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.