Theme Development

Theme Development

In our last session, we used the theme chart below to help us write about a theme from two different music videos.

In this session, we are going to add another step to our theme chart so that we can write more in-depth about our themes.

In this lesson, I am going to teach you that literary essayists (people who write essays) dig deep into the text that they are writing about. They read the scenes that deal with the theme very closely to look for nuance (subtle variations) and detail, and then they use writing to say what they think the text is really saying. This is what’s entailed in writing about theme. We MUST read closely to see how your thinking about the theme might evolve.

Previously you went through several steps to look for themes in your texts. You found a problem or issue that was explored in your stories; you reflected on parts of the text that pertained to the issue, you asked yourselves what the story aimed to teach about the issue, and then you wrote to grow your ideas. Remember how we talked about the idea that jealousy can hurt people.

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Our next step, what I am aiming to teach you today is that essayists go back to the text to look a little closer and see if there is more there, hiding in the details of certain scenes. To do that, it helps to look for multiple scenes in the story where that issue is present.

Cheers!