest, sometimes this column is written last in the whole document, or is developed simultaneously with the theme. For instance, when I was done with column two I was already more or less sure of what I wanted to say the theme was (even without my fore-familiarity with the poem), and so I wrote that first and came back to connect the dots in the third column. I think it is helpful to explain this to students, and that they shouldn’t feel bad for doing them out of order. I would emphasize instead that information they learn from one column or box can and should affect what they write in others, and that sometimes they will have to go back and add or change what they wrote as their understanding deepens.

Now, on the back of the sheet, the columns continue. I have found that good in-depth analysis can rarely be contained to the front of this sheet. However, I would like to note that the paraphrase column, when done right, rarely needs the back side. When this happens, I would recommend telling students that they can use the extra space for either more clues or explaining the evidence as long as it’s clearly labeled.

At the very bottom, I have two final boxes. The first is where the student will write out the primary theme. I provide two lines because a good theme is usually fairly complex, and can sometimes run over the single line. The final box is for any additional themes the student may see in the work. I include this box for similar reasons to the secondary topics box on the front page. However there is an additional reason I did so. Sometimes their secondary themes will be very similar, or simply put a different emphasis on the ideas. I would suggest working with these students to combine their similar or related themes into one combined, complex theme. This ability to synthesize is highly valuable and adds depth to their sentence-writing.

I believe that by the end of this sheet, if done with sincerity and effort, a student should have all of the pieces they would need to write an essay on the poem, explaining the theme. Themes are the broadest and most basic forms of analysis for literature, which makes for a great launching off point to more in-depth analysis of the elements.

FREE DOWNLOADS:

PDF:

Google Drive: (To Download the Google Drive Files, you will have to click on File and “Download as…” If you use Google Drive a lot, you can also click on “Make a Copy” and modify the file name as you see fit.)

Free Images: As a special bonus, whenever I make a custom image for one of my materials, I will release the image separately under the same license as everything else. So please, enjoy these free Magnifying Glasses images! Just click on one to download it!

I hope you find these materials useful! If you do, and you want to help me keep making free materials for you and teachers around the world, please support me at My Patreon!

Have a great day, and DFTBA!

Sincerely,

– Mr. Edward L. Cheever II

P.S. – DFTBA = “Don’t Forget to be Awesome!”

P.P.S. – All materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution -Non-Commercial – ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) License.