Five Ways To Target Commentary For Essay Writing

So, how do we get students to go beyond the obvious? How do we teach them to analyze evidence? That’s a great question and one of the main reasons why I invented the “LET” Method. You can find more information about this method as well as an entire commentary bundle by Bespoke ELA by clicking here. This method stands for “Literary Elements and Techniques.” Seems pretty basic, right? It is! The essence of this method is to have students first identify the literary elements and techniques within a quotation and then explain how those elements or techniques prove the topic sentence and thereby the thesis statement.

To clarify, literary elements are the fundamental elements that are found in every story or piece of literature. These include: setting, point of view, style, conflict, character, and plot. Literary techniques delve more into the element of style with figurative language, and these techniques are not found in every piece of literature. Techniques include metaphor, simile, irony, personification, diction, allusion, apostrophe, and others.

Here is an example of the “LET Method” in action:

Blended Quotation: In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the narrator states, “Her hand and her wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,— or from one of our elder poets,— in a paragraph of today’s newspaper.”

Thesis Statement: George Eliot uses imagery and allusions to show that beauty comes in all forms and is something to be captured through art.

Devices Included in this Quotation: imagery, allusion, alliteration, analogy

Commentary: In this instance, the narrator uses imagery to describe the delicate beauty of the female figure. This beauty is emphasized by several allusions to the “Blessed Virgin,” “Italian painters,” the “Bible,” “our elder poets,” and “today’s newspaper.” These illusions work to show that her beauty is impressive and something of the sort that would appear in fine publications.

Using the “LET Method” gives students something concrete to explain about a quotation—as long as they can identify the devices being used. Thus, it is imperative to spend time identifying devices so that students can begin to pick up on these devices when crafting commentary.