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• How to write a literary analysis essay | A step-by-step guide

How to Write a Literary Analysis Essay | A Step-by-Step Guide

Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.

Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.

A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the language, perspective, and structure of the text, and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.

Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it’s essential to carefully read the text and c ome up with a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay :

• An introduction that tells the reader what your essay will focus on.
• A main body, divided into paragraphs , that builds an argument using evidence from the text.
• A conclusion that clearly states the main point that you have shown with your analysis.

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Table of contents

Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.

The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.

Your goal in literary analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text, but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.

To get started with your analysis, there are several key areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.

Language choices

Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?

What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).

Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.

Narrative voice

Ask yourself:

• Who is telling the story?
• How are they telling it?

Is it a first-person narrator (“I”) who is personally involved in the story, or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from a distance?

Consider the narrator’s perspective . Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they an unreliable narrator who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.

The tone of the text is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa ? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?

Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.

• Novels are often divided into chapters and parts.
• Poems are divided into lines, stanzas, and sometime cantos.
• Plays are divided into scenes and acts.

Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text in the way they did.

There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?

With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.

In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for  dramatic irony , where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.

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Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.

If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:

Essay question example

Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?

Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:

Thesis statement example

Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.

Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.

Your thesis should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.

Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein . You could start by asking yourself:

Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:

The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:

Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process , so it doesn’t need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.

Finding textual evidence

To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your essay to explain your argument to the reader.

It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.

To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.

Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author and text(s) you’re analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.

A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.

If you struggle to come up with a good title at first, don’t worry—this will be easier once you’ve begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.

“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”

The introduction

The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay’s structure.

A typical structure for an introduction is to begin with a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it, or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.

Then you can end with a brief indication of what’s coming up in the main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.

Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it’s not a bad idea. After all, you’ll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you’ve begun writing them!

If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.

The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.

Paragraph structure

A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five paragraphs : the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.

Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don’t try to include everything you can think of to say about the text—only analysis that drives your argument.

In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.

Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.

Topic sentences

To keep your points focused, it’s important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.

A good topic sentence allows a reader to see at a glance what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like “however” or “moreover” are useful for creating smooth transitions:

… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging undergone by the man as he waits.

Nevertheless, the “radiance” that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.

This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word “nevertheless” points out a contrast with the previous paragraph’s conclusion.

Using textual evidence

A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.

It’s important to contextualize quotes and explain why you’re using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:

It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re discussing the author’s language, but sometimes you’ll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can’t be captured in a short quote.

In these cases, it’s more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:

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The conclusion of your analysis shouldn’t introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it’s about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and try to emphasize their significance to the reader.

A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments, and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:

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By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.

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How to Write a Novel Study: A Complete Guide for Students & Teachers

What Is a Novel Study?

A novel study is essentially the process of reading and studying a novel closely. There are three formats the novel study can follow, namely:

• The whole-class format
• The small group format
• The individual format

Each of these formats comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. Which you will use in your classroom will depend on several variables, including the novel study’s purpose, class demographics, time constraints, etc. 

This article will look at activities you can use with your students in a novel study. Though the focus will primarily be on the whole-class format, the activities outlined below can easily be adapted for small-group and individual novel studies. 

But first, let’s take a look at some of the many considerable benefits of the novel study.

What Are the Benefits of a Novel Study?

The benefits of this type of learning are many and varied. Essentially, the novel itself serves as a jumping-off point for a diverse range of learning experiences that can benefit students’ learning in many ways. 

Here are just three of these benefits.

1. Encourages a Love of Reading

As teachers, we are well aware of how much literature can enrich our lives. However, for many of our students, reading is a chore in and of itself and is to be avoided whenever possible.

The novel study sets aside time in class to focus on reading in an engaging manner that not only encourages students to enjoy reading but helps them develop the tools and strategies required to get the most out of the books they read.

2. Builds a Wider Knowledge Base

Sharing books in this manner creates opportunities for students to become exposed to experiences far beyond those of their daily lives. Not only will they enter new and unfamiliar worlds through the portal of fiction, but they’ll also be exposed to the experiences and opinions of other students in the class. These experiences and opinions may differ markedly from their own.

It will also widen the student’s knowledge and understanding of text structure, vocabulary, punctuation, and grammar . Novel studies are an extremely effective way to practice comprehension skills and improve critical thinking.

3. Boosts Class Cohesion

Whole class novel studies help your students to flex their muscles of cooperation as they work their way through a text together. They also help students to understand each other, take on board the opinions of others, and learn to defend their own thoughts and opinions.

While reading is often viewed as a solitary activity, reading in this manner can become a social experience that helps students to bond as a class.

What Should I Do in a Novel Study?

There are many different ways to undertake a novel study in your classroom. 

For example, some teachers like to read the entire novel to their students first before going back through it as a class, focusing then on student interactions with the text.

Other teachers like to weave guided reading activities into their novel study sessions. However, this often works better with smaller groups where students can be grouped according to ability and assigned texts accordingly.

What shape a novel study takes in your classroom will depend on your student demographics and learning objectives. However, we can helpfully divide the various activities into pre-reading, during-reading, and post-reading. You can select those that suit your situation best. 

Now, let’s look at some of these.

How to Start a Novel Study

Your novel study begins even before the first page is read. The activities below will help students tune in to the book they are about to read. 

This is a crucial stage of the novel study, especially if the book is of historical significance or deals with historical events and where some background knowledge may be essential for understanding the novel. 

Prereading Activities

• Examine the Covers

Before opening the book, have students examine the covers closely, both front and back. What can they tell about the book before opening it based on:

• The cover illustration?
• The author’s name?
• The blurb on the back?

It’s useful to do this as a whole-class discussion to allow for sharing ideas. Ask questions to encourage reflection and get students to make predictions about the novel based on their answers and observations. For example:

• What information does the cover provide?
• Does the cover illustration intrigue you? Why?
• Does this novel remind you of any other books you’ve read? Why?
• Do you recognize the author’s name? What else have they written?

It can be pretty surprising just how much information you can glean from a novel’s covers.

• Generate a List of Questions

Once students have had a good chance to examine the novel’s covers in small groups, get them to generate questions they have about the book and its contents.

These questions may be based on their expectations in the first activity, but they may also be general questions related to common elements in all novels. For example:

• Where is the story set?
• When is it set?
• Who is the main character/protagonist in the novel?
• Who is the antagonist?
• What is the nature of the central conflict?
• What happens in the climax? Resolution? Etc.

While most of these questions will not be answered entirely until the students have read the novel, asking these questions will get the students thinking about the novel’s structure from the outset. This will be extremely useful for later activities.

• Take a Peek Inside

Now, it’s time to open the book to look closer. Task students to go ‘finger-walking’ through the book and, without reading the novel, explore the book’s pages for more surface information. For example:

• When was the book published? Why is this significant?
• Are there any illustrations inside? What impression do they make?
• Does the book have chapters? What do the chapter titles tell us about the story?
• Open a random page and read it. What language register does the writer use? What point of view is employed?

Encouraging students to work in small groups can be helpful here. You can also ask prompting questions to help students maintain focus during this activity.

During Reading Activities

The whole-class format is perhaps the most widely used in the classroom context. In this format, each student will usually have a copy of the text and follow along while the teacher or another student reads. 

The reading will pause at intervals to allow the students to engage in discussion, ask questions, or complete various activities supporting learning goals related to the text they have been reading.

In general, novel study activities will focus on:

• Building vocabulary
• Improving comprehension
• Making text-to-text connections
• Making text-to-self connections
• Making text-to-world connections

In the following section, we’ll look at each of these in turn.

Reading is a fantastic way to build vocabulary; when your students encounter new vocabulary while reading, encourage them to employ several strategies to decipher the word before resorting to their dictionaries.

Firstly, what clues to the word’s meaning can the students find in the word itself? Do students recognize the word’s root or affixes? Does it resemble any other words they already know the meaning of?

Secondly, students should look at the context in which the word is used, not just in the sentence itself but also in the preceding and following paragraphs. What clues can the students find to the word’s meaning?

After analyzing the parts of the word and exhausting context clues, students can look up the word in dictionaries. However, they will still need to do some legwork to make the new word stick. Some valuable ways of committing a new word to memory include:

• Sketching a visual interpretation of the word
• Making a list of synonyms of the word using a thesaurus to assist
• Apply the target words in personal contexts (in conversation/writing sentences)
• Reading Comprehension

Vocabulary is only one aspect of comprehension. Novel studies afford students a valuable opportunity to develop their deep comprehension abilities.

Beyond just understanding the meaning of the words in a novel, students will work on their understanding of skills such as:

• Identifying the central idea/themes
• Examining character/plot development
• Distinguishing between fact and opinion
• Summarizing
• Inferencing
• Comparing and contrasting

While activities for teaching some of the more basic comprehension skills may be more self-evident, activities for teaching higher-level skills, such as inferencing, may require a bit more thought and planning.

We can define inference as the process of deriving a conclusion based on the available evidence in the text combined with the student’s background knowledge and experience. 

Put simply, inference involves reading between the lines.

Inference = What is in the text + What I already know

To encourage students to use inference while completing a novel study, ask questions building on prompts such as:

• Why do you think…
• What do you think would happen if…
• What can you conclude about x based on what you’ve read?
• How does the writer feel about…
• How do you think x feels?

If you want to learn more about teaching inference in the classroom, check out our thorough article on the topic here .

• Making Connections

While vocabulary building and developing reading comprehension skills are a big part of what novel studies are all about, this type of reading lends itself to a deeper exploration of the power of the written word.

Too often, our students read prescribed texts without ever making any personal or profound connections to the material they read. Students can better understand what they are reading by exploring ways of connecting to a novel. There are three main types of connections we can explore:

• Text-to-self connections
• Text-to-text connections
• Text-to-world connections

Let’s look at how students can make each type of connection in a novel study.

Text-to-Self

This is all about the student making a personal connection and responding to the text as an individual. Essentially, this type of connection is about encouraging the students to share their thoughts and feelings on various aspects of the novel. This sharing can take the form of oral contributions to class discussions and debates or in the form of a written response.

Either way, question prompts are a great way to kick things off. Here are some examples to get the ball rolling.

• What does this incident remind you of in your own life?
• Which character do you identify with the most?
• Have you ever been in a similar situation? What happened?
• What would you do in this situation?

Text-to-Text

These connections are all about the student linking the novel they are studying to other texts they have read or seen. This could include other novels, comics, nonfiction books, websites, and poems.

Here are some useful prompts to encourage your students to make text-to-text connections.

• Have you ever read anything like this before?
• How is this text similar to/different from other texts you’ve looked at?
• What other fictional character does the hero of this novel remind you of?

Text-to-World

Making a text-to-world connection requires students to think about the novel in terms of the wider world. Here, students forge links with the broader culture and current affairs. Text-to-world connections will frequently require students to tie the novel into other areas of learning, such as social studies and the sciences.

Here are a few helpful text-to-world prompts.

• How do the events described in the novel relate to real-world events?
• What issues explored in the novel are pertinent in today’s world?
• How does the world described in the novel relate to the world we live in now?

Post-Reading Activities

The number of possible activities you can do to complete a novel is almost endless. Which activities you choose will depend on what aspect of the novel and/or objectives you are trying to teach. Here are just a few popular tasks students regularly complete after they finish reading a novel.

• Create a timeline of events.
• Graph the plot .
• Write a character profile.
• Design an alternative book cover/blurb.
• Write a summary of the novel.
• Write an alternative ending.
• Have a formal debate based on themes or issues explored in the novel.
• Write a book review.

Well, that’s enough to start a novel study in your classroom. However, if you’d like to read more on reading comprehension strategies you can employ in your novel studies, check out our depth article on the topic here .

The flexibility of the novel study format lends itself well to almost any age group; just be sure to choose a text that matches the general reading ability of your class. For older kids, you may even want to involve them in deciding what text to study. 

However you decide to choose your novel, just be sure to read the text thoroughly in advance to stay one step ahead of your students – and don’t forget to have fun with it!

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A Complete Guide to Writing a Novel Study for Students and Teachers

Introduction

Writing a novel study is a significant part of a student’s academic journey, and it tests their comprehension, analytical skills, and ability to communicate. Teachers also come across challenges when planning and reviewing the novel studies to ensure the students get the most out of their learning experience. This guide aims to provide both students and teachers with useful tips and insights into writing an effective novel study.

I. For Students – How to Write a Novel Study

1. Choose your book thoughtfully: Select a book that you’re genuinely interested in or curious about. It helps if the author has created multifaceted characters, compelling plotlines, and engaging themes.

2. Read thoroughly: Prioritize understanding the plot, setting, characters, themes, style, and symbolic motifs of the book.

3. Take notes while reading: Jot down quotes or scenes that capture your attention and might be useful to reference when discussing themes or character development.

4. Analyze the story: As you read, think critically about how elements of the story work together to produce meaning. Analyze the characters, relationships between them, key events in the plot, and various symbols used by the author.

5. Develop an argument or central theme: Craft a thesis statement or central idea that aligns with your observations of the novel. This will act as a foundation for your essay.

6. Create an outline: Map out your essay’s structure by organizing related ideas into a clear hierarchy of main points and supporting examples.

7. Draft your work: Write your essay based on your outline.

8. Revise and edit: Proofread your paper after taking a break from it to look for mistakes in content or style. Consider asking someone else to review it as well for additional feedback.

II. For Teachers – Guiding Your Students in Writing Novel Studies

1. Help students choose their books: Encourage students to go beyond their comfort zones and read books that challenge them. Provide several suggestions covering a wide range of styles, themes, and genres.

2. Establish clear objectives: Determine your expectations for the novel study. Specify requirements about the format, length, and whether the essay should focus on a specific aspect like theme, characters, or plot.

3. Encourage active reading: Teach students the importance of annotating texts, noticing patterns, and asking questions about the story.

4. Facilitate discussions: Debate ideas as a class or in small groups to help students refine their arguments and reinforce their understanding of critical literary concepts.

5. Provide templates or guidelines: Offer examples of novel studies or essay outlines to help students understand how to effectively structure their work.

6. Offer writing workshops: Guide your students in refining research techniques, brainstorming ideas, developing thesis statements, and improving writing skills through regular workshops.

7. Give constructive feedback: Review drafts and provide detailed feedback on content, organization, grammar, clarity, and style.

8.Encourage peer review: Develop a learning environment in which your students can help each other by providing feedback on their novel studies before submission.

A successful novel study requires diligent reading combined with thoughtful critical analysis. By following these practical tips and guidelines for both students and teachers, mastering the art of writing insightful novel studies can become a reality for every student pursuing literary excellence.

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Planning a Novel Study (Without Stress)

A Step-By-Step Guide

Planning a novel study can seem like an overwhelming task. And when you’re just throwing things together (we’ve all been there), it totally can be. However, a novel study is a cornerstone in an ELA classroom. You might feel immense pressure to design a unit where students can finally let their foundational reading skills shine and even take them to the next level. Therefore, it’s imperative to create a novel study with intent and purpose. After reading this, you’ll be able to create one with a lot less stress too.

When planning a novel study for your classroom, you want to avoid planning as you go. (That’s my number one piece of advice.) Now, I’m not saying you can’t make adjustments along the way. You’ll likely find that it’s hard to make it through an entire novel without making a tweak here or there. However, having a plan will not only ease your stress but will ensure a meaningful and purpose-driven novel study for your students as well.

So, whether this is your first time planning a novel study for your students or you’re looking to clean up your process and planning, follow this step-by-step approach. Trust me; It’ll benefit both you and your students.

WHAT EXACTLY IS A NOVEL STUDY?

Let me start by clarifying what a novel study is not . A novel study does not mean simply studying a plot, and it’s more than quizzing students on what happened on a specific page of a particular book. It’s not just about who did what when. Planning and facilitating a novel study isn’t synonymous with teaching a book. Why? Teaching a novel study goes beyond the book. Instead, a novel study goes beyond the basics of reading words on a page. Now that your students have a strong foundation of phonics, fluency, and vocabulary, a novel study helps them dive into the next phase of their learning journey.

It’s teaching students how to engage with a book. It goes beyond the words on the page and helps students understand to read between the lines. A novel study helps students develop essential reading comprehension and critical thinking skills that they will continue to build upon throughout their educational journey and beyond.

A novel study is also an opportunity for students to be highly active participants in their learning experience. When done well, a novel study finds the balance between guidance and student-led analysis to develop, practice, and refine their reading comprehension and analysis skills. And perhaps one of the best potential outcomes of a novel study is creating a safe space where students can build a love and appreciation for reading. (What kind of English teacher wouldn’t want that?)

UNDERSTANDING THE BENEFITS.

Before you dive into planning your novel study, you might be wondering if it’s worth the hype. Afterall, if you’re going to take the time and effort to plan it out, you want to be sure your students will benefit. (Hint: They will.)

The purpose and benefits are going to vary from class to class, student to student. You may choose certain novels to hone in on specific skills, standards, and learning goals. The novel study might be part of a larger unit or may stand on its own. Regardless, there are many benefits to introducing a novel study to your classroom.

Teacher Benefits.

A novel study is a great way to check many boxes with one cohesive unit. For starters, novel studies provide plenty of room to address multiple learning goals and state standards within a single unit. I’ve found it’s much more enjoyable for myself and my students when learning goals flow seamlessly from one to another. Additionally, novel studies provide the perfect setting for bringing together reading and writing skills (an ELA teacher’s dream). Student Benefits.

Perhaps one of the most significant student benefits of novel study is exposure. Novels provide students a portal to different experiences and perspectives. Our experiences often shape our lives, yet student experiences can be rather limited. So, whether you’re hoping to expose them to different cultures, historical periods, or circumstances and experiences outside their own, a well-planned and executed novel study can open the door to understanding and even lay the foundation for empathy.

Similarly, students gain skills beyond the book. Students might need to collaborate on activities or practice listening to the opinions of others, helping them develop essential interpersonal skills. So, they’ll gain a sense of perspective from reading and discussing the novel. Students will have many opportunities to understand that not everyone thinks and works in the same way.

Lastly, a novel study is a great opportunity to contextualize new vocabulary. While students might be used to spelling bees and weekly vocab lists, a novel study gives them a context for learning new words. Instead of learning new words for the sake of learning new words, vocabulary is contextualized for a more meaningful and authentic understanding. To this day, I cannot hear the word disillusionment without thinking of the great tragedy of The Great Gatsby and the American experience in the 1920s.

Now that you understand what a novel study is (and isn’t) and some of its greatest benefits, let’s get to planning!

Step 1: Know Your Purpose.

It all starts with a purpose. So, you want to begin planning your novel study with an idea of where you’re going and, ultimately, taking the students. Consider asking yourself the following questions to get you thinking about the bigger picture:

• How does this novel study fit into your curriculum? Is it your approach to your next unit or a supplement to a larger unit?
• What do you want your students to gain from this novel study? Be sure to think beyond the novel, considering both transferable skills and broader knowledge.

Perhaps this novel study is meant to introduce students to a particular genre or literary element. Or maybe you’re honing in on a particular experience or culture. In other cases, especially in middle school, you may be looking to provide a deeper context into a historical event or period students are learning in social studies.

Regardless, novel studies are a great way to provide context and build a rich understanding. However, you must know what that purpose is so you can effectively fulfill it.

WHAT TO CONSIDER WHEN DEFINING YOUR PURPOSE FOR YOUR NOVEL STUDY.

• Essential question. As you define your purpose, consider any essential questions you are looking for your students to answer by the end of the novel study. These questions are usually big abstract questions attached to curriculum units. A question might be as abstract as, “What role does tradition play in society?” Or, it might be more literature-focused, such as, “How does character development help move a story forward?” or “How does setting impact a story?”
• Universal theme. Similar to an essential question, you might be planning your novel study around a universal theme such as “The American Dream,” “Identity,” or “Overcoming adversity.” Whatever the theme, it’s essential to understand its role in your purpose. It’s imperative to have this understanding before moving on to the next step.
• Standards. Remember, one of the benefits of facilitating a novel study is hitting multiple standards in a cohesive way. So, when planning your novel study, be sure to identify the target standards your study will cover. (This is especially important if you work in a district where you must submit unit plans that identify key targets.) Even if that doesn’t apply to you, it can help anchor your planning as you move forward. Stick to no more than three standards so you can be sure to touch upon each standard at least twice throughout the novel study. Any more than three standards and it will likely be hard to get beyond the surface level of the standards.
• Learning needs and goals. As you consider your purpose, look toward the specific needs of your class. Needs, and therefore goals, will differ from class to class. So, even if you’re revamping an existing novel study, be sure to revisit this component and adjust to your particular group of students.

Step 2: Choose Your Framework.

Once you have clarity around your purpose, the next step is to choose the framework for your novel study. There are three frameworks to consider:

• Whole-class novel study
• Small-group novel study
• Independent novel study

In a whole-class novel study , the whole group reads the same book. This approach creates a shared experience among the students as they engage in a particular text, supplemental materials, and assessments. Despite being a whole-class approach, you can implement various activities and reading techniques, including whole-class, partner, and independent reading.

In a small-group novel study , each group has a different text. You may decide to give students a say in which book they read, but ultimately, it’s imperative you match the students with the books that suit their abilities best. Depending on the needs of your classroom, the different groups may be working on similar or different skills and tasks. However, I recommend finding a unifying theme, essential question, or experience across all books if possible. That way, students can come together to engage in whole-class discussions.

Just as the name indicated, an independent novel study consists of each student reading their own text. This is a highly independent approach where you might offer mini-lessons throughout the unit, but students work on reading and responding to assignments independently. While some students thrive with this level of autonomy, I do not recommend this framework for struggling or reluctant readers. With that said, you might consider putting together an independent study for highly advanced readers despite a whole-class or small-group approach.

NOT SURE WHICH FRAMEWORK TO CHOOSE?

For this grade level, I recommend embarking on a whole-class or small-group novel study. However, if this is the first time the majority of your students are engaging in a novel study or if they require more direct instruction and guidance to achieve your desired goals, I suggest a whole class novel study. Typically speaking, this framework allows more room for redirection and adjustments on the fly. If your classroom includes a wide range of needs and abilities, a small-group novel study might just be the best way to target particular groups of students. If you are overwhelmed by the idea, I suggest using a similar approach for each group, adjusting the specifics of the supplemental material as needed. For example, perhaps you expect one group to fill out a graphic organizer as a response. However, you may provide the organizer to another group while asking them to turn in a fully developed written response. Alternatively, you can begin the year with a whole-class novel study to lay the foundation, introducing students to the components and expectations of this type of unit. Then, follow up with a small-group novel study later in the year to accommodate varying needs or simply give students more autonomy.

Step 3: Choose Your Book

When you choose the book(s) for your novel study, you’ll want to consider what resources you have available to you. If you’re planning this unit far enough in advance and have a hefty book budget, you might have more choice than a teacher working from a pre-approved reading list or library resources.

Regardless, this is why this step comes after clarifying your purpose. Be sure to select a book that aligns with your purpose. For example, will the book help students gain perspective around a historical event or period? Will students be able to apply the book when answering an essential question? Does it fit within the scope of the unit theme? The good news is novel studies have a lot of wiggle room. Unlike being confined to the content in a (potentially outdated) textbook, you have the freedom to select a novel that fits your goals and classroom needs. So, take advantage of the opportunity if you are able to.

HERE ARE A FEW THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN CHOOSING YOUR NOVEL STUDY TEXT:

• Difficulty. This is your Goldilocks moment. You don’t want to select a book that is too difficult or too easy and risk losing student engagement. Instead, seek out that book that is juuuust right. (Remember, if that seems like an impossible task due to a diverse group, consider setting up a small-group novel study.
• Appropriateness. You want to consider what is appropriate for your student’s age. Just because a protagonist is 15 doesn’t mean you need to disregard it as an option. However, you might want to steer clear of books with vulgar language or references to sex, violence, and drugs. When considering appropriateness, be sure to consider parent and district expectations as well to avoid any potential backlash.
• Interest. Your students will be spending anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months working with this text. So, while it might feel impossible to select a text that will pique everyone’s interests, consider the group as a whole. Will they find the story relatable or intriguing? Does it address a relatable theme or question? Even if you’re choosing (or required) to read a classic text, how can it be made relevant to modern society or students’ lives?
• Why? Again, be sure the text aligns with your purpose. This one is so important that, yes, I mentioned it twice.

Now, if you’ve chosen a book you haven’t yet read, your next step is to read the novel. Trust me; you don’t want to be surprised by inappropriate language or controversial topics. However, if you are crunched for time, I understand you may not have time to read an entire novel. At the very least, I suggest you read the synopsis and a handful of reviews to grasp the general storyline and identify any potential red flags in content. I also recommend doing a “finger walk” through the text to get a feel for the writing, including vocabulary and structure. Not everyone is looking to read a book written in diary format or verse. Alternatively, that might be exactly what you want!

WHILE YOU READ/REREAD

Let’s face it. Even as teachers, we might need a refresh and review on a novel we’ve read before. (Yes, even if we’ve taught it eight times.) So, as you read, consider paying attention to the following as you prepare to plan an entire novel study around the text:

• What from the text is relevant to the students’ lives? Modern society? Other areas they may be studying in other subjects?
• What themes and patterns are you finding? How do they fit into the overall goal of the novel study or overarching unit?
• What are you picking up on that you want your students to notice too?
• What literary elements do you want to teach or (at a minimum) point out in the story? (Things like parallel plot structure, character foils, monologue, extended metaphor, motif, static vs. dynamic characters, foreshadowing, etc.)
• What words might students need to know to build their vocabulary and/or enhance their understanding of the novel?
• How does the story unfold? How could it be broken up into manageable reading assignments for students?
• What parts of the story have a lot to unpack? Where do you feel students would benefit most from your input vs. independent reading?

From there, you can use your annotations to guide your focus when planning daily lessons, discussions, and assessments.

Step 4: Set Your Timeline.

When planning your novel study, you need to know how much time you plan to allot to this unit. In cases where you have limited time, you might need to flip-flop this step and the one prior.

Some novel studies move quicker than others. In some cases, you may only need four weeks, and in others, you may need an entire quarter. Your timeline will also depend on your daily schedule. Does your school operate on block scheduling? How long is each class period? Regardless, when deciding which timeline is right for you and your students, consider how much work you’d like done in class vs. at home. How much whole class reading do you plan on doing? That always takes longer than independent reading. Are you sharing this unit with supplemental minilessons to provide historical context or teach writing strategies? These are all things you want to keep in mind as you determine your timeline.

PLAN AHEAD.

As you’re setting up your timeline, you need to think beyond your novel study as well. I suggest marking off important dates to be mindful of as you plan your daily lessons. You don’t want to forget about half days or holidays– those could really throw off your plan if you’re not prepared. Additionally, it’s worth noting any days you know you will be out of the classroom for workshops, appointments, etc. I always recommend using those as independent workdays or “light” days. Mapping those out ahead of time can save you from stressfully shuffling things around for last minute adjustments.

Lastly, plan a buffer week. This extra week prepares you for the unexpected that is bound to come up. Maybe there was an unexpected school closure or an activity that took longer than expected. Whatever the interruption to your ideal timeline, it’s best to be prepared. Tacking on a buffer week to the end of your timeline will give you the wiggle room you need just in case. That way you don’t have to stress if you need to slow down or run into an unexpected obstacle.

In the rare event you end ahead of schedule (AKA on time)? Enjoy it. You can give the students an extra day or two on a final project, add in a fun activity that didn’t quite make the cut the first time around, or simply move on. (We all know that extra week will come in handy at some point down the line.)

I’m telling you, this buffer week is a teacher’s best-kept secret when it comes to planning a novel study.

ESTABLISH READING ASSIGNMENTS.

Once you establish your timeline, you have a foundation for determining your reading assignments. Use your timeline to help you determine how to best chunk out the novel. Account for both in-class and at-home reading, if applicable.

If you’re not sure how to chunk it out, divide the total number of pages in the book by the number of weeks you plan on dedicating to reading. (Remember, the first and last week might not involve reading, so be sure to double-check your plan.) Then divide that number by the number of days you plan on reading each week, in class or at home. You’ll likely have to adjust the number to match up with reasonable breaks in the text, like chapters, but it’s a dependable place to start. Once you know how many pages will be covered each day, in class or at home, be sure to denote which days will be specific for in-class reading. Feel free to mark down which type of in-class reading you’d like to do, such as whole class or independent reading. While this might seem oddly specific, it will help you when it comes to filling in the accompanying lessons and activities.

Additionally, planning both in-class and at-home reading helps you stay on track. Worst case, students have less homework or have to tack on a few extra pages. But trust me. Having a general idea will come in handy when planning out the details.

Step 5: Choose Your Final Assessment.

Start at the end. No, I’m not speaking in riddles. I am , however, talking about Backward Design. So, before filling your schedule with mini-lessons, formative assessments, and fun activities, determine how you will summatively assess your students at the end of the novel study.

Remember, the purpose of a novel study is to go beyond the basics and get students interacting with a text to build a deeper understanding. It’s about comprehension and critical thinking, not regurgitation. Steer clear of static multiple-choice questions and short answer prompts with limiting right and wrong answers. While these can make for quick exit tickets and reading checks, the final assessment should move beyond basic comprehension.

To do this, you’ll need to revisit your purpose. What are the learning goals and standards you are trying to assess by the end of this unit? Then, you need to determine how you are going to assess student learning. Is it going to be through a formal writing assignment? A reflection? A multi-faceted project? A formal discussion or presentation? Will students have a choice?

Once you have the final assessment squared away, be sure to add it to your calendar, marking the final due date. Then, you can work backward to fill in imperative dates to prepare students for the final assessment as needed. For example, certain assessments might need time for workshop days, peer revisions, or presentations. However, plan all of these dates (including the final due date) before the buffer week.

And don’t worry yet if you don’t have the exact assessment or rubrics finalized. For now, stay focused on the plan.

Step 6: Work Backward to Fill in the Rest!

Now that you have your essential framework laid out, it’s time to fill in the blanks! Using your reading schedule and final assessment, work backward to fill out the remaining blocks. You’ll want to incorporate activities before, during, and after reading to round out your novel study.

INTRODUCE THE NOVEL.

Start by planning out how you are going to introduce the novel. Do students need any background information before they dive in? Would it be useful to learn about the novel’s author, setting, or historical context? You can add other pre-reading activities like analyzing the book’s cover or discussing a relevant issue that appears in the book. Have students complete an anticipation guide or play four corners to begin exploring themes and conflicts in the novel.

CHECKING FOR READING COMPREHENSION.

Reading comprehension is an essential component of any novel study. Therefore, incorporate lessons and activities that address areas of comprehension such as identifying themes, examining character development and plot structure, summarizing, and making inferences and connections. You can accomplish these comprehension checks through group discussions, independently written responses, and group activities.

When planning for reading comprehension activities, be sure to incorporate a variety of activities. Not all students will shine through writing, but that doesn’t mean they don’t understand the novel and its essential elements. Adding a variety to your unit study will ensure each student has the opportunity to shine and showcase their comprehension in one way or another.

You’ll also want to leave room for any minilessons you plan on teaching to aid student comprehension. Do you need to plan a 20-minute lesson reviewing the elements of plot? Do you need to teach a lesson about literary devices or explain how to effectively annotate a text? Leave room for teaching such lessons and completing activities throughout the novel study.

BEFORE THE FINAL ASSESSMENT.

If time permits, consider incorporating a post-reading assignment that serves more as a fun review before jumping into the final assessment. This is a great opportunity for student choice and group mini-projects. Students can put together collages, redesign the cover, create a timeline of events, write a book review, or make a character scrapbook to review the essential elements of the story. Give them as many or as few guidelines as you feel necessary.

However, keep these activities to one or two classes. You don’t want them to take away from prepping for the final assessment. However, it’s an excellent way for students to interact with the whole text, providing a refresher before embarking on a summative assessment.

A FINAL WORD.

A piece of advice? Be realistic when planning. If you know your students aren’t going to be able to read 20 pages, watch a video clip, participate in a discussion, and write a response, don’t set that expectation for a single class period. It only creates stress and interrupts your plan. Instead, feel free to have a bank of optional extension activities you can pull from if needed. Character diary entries, connection prompts, and comic strips are some student favorites.

You’re Ready to Go!

The best part? Once you have a well-mapped-out novel study, you can rinse and repeat with different novels or groups of students from year to year. That way, you won’t have to start from scratch each time. I’m willing to bet there’s already a lot on your plate, so I’d hate for you to reinvent the wheel when you don’t have to.

But, for now, happy planning! Psst… Feel free to save this post to return to as needed throughout your planning process.

If you’re pressed for time or still feel overwhelmed don’t fear. I’ve premade some novel study resources I know you’ll find useful. Check them out!

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Tutorials, Study Guides & More

How to study a novel

September 16, 2009 by Roy Johnson

reading novels and effective study skills

Why study a novel? There’s nothing wrong with reading a novel just to pass the time, or as an alternative to watching TV. But if you want to get more out of your reading experience, if you want to start appreciating the finer points of literature, or if you want to make a serious study of the books you read – then you need to go in at a deeper level. For this you may need new reading techniques.

The tips and skills listed here are not in any order of priority, and some may be more appropriate for the book you are reading than others. Use them in any combination possible, and I guarantee you’ll start seeing things in novels you never saw before.

Method There isn’t one single formula or a secret recipe for the successful study of a novel. But to do it seriously you should be a careful and attentive reader. This means reading, then re-reading. It means making an active engagement with the book, and it probably means reading more slowly than usual. And it means making notes.

Approach You can read the novel quickly first, just to get an idea of the story-line. Then you will need to read it again more slowly, making notes. If you don’t have time, then one careful slower reading should combine understanding and note-taking. For instance you could read a novella such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness quite quickly, then re-read it more carefully, making detailed notes. But in the case of a long novel such as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House it’s unlikely that you would have enough time to read it more than once. You would need to make the notes at the same time as a single reading.

Make notes There are two possible types of notes – some written in the pages of the book itself, and others on separate sheets of paper. Those in the book are for highlighting small details as you go along. Those on separate pages are for summaries of evidence, collections of your own observations, and page references for study topics or quotations.

Notes written in the book are absolutely vital if you are going to write about the book – say for a term paper or a coursework essay. They will save you hours of searching through the pages to locate a passage you wish to quote.

Notes in the book Use a soft pencil – not a pen. Ink is too distracting on the page. Don’t underline whole paragraphs. If something strikes you as interesting, write a brief note saying why or how it is so. If you read on the bus or in the bath, use the inside covers and any blank pages for making notes. Do not of course write in library books – only your own copy. To do so is both insulting to other readers, and very stupid – because you lose the notes when the book is returned.

Vladimir Nabokov’s notes on Kafka’s Metamorphosis

What to note? You can nmake a note of anything that strikes you as interesting, but here are some suggestions:

• the appearance of characters
• recurring themes or motifs
• features of the author’s style
• plot twists or crucial scenes
• important details of the story

Some do’s and don’ts Underline up to a couple of lines of the text if necessary – but also put a word or two in the margin that gives it a title . In other words, give a name to what you think is important. Don’t underline whole paragraphs: that creates an ugly page, and it’s a waste of time. Instead, write a note in the top or bottom margin, saying what you think is important. Or put a circle round a name or a special couple of words.

Separate notes You will definitely remember the characters, events, and features of a novel more easily if you make notes whilst reading. Use separate pages for different topics. You might make a record of

• chronology of events
• major themes
• stylistic features
• narrative strategies

Characters Make a note of the name, age, appearance, and their relationship to other characters in the novel. Writers usually give most background information about characters when they are first introduced into the story. Make a note of the page(s) on which this occurs. Note any special features of main characters, what other characters (or the author) thinks of them.

Chronology of events A summary of each chapter will help you reconstruct the whole story long after you have read it. The summary prompts the traces of reading experience which lie dormant in your memory. If the book is divided into chapters, make a short summary of each one as you finish reading it.

A chronology of events might also help you to unravel a complex story. It might help separate plots from sub-plots, and even help you to see any underlying structure in the story – what might be called the ‘architecture of events’.

Major themes These are the important underlying issues with which the novel is concerned. They are usually summarised as abstract concepts such as – marriage, education, justice, freedom, and redemption. These might only emerge slowly as the novel progresses on first reading – though they might seem much more obvious on subsequent readings.

Seeing the main underlying themes will help you to appreciate the relative importance of events. It will also help you to spot cross-references and appreciate some of the subtle effects orchestrated by the author.

Stylistic features These are the decorative and literary hallmarks of the writer’s style – which usually make an important contribution to the way the story is told. The style might be created by any number of features:

• choice of vocabulary
• imagery and metaphors
• shifts in tone and register
• use of irony and humour

Quotations If you are writing an essay about the novel, you will need quotations from it to support your arguments. You must make a careful note of the pages on which they occur. Do this immediately whilst reading – otherwise tracking them down later will waste lots of time.

Record page number and a brief description of the subject. Write out the quotation itself if it is short enough. Don’t bother writing out long quotations.

Bibliography If you are reading literary criticism or background materials related to the novel – make a full bibliographic record of every source. In the case of books, you should record – Author, Book Title, Publisher, Place of publication, Date, Page number.

If you borrow the book from a library, make a full note of its number in the library’s classification system. This will save you time if you need to take it out again at a later date.

In the case of Internet and other digital sources (CDs, websites, videos) you need to look at our guidance notes on referencing digital sources .

Maps and diagrams Some people have good visual memories. A diagram or map may help you to remember or conceptualise the ‘geography’ of events. Here’s Vladimir Nabokov’s diagram of the geography of Southerton in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park .

Chapter summaries Many novels are structured in chapters. After reading each chapter, make a one sentence summary of what it’s about. This can help you remember the events at a later date. The summary might be what ‘happens’ in an obvious sense [Mr X travels to London] but it might be something internal or psychological [Susan realises she is ‘alone’].

Deciding what is most important will help you to digest and remember the content of the novel. The process of deciding will also help you to separate the more important from the less important content.

Making links Events or characters or details of plot may have significant links between them, even though these are revealed to the reader many pages apart. Always make a note as soon as you see them – because they will be very hard to find later.

Use a dictionary Some novelists like to use unusual, obscure, or even foreign words. Take the trouble to look these up in a good dictionary. It will help you to understand the story and the author, and it will help to extend the range of your own vocabulary. If you need help choosing a good dictionary for studying, have a look at our guidance notes on the subject.

What is close reading? When you have become accustomed to looking at a novel in greater depth, you might be interested to know that there are four possible stages in the process of understanding what it has to offer and what can be said about it. These are the four, in increasing degree of complexity.

1. Linguistic You pay especially close attention to the surface linguistic elements of the text – that is, to aspects of vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. You might also note such things as figures of speech or any other features which contribute to the writer’s individual style. This level of reading is largely descriptive .

2. Semantic You take account at a deeper level of what the words mean – that is, what information they yield up, what meanings they denote and connote. This level of reading is cognitive . That is, we need to understand what the words are telling us – both at a surface and maybe at an implicit level.

3. Structural You note the possible relationships between words within the text – and this might include items from either the linguistic or semantic types of reading. This level of reading is analytic . You assess, examine, sift, and judge a large number of items from within the text in their relationships to each other.

4. Cultural You note the relationship of any elements of the text to things outside it. These might be other pieces of writing by the same author, or other writings of the same type by different writers. They might be items of social or cultural history, or even other academic disciplines which might seem relevant, such as philosophy or psychology. This level of reading is interpretive . We offer judgements on the work in its general relationship to a large body of cultural material outside it.

Next steps If you want a sample of these four levels of reading illustrated with brief extracts from a short story and a long novel, here are –

• Katherine Mansfield’s ‘The Voyage’
• Charles Dickens’s Bleak House

© Roy Johnson 2004

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Oh Hey, ELA!

by Lindsay Flood

Novel Study for Any Novel

Teachers love novel studies. Students LOVE novel studies. However, novel studies can be a struggle for several reasons.

As a teacher, I want to talk about EVERY. SINGLE. THING. That’s obviously not always the best option. Because, well, the novel study would take 2ish years.

Still, I wanted my students to dig into the richness of a novel. The character development, plot line, inferences to be made. The flashbacks, the foreshadowing, the connections. OH my! Too good!

So, I figured out a way for my students to close read and analyze key points of a novel, and not just any novel , but for all novels.

What’s hard for students to recognize is how the events in the plot line connect with one another. The best way to watch these events unfold is in a novel.

So many elements of the exposition relate to the conflict, the character development, the reactions and motivations the characters demonstrate, as well as to the theme and the resolution. It’s easy to miss these connections in most novel studies.

The design of this particular novel study makes it easy for students to see the progression of that “Plot Roller Coaster” or “Plot Mountain” they’ve been drawing since 1 st grade. The tabs in the novel visually connect to the unfolding of the plot line. One of my students LITERALLY shouted, “THAT is so cool!” They love the tabs and to see the plot unfolding and connecting just by looking at the tabs makes they feel like they are truly analyzing and close reading.

With this novel study , my students were able to make deep, meaningful connections to critical parts of the novel that changed the direction of the plot line, or that opened the eyes of the reader’s understanding of a particular character’s perspective or lesson learned.

There are two things that I LOVE about this novel study : you can use it with any novel, and you can use in a variety of different ways with your students. Here are some ways that my students used the novel study in my classroom with the books A Long Walk to Water by Linda Sue Park and Wonder by RJ Palacio.

Whole Group:

This novel study’s flexibility allows for an interactive and rigorous whole group graphic organizer. Because the students were focused on a particular set of paragraphs in the text, as a class, we were able to dig deeper into a paragraph (or two or three) and really study a character, the setting, mood and tone of the section, and the perspectives of the character. The graphic organizers were perfect for launching student discussion, making deep connections, and understanding how perspectives are formed based on the experiences of the characters prior to this section.

  Small Group:

The collaborative aspect of meaningful, deep conversations that are guided by the graphic organizers in a small group are amazing . It’s based on the student’s analysis of a particular section of the text, but also leads the students to foreshadow, flashback, and make connections throughout the text that are focused on rigorous ELA standards and skills. Also, the students are able to learn from each other, by sharing their thinking and their perspectives in the small group setting. It’s amazing to see their “brains on the paper” as they work together and share their own thoughts and opinions and conclusions.

  Homework:

Often time, when you assign nightly reading from a novel, it’s hard to decipher if the students really read and gained the information you wanted them to get from the text. However, what I’ve found with the assigned reading and then providing them with these analysis graphic organizers, the students are definitely focusing in more on the skill or aspect of the text I want them to focus in on.

Parents are even noticing the students’ focus on their reading when using these as their close reading guides :

“My kiddo showed me this in his book today! Love the color, book-mark style, AND the focus on text details!” – Alison, a parent of a student in my class

Socratic Seminar:

Since my students are required to read a portion before coming to class, this novel study is perfect for Socratic Seminars. The fact that students can use these novel study guides and the graphic organizers included to formulate new thinking or a deeper understanding, lends perfectly to whole group, student-led conversations based on one particular section of text. For example, in Wonder , the chapter “A Tour of the Galaxy” in Part 2, the students were required to close read the first three paragraphs. The questions and conversations that came up during student led discussion were amazing:

• “Via definitely feels alone. She’s just floating around the sun – Auggie. I’ve felt this way before because of my sibling…”
• “This is crazy how alone Via feels. And she’s the OLDER sister! She definitely feels like she has to be the protector because she’s older. But I’m glad she has Gran.”
• “I think it’s crazy the analogy Via uses. It shows her true perspective of Auggie, even though she really loves him. She just knows what she ‘has to do’ to survive in Auggie’s world.”

Formative Assessment:

When working in small group, or even whole group, it’s easy to quickly observe the skill the students are struggling with, or they are mastering. This helped me determine small groups for reteaching as well as skills I needed to refocus on for mini-lessons.

Rigorous, Deep Thinking:

Oftentimes, novel studies present “right there”, basic comprehension question. With all the juicy goodness in a novel, why just ask surface level questions? (Also – let’s be real – we also know that this is not what the students need as we prep for state testing or benchmark assessments.)

The questions on the study guides require text-based evidence to support ALL of their analysis and answers. The students are guided to answer the “Why?” and “How?” and “I know this because…” when focusing on:

• Character Perspective
• Mood and Tone of the text
• Character Traits and Motivation
• Author’s Purpose
• As well as: exposition, rising action, falling action, & climax

For example, in both A Long Walk to Water and Wonder , students are able to recognize how a character’s physical traits can affect their personality and motivations. They were able to recognize the actions and reactions of the main characters affect supporting characters. They were able to determine the author’s purpose of including certain details and how the details affect the resolution. The students were able to digest and break down the climax of the story and how the main character truly was affected and changed.

What are some of your favorite novel studies to do with your kiddos?

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Published by Lindsay Flood

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5 thoughts on “Novel Study for Any Novel”

Hi Lindsay! When do you assign the different parts of this product? Trying to plan ahead for my 8th graders and To Kill A Mkbd….. I have things I have done with them in years past; however, I want to focus on the story elements and this works perfectly.

I could not figure out how and why to use the post it notes.

Hi Lindsay! Do you have an example of how and where in A Long Walk to Water that you use this? Possibly an example to purchase even? We just got our books a few weeks ago and I just bought your TPT file today! I am a little intimidated to use it!

I would love to see an explanation of some of the sticky notes as well!

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CommonLit 360 How to Effectively Teach a CommonLit 360 Novel Unit

Olivia Franklin

Build student reading comprehension with highly engaging novel study units, complete with engaging lessons and chapter guides as part of CommonLit’s free 360 curriculum.

CommonLit 360 is a comprehensive ELA curriculum for grades 6-12. Our standards-aligned units are highly engaging and develop core reading and writing skills.

Looking for engaging novel units that include student materials, engaging activities, and more? Want to hook students and get them excited to talk and write about books they are reading in class? CommonLit has you covered.

CommonLit’s 360 curriculum for grades 6-12 provides each grade with at least one novel study unit. High-interest texts frequently taught in ELA classrooms anchor these units, including Animal Farm, The Giver, and more. Each unit comes with everything teachers need to make their novel units engaging – chapter guides, reading and writing lessons, supplemental texts, discussion lessons, and more.

Engage students with Essential Questions designed around interesting topics

Each novel unit comes with an Essential Question that students will analyze throughout the book. The topics for each novel unit are designed to be interesting and relevant to students’ lives, allowing for lively discussion as students develop reading and writing skills.

Here are the novels and questions for each unit:

Spark student interest with  reading comprehension questions

CommonLit’s novel units come complete with all the lesson plans and materials needed to effectively teach the lessons. The books themselves are the only items schools will need to provide, with many books available online through Project Gutenberg .  

Each chapter or section of the novel comes with skills-based During Reading questions to guide students’ thinking as they read. The During Reading questions give students multiple opportunities to write in response to the text.

The chapter guides are designed to be flexibly used – they can be assigned independently or in small groups, and allow for class discussions. Additionally, teachers are provided with their own copies that include summaries, facilitation guides, and exemplar responses.

We also provide reading assessments meant to be completed independently. These exit tickets give teachers a benchmark of student progress. The assessments can be assigned digitally or on paper.

Lessons that help build foundational writing skills

In our novel units, we give students ample opportunities to write about what they read. Throughout the unit, students answer open-ended assessment questions. They also engage in writing lessons which teach them foundational writing skills.

Take 9th grade’s Animal Farm unit as an example. Students learn how to write a thesis that includes a counterclaim and how to emphasize parts of a quote in their analysis. These lessons help students work their way to the culminating literary analysis essay. Teachers are also given optional narrative or creative essay prompts to include in the unit as well.  

Related Media Explorations build critical background knowledge

Most 360 units include a Related Media Exploration, a media analysis that is a unique  cornerstone of our ELA curriculum. These interactive tasks bring our novel units to life and provide useful background information while also providing opportunities for text-to-self connections.  

In our Animal Farm unit, students engage in two Related Media Explorations. The first is an overview of different types of government: capitalism, socialism, communism, and totalitarianism. The second explores the novel’s allegorical connection to the events and leaders of the Russian Revolution.

Discussion lessons to foster student debate

Our novel units go beyond reading and writing lessons to emphasize speaking and listening skills as well. Discussion lessons embedded in the units are great opportunities to extend student thinking and promote strong habits of discussion.

They come with supportive copies so students can effectively prepare for the discussion, as well as facilitation tips and student voice trackers so teachers feel confident leading students through the lesson.

In the Animal Farm unit, students will debate two questions: “What factors contributed to Animal Farm’s corruption? Was the ending of Animal Farm preventable or was it inevitable?”

Supplemental activities to hone student skills

Our novel units also come with lots of optional lessons to further engage students. For example, we provide vocabulary activities to help students internalize high-impact academic vocabulary words they will see in the novel they are reading.

The Animal Farm unit introduces 21 new vocabulary words and provides 5 activities and two quizzes to test student application of the words in context. We also provide grammar activities and quizzes, along with supplemental texts in English and Spanish.

Want to learn more about novel units and CommonLit 360? Register for a free, 30-minute webinar today!

Interested in learning about our affordable support packages? For just $6,500 per school, School Essentials PRO Plus provides teachers with three  benchmark assessments, two unit skill assessments per 360 unit, personalized professional development, school-wide data reports, LMS integrations, and more.

We are eager to support your team!

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How to Plan a Novel Study QUICKLY

During my first year of teaching, my novel studies were a mess. We didn’t finish the first two books. I was up all night trying to plan the next day. I had no sense of direction and no idea how long any of my plans would take. Now, I can plan an entire novel study in under an hour. This post will walk you through the exact steps I take to plan a novel study quickly .

Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links that earn me a small commission, at no additional cost to you. I only recommend products that I personally use and love, or think my readers will find useful.

Plan A Novel Study Step 1: Get Your Calendar

Every school functions a little differently. Before you plan anything, make sure you have a calendar in front of you. 

I usually start with a paper calendar and later transition to a digital calendar after I have some general ideas down. Play around with different calendars and planners until you find one you like. 

(Want a free planning calendar? I include one in my FREE email series for new English teachers. Sign up right here! )

Before you can even begin planning your novel study unit, you need to know how much time you have. 

Some curriculums might dictate that you move through units faster. You might only have 4 weeks to do a whole novel study. 

For a novel study, I use my whole quarter. That’s nine-weeks in my district (and most high schools in the United States).

My school is an alternative school; we don’t assign homework. That means all of the reading and work will be done in class, so finishing a novel study in less than nine-weeks is nearly impossible for me and my students.

Figure out your timeframe according to your district and your school.

Mark Important Dates

Then, label your calendar with any days that might affect your teaching time.

I always make sure to label in-service days, holidays, half-days, and even days when I already have an appointment scheduled and I know that I’ll be absent. 

At this point, you should know exactly how many teaching days you have with your students. 

Also, note which days it might be best to “teach light”.

The day before winter break, for example, may not be the best day to teach an intense lesson. You might not want to leave a sub to introduce a huge project the day you have a dentist appointment. 

Block Off Your Buffer Week

I learned early in my teaching career that there is never enough time. Inevitably, a last-minute assembly will be scheduled, a snow day will happen, or your counselors will insist on coming in to discuss college applications. 

I always leave the last week of a unit as a “buffer” week. This way, if we need to slow down or reschedule, I know there will still be time to finish.

And if we miraculously end our unit on schedule? Then I have five glorious days to review, teach enrichment minilessons, and have fun with my students. 

So in my nine-week novel study, I plan as if I only have eight weeks. That last week is blocked off and completely ignored. 

Getting your calendar ready should take no more than 5 minutes. 

Plan A Novel Study Step 2: Get Your Book

Your novel choice might be dictated by your school or district. Or, you might have a list of novels to choose from. You might even have complete freedom.

Regardless of how rigid or free your curriculum is, you’ll need a novel to study.

If you already have a book in mind, move on to step 3.

If you don’t, be sure to consider a few things while you make your choice.

First, your novel choice should support your overall goals.

If you’re teaching an African American unit, remember to double-check that the book is written by an African American. If you’re diving into dystopian fiction, make sure you choose a dystopian novel. 

I know that sounds obvious, but when you start digging into book recommendations on blogs and social media, you can end up down a rabbit hole and accidentally start planning for a unit that you’re not even teaching.

Stay focused.

Another aspect to consider is the time you have and your students’ abilities.  

If you only have four weeks and you can’t assign reading outside of the classroom, you may want to lean towards graphic novels or novellas. 

If your class contains many high-needs students, it might not be the time to read the entirety of the Canterbury Tales. 

Be sure that your novel choice makes sense for your timeframe and your students. 

Actually narrowing down your book choice might take a while if you don’t have one prescribed or any ideas before trying to plan. I always recommend talking to your colleagues and consulting teacher Facebook group for ideas if you get stuck.

This step should only take 5 minutes if you have a book idea but might take days if you have no idea where to begin.

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Plan a Novel Study Step 3: Choose Your Final Assessment

Your instructional coach has probably preached the idea of “backward design” to you at some point–that’s what you’re going to do here.

Begin with the end in mind. Will your students be writing an analysis essay? Creating a research project? Engaging in a formal discussion?

The final “big” assessment for your unit should shape everything you do during the unit.

Your final assessment will also determine your lesson plans toward the end of the unit. 

Decide on your final assessment and then choose a due date on your calendar.

Remember to ignore your buffer week and to leave time for you to grade it afterward!

Work From the Due Date Back

From your due date, plan backward. How much time will students need in class for researching, drafting, and peer-editing? Pen (or type) these into your lesson planning calendar.

For example, a final discussion will only take one day to do (the due date). You might also want to block out the day before as a final prep day for students to organize their notes.

For a large project, however, you may want to mark off several days for researching, a couple of days for assembling the project, and a day of rehearsal. The due date might cover two or three days of class if you’re having students present them to the whole class.

At this point, you might have a couple of days or a couple of weeks planned. Way to go!

Don’t worry yet about making sure you have peer-editing sheets or the actual project assignment–that can all be done later. Right now, just get your framework done for the unit.

This step should take between ten and fifteen minutes. Remember, you’re just penciling in ideas–not creating anything yet.

Plan a Novel Study Step 4: Schedule the Reading

At this point, you might already have very few teaching days left. By the time you account for assemblies and statewide testing and squeeze in an essay, much of your class time is gone. 

And we haven’t even scheduled the actual novel yet! Now, it’s time to do that.

It’s difficult to estimate how long a book will take to read if you haven’t taught it yet. 

My Reading Time Formula

I have a formula I use to determine how many days we’ll need to finish reading a book in class:

Days of Reading = Book Length/Weeks of Reading/Days of Reading Per Week

• Find the audiobook version of the novel on Amazon (or YouTube or wherever).
• Note the length of the audiobook and convert it into minutes. (This is the “Book Length” in my formula above.)
• Look at your calendar and decide how many weeks you have to get through the novel. (This is “Weeks of Reading” in my formula above.) Divide the length of the audiobook in minutes (Book Length) by the number of weeks you have to read the novel (Weeks of Reading). 
• Decide how many days a week you’ll read. I recommend sticking with just two or three days per week, so you’re students don’t get burnt out. (This number is “Days of Reading Per Week” in my formula above.) Now, divide the number you got in step 3 by the number of days per week you’ll read.

Formula Example

As an example, let me use a novel study that I’m planning right now with A Long Way Gone by Ishmael Beah. According to Amazon, the audiobook is 7 hours and 43 minutes, for a total of 463 minutes.

I want to read the whole book in five weeks, so I’ll divide 463 by 5 for a total of 92.6 minutes of reading. That means each week, we’ll need to read about 92 minutes to get through the whole novel. 

Each week, I want to spend two days reading and answering reading questions. So, I’ll divide 92.6 by 2 for a total of 46.3 minutes. 

That means twice a week for five weeks, I’ll need to spend about 46 minutes reading the book with my students. 

Now, you can play around with these numbers. For example, if you want to assign thirty minutes of reading outside of class each week, you can subtract that from your total time.

Forty-six minutes works well for me because I have ninety-minute block classes. We can read for forty-six minutes and still have time to answer questions and summarize the events together. 

Mark Your Reading Days

Now that you know how often you’ll need to read, you can mark those days on your calendar.

For my A Long Way Gone novel study, I marked off every Monday and Wednesday from weeks 2-6 on my calendar.  

Now, understanding my formula through a blog post might take a minute, but the actual math should be quick.

Planning your reading schedule should take no longer than five minutes!

Plan a Novel Study Step 5: Work Backwards and Fill in Your Calendar

By now, a big chunk of your calendar should be filled in. You’ve scheduled reading days and the due date of your final assessment. 

You might also have blocked off days for work time, research, peer-editing, or presenting. 

Now, jump to the end of your calendar (ignoring the buffer week of course) and start filling in everything else you need to cover. 

Do you have a day to introduce the final assessment? Will you need time to teach skills related to the assessment like writing thesis statements or finding credible sources? 

Are there other programs that your school or district requires you to use? If you’re doing an independent reading program , don’t forget to include time for that.

Don’t forget to also include lessons that your students might need to relate to the novel.

I always plan for some kind of introduction to the book and the author. Usually, this is a slideshow that covers crucial background information also. 

After you fill in the empty days on your calendar with other needed activity, you’ll probably have very little time left to fill–if any.

If you have a day or two that’s completely blank, that’s ok! You’ll find something to fill it. If time isn’t stolen from you by an assembly or a snow day, you can assess your students’ work to see what skills you need to re-teach on those empty days. 

This step could very easily only take five minutes, but could take longer depending on your calendar, your assessment, and how detailed you want to be. 

But Congratulations! You created a novel study plan in under an hour!

What to do After Creating a Plan for Your Novel Study

I hope you feel great now that you have a schedule. It always takes a load off of my shoulders.

(If this is too easy, maybe you should try planning a literature circle next!)

Obviously, however, there is still a lot to create and plan. You have the rough calendar and ideas, but you might not have all of the worksheets, assignments sheets, or quizzes and tests ready to go. 

This is when I will start asking to steal material from colleagues. It’s also when I start looking at Teachers Pay Teachers. 

There are some really great resources created by other teachers out there.

For my A Long Way Gone novel study, I definitely purchased an introduction presentation from another seller. That’s a resource that would take me a long time to research and put together.

I’d rather spend a few dollars and move on to tackling the next day. 

If you’d like to do the same, check out some novel studies that are already down for you:

• The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
• Dear Martin by Nic Stone
• All American Boys by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely
• Internment by Samira Ahmed

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The 10 Best Essay Collections of the Decade

Ever tried. ever failed. no matter..

Friends, it’s true: the end of the decade approaches. It’s been a difficult, anxiety-provoking, morally compromised decade, but at least it’s been populated by some damn fine literature. We’ll take our silver linings where we can.

So, as is our hallowed duty as a literary and culture website—though with full awareness of the potentially fruitless and endlessly contestable nature of the task—in the coming weeks, we’ll be taking a look at the best and most important (these being not always the same) books of the decade that was. We will do this, of course, by means of a variety of lists. We began with the best debut novels , the best short story collections , the best poetry collections , and the best memoirs of the decade , and we have now reached the fifth list in our series: the best essay collections published in English between 2010 and 2019.

The following books were chosen after much debate (and several rounds of voting) by the Literary Hub staff. Tears were spilled, feelings were hurt, books were re-read. And as you’ll shortly see, we had a hard time choosing just ten—so we’ve also included a list of dissenting opinions, and an even longer list of also-rans. As ever, free to add any of your own favorites that we’ve missed in the comments below.

The Top Ten

Oliver sacks, the mind’s eye (2010).

Toward the end of his life, maybe suspecting or sensing that it was coming to a close, Dr. Oliver Sacks tended to focus his efforts on sweeping intellectual projects like On the Move (a memoir), The River of Consciousness (a hybrid intellectual history), and Hallucinations (a book-length meditation on, what else, hallucinations). But in 2010, he gave us one more classic in the style that first made him famous, a form he revolutionized and brought into the contemporary literary canon: the medical case study as essay. In The Mind’s Eye , Sacks focuses on vision, expanding the notion to embrace not only how we see the world, but also how we map that world onto our brains when our eyes are closed and we’re communing with the deeper recesses of consciousness. Relaying histories of patients and public figures, as well as his own history of ocular cancer (the condition that would eventually spread and contribute to his death), Sacks uses vision as a lens through which to see all of what makes us human, what binds us together, and what keeps us painfully apart. The essays that make up this collection are quintessential Sacks: sensitive, searching, with an expertise that conveys scientific information and experimentation in terms we can not only comprehend, but which also expand how we see life carrying on around us. The case studies of “Stereo Sue,” of the concert pianist Lillian Kalir, and of Howard, the mystery novelist who can no longer read, are highlights of the collection, but each essay is a kind of gem, mined and polished by one of the great storytellers of our era.  –Dwyer Murphy, CrimeReads Managing Editor

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade, and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published primarily in GQ , but also in The Paris Review , and Harper’s —was the only full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching Towards Bethlehem , and probably one of the only full books of essays they had even heard of.

Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly, it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming of One Tree Hill , the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer, the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules Challenge fame).

But as Dan Kois has pointed out , what connects these essays, apart from their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard quiz, considering the context.)

It’s hard not to feel, reading this collection, like someone reached into your brain, took out the half-baked stuff you talk about with your friends, researched it, lived it, and represented it to you smarter and better and more thoroughly than you ever could. So read it in awe if you must, but read it.  –Emily Temple, Senior Editor

Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (2013)

Such is the sentence-level virtuosity of Aleksandar Hemon—the Bosnian-American writer, essayist, and critic—that throughout his career he has frequently been compared to the granddaddy of borrowed language prose stylists: Vladimir Nabokov. While it is, of course, objectively remarkable that anyone could write so beautifully in a language they learned in their twenties, what I admire most about Hemon’s work is the way in which he infuses every essay and story and novel with both a deep humanity and a controlled (but never subdued) fury. He can also be damn funny. Hemon grew up in Sarajevo and left in 1992 to study in Chicago, where he almost immediately found himself stranded, forced to watch from afar as his beloved home city was subjected to a relentless four-year bombardment, the longest siege of a capital in the history of modern warfare. This extraordinary memoir-in-essays is many things: it’s a love letter to both the family that raised him and the family he built in exile; it’s a rich, joyous, and complex portrait of a place the 90s made synonymous with war and devastation; and it’s an elegy for the wrenching loss of precious things. There’s an essay about coming of age in Sarajevo and another about why he can’t bring himself to leave Chicago. There are stories about relationships forged and maintained on the soccer pitch or over the chessboard, and stories about neighbors and mentors turned monstrous by ethnic prejudice. As a chorus they sing with insight, wry humor, and unimaginable sorrow. I am not exaggerating when I say that the collection’s devastating final piece, “The Aquarium”—which details his infant daughter’s brain tumor and the agonizing months which led up to her death—remains the most painful essay I have ever read.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)

Of every essay in my relentlessly earmarked copy of Braiding Sweetgrass , Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s gorgeously rendered argument for why and how we should keep going, there’s one that especially hits home: her account of professor-turned-forester Franz Dolp. When Dolp, several decades ago, revisited the farm that he had once shared with his ex-wife, he found a scene of destruction: The farm’s new owners had razed the land where he had tried to build a life. “I sat among the stumps and the swirling red dust and I cried,” he wrote in his journal.

So many in my generation (and younger) feel this kind of helplessness–and considerable rage–at finding ourselves newly adult in a world where those in power seem determined to abandon or destroy everything that human bodies have always needed to survive: air, water, land. Asking any single book to speak to this helplessness feels unfair, somehow; yet, Braiding Sweetgrass does, by weaving descriptions of indigenous tradition with the environmental sciences in order to show what survival has looked like over the course of many millennia. Kimmerer’s essays describe her personal experience as a Potawotami woman, plant ecologist, and teacher alongside stories of the many ways that humans have lived in relationship to other species. Whether describing Dolp’s work–he left the stumps for a life of forest restoration on the Oregon coast–or the work of others in maple sugar harvesting, creating black ash baskets, or planting a Three Sisters garden of corn, beans, and squash, she brings hope. “In ripe ears and swelling fruit, they counsel us that all gifts are multiplied in relationship,” she writes of the Three Sisters, which all sustain one another as they grow. “This is how the world keeps going.”  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Hilton Als, White Girls (2013)

In a world where we are so often reduced to one essential self, Hilton Als’ breathtaking book of critical essays, White Girls , which meditates on the ways he and other subjects read, project and absorb parts of white femininity, is a radically liberating book. It’s one of the only works of critical thinking that doesn’t ask the reader, its author or anyone he writes about to stoop before the doorframe of complete legibility before entering. Something he also permitted the subjects and readers of his first book, the glorious book-length essay, The Women , a series of riffs and psychological portraits of Dorothy Dean, Owen Dodson, and the author’s own mother, among others. One of the shifts of that book, uncommon at the time, was how it acknowledges the way we inhabit bodies made up of variously gendered influences. To read White Girls now is to experience the utter freedom of this gift and to marvel at Als’ tremendous versatility and intelligence.

He is easily the most diversely talented American critic alive. He can write into genres like pop music and film where being part of an audience is a fantasy happening in the dark. He’s also wired enough to know how the art world builds reputations on the nod of rich white patrons, a significant collision in a time when Jean-Michel Basquiat is America’s most expensive modern artist. Als’ swerving and always moving grip on performance means he’s especially good on describing the effect of art which is volatile and unstable and built on the mingling of made-up concepts and the hard fact of their effect on behavior, such as race. Writing on Flannery O’Connor for instance he alone puts a finger on her “uneasy and unavoidable union between black and white, the sacred and the profane, the shit and the stars.” From Eminem to Richard Pryor, André Leon Talley to Michael Jackson, Als enters the life and work of numerous artists here who turn the fascinations of race and with whiteness into fury and song and describes the complexity of their beauty like his life depended upon it. There are also brief memoirs here that will stop your heart. This is an essential work to understanding American culture.  –John Freeman, Executive Editor

Eula Biss, On Immunity (2014)

We move through the world as if we can protect ourselves from its myriad dangers, exercising what little agency we have in an effort to keep at bay those fears that gather at the edges of any given life: of loss, illness, disaster, death. It is these fears—amplified by the birth of her first child—that Eula Biss confronts in her essential 2014 essay collection, On Immunity . As any great essayist does, Biss moves outward in concentric circles from her own very private view of the world to reveal wider truths, discovering as she does a culture consumed by anxiety at the pervasive toxicity of contemporary life. As Biss interrogates this culture—of privilege, of whiteness—she interrogates herself, questioning the flimsy ways in which we arm ourselves with science or superstition against the impurities of daily existence.

Five years on from its publication, it is dismaying that On Immunity feels as urgent (and necessary) a defense of basic science as ever. Vaccination, we learn, is derived from vacca —for cow—after the 17th-century discovery that a small application of cowpox was often enough to inoculate against the scourge of smallpox, an etymological digression that belies modern conspiratorial fears of Big Pharma and its vaccination agenda. But Biss never scolds or belittles the fears of others, and in her generosity and openness pulls off a neat (and important) trick: insofar as we are of the very world we fear, she seems to be suggesting, we ourselves are impure, have always been so, permeable, vulnerable, yet so much stronger than we think.  –Jonny Diamond, Editor-in-Chief 

Rebecca Solnit, The Mother of All Questions (2016)

When Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” was published in 2008, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon unlike almost any other in recent memory, assigning language to a behavior that almost every woman has witnessed—mansplaining—and, in the course of identifying that behavior, spurring a movement, online and offline, to share the ways in which patriarchal arrogance has intersected all our lives. (It would also come to be the titular essay in her collection published in 2014.) The Mother of All Questions follows up on that work and takes it further in order to examine the nature of self-expression—who is afforded it and denied it, what institutions have been put in place to limit it, and what happens when it is employed by women. Solnit has a singular gift for describing and decoding the misogynistic dynamics that govern the world so universally that they can seem invisible and the gendered violence that is so common as to seem unremarkable; this naming is powerful, and it opens space for sharing the stories that shape our lives.

The Mother of All Questions, comprised of essays written between 2014 and 2016, in many ways armed us with some of the tools necessary to survive the gaslighting of the Trump years, in which many of us—and especially women—have continued to hear from those in power that the things we see and hear do not exist and never existed. Solnit also acknowledges that labels like “woman,” and other gendered labels, are identities that are fluid in reality; in reviewing the book for The New Yorker , Moira Donegan suggested that, “One useful working definition of a woman might be ‘someone who experiences misogyny.'” Whichever words we use, Solnit writes in the introduction to the book that “when words break through unspeakability, what was tolerated by a society sometimes becomes intolerable.” This storytelling work has always been vital; it continues to be vital, and in this book, it is brilliantly done.  –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends (2017)

The newly minted MacArthur fellow Valeria Luiselli’s four-part (but really six-part) essay  Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions  was inspired by her time spent volunteering at the federal immigration court in New York City, working as an interpreter for undocumented, unaccompanied migrant children who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border. Written concurrently with her novel  Lost Children Archive  (a fictional exploration of the same topic), Luiselli’s essay offers a fascinating conceit, the fashioning of an argument from the questions on the government intake form given to these children to process their arrivals. (Aside from the fact that this essay is a heartbreaking masterpiece, this is such a  good  conceit—transforming a cold, reproducible administrative document into highly personal literature.) Luiselli interweaves a grounded discussion of the questionnaire with a narrative of the road trip Luiselli takes with her husband and family, across America, while they (both Mexican citizens) wait for their own Green Card applications to be processed. It is on this trip when Luiselli reflects on the thousands of migrant children mysteriously traveling across the border by themselves. But the real point of the essay is to actually delve into the real stories of some of these children, which are agonizing, as well as to gravely, clearly expose what literally happens, procedural, when they do arrive—from forms to courts, as they’re swallowed by a bureaucratic vortex. Amid all of this, Luiselli also takes on more, exploring the larger contextual relationship between the United States of America and Mexico (as well as other countries in Central America, more broadly) as it has evolved to our current, adverse moment.  Tell Me How It Ends  is so small, but it is so passionate and vigorous: it desperately accomplishes in its less-than-100-pages-of-prose what centuries and miles and endless records of federal bureaucracy have never been able, and have never cared, to do: reverse the dehumanization of Latin American immigrants that occurs once they set foot in this country.  –Olivia Rutigliano, CrimeReads Editorial Fellow

Zadie Smith, Feel Free (2018)

In the essay “Meet Justin Bieber!” in Feel Free , Zadie Smith writes that her interest in Justin Bieber is not an interest in the interiority of the singer himself, but in “the idea of the love object”. This essay—in which Smith imagines a meeting between Bieber and the late philosopher Martin Buber (“Bieber and Buber are alternative spellings of the same German surname,” she explains in one of many winning footnotes. “Who am I to ignore these hints from the universe?”). Smith allows that this premise is a bit premise -y: “I know, I know.” Still, the resulting essay is a very funny, very smart, and un-tricky exploration of individuality and true “meeting,” with a dash of late capitalism thrown in for good measure. The melding of high and low culture is the bread and butter of pretty much every prestige publication on the internet these days (and certainly of the Twitter feeds of all “public intellectuals”), but the essays in Smith’s collection don’t feel familiar—perhaps because hers is, as we’ve long known, an uncommon skill. Though I believe Smith could probably write compellingly about anything, she chooses her subjects wisely. She writes with as much electricity about Brexit as the aforementioned Beliebers—and each essay is utterly engrossing. “She contains multitudes, but her point is we all do,” writes Hermione Hoby in her review of the collection in The New Republic . “At the same time, we are, in our endless difference, nobody but ourselves.”  –Jessie Gaynor, Social Media Editor

Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (2019)

Tressie McMillan Cottom is an academic who has transcended the ivory tower to become the sort of public intellectual who can easily appear on radio or television talk shows to discuss race, gender, and capitalism. Her collection of essays reflects this duality, blending scholarly work with memoir to create a collection on the black female experience in postmodern America that’s “intersectional analysis with a side of pop culture.” The essays range from an analysis of sexual violence, to populist politics, to social media, but in centering her own experiences throughout, the collection becomes something unlike other pieces of criticism of contemporary culture. In explaining the title, she reflects on what an editor had said about her work: “I was too readable to be academic, too deep to be popular, too country black to be literary, and too naïve to show the rigor of my thinking in the complexity of my prose. I had wanted to create something meaningful that sounded not only like me, but like all of me. It was too thick.” One of the most powerful essays in the book is “Dying to be Competent” which begins with her unpacking the idiocy of LinkedIn (and the myth of meritocracy) and ends with a description of her miscarriage, the mishandling of black woman’s pain, and a condemnation of healthcare bureaucracy. A finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Thick confirms McMillan Cottom as one of our most fearless public intellectuals and one of the most vital.  –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Dissenting Opinions

The following books were just barely nudged out of the top ten, but we (or at least one of us) couldn’t let them pass without comment.

Elif Batuman, The Possessed (2010)

In The Possessed Elif Batuman indulges her love of Russian literature and the result is hilarious and remarkable. Each essay of the collection chronicles some adventure or other that she had while in graduate school for Comparative Literature and each is more unpredictable than the next. There’s the time a “well-known 20th-centuryist” gave a graduate student the finger; and the time when Batuman ended up living in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, for a summer; and the time that she convinced herself Tolstoy was murdered and spent the length of the Tolstoy Conference in Yasnaya Polyana considering clues and motives. Rich in historic detail about Russian authors and literature and thoughtfully constructed, each essay is an amalgam of critical analysis, cultural criticism, and serious contemplation of big ideas like that of identity, intellectual legacy, and authorship. With wit and a serpentine-like shape to her narratives, Batuman adopts a form reminiscent of a Socratic discourse, setting up questions at the beginning of her essays and then following digressions that more or less entreat the reader to synthesize the answer for herself. The digressions are always amusing and arguably the backbone of the collection, relaying absurd anecdotes with foreign scholars or awkward, surreal encounters with Eastern European strangers. Central also to the collection are Batuman’s intellectual asides where she entertains a theory—like the “problem of the person”: the inability to ever wholly capture one’s character—that ultimately layer the book’s themes. “You are certainly my most entertaining student,” a professor said to Batuman. But she is also curious and enthusiastic and reflective and so knowledgeable that she might even convince you (she has me!) that you too love Russian literature as much as she does. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (2014)

Roxane Gay’s now-classic essay collection is a book that will make you laugh, think, cry, and then wonder, how can cultural criticism be this fun? My favorite essays in the book include Gay’s musings on competitive Scrabble, her stranded-in-academia dispatches, and her joyous film and television criticism, but given the breadth of topics Roxane Gay can discuss in an entertaining manner, there’s something for everyone in this one. This book is accessible because feminism itself should be accessible – Roxane Gay is as likely to draw inspiration from YA novels, or middle-brow shows about friendship, as she is to introduce concepts from the academic world, and if there’s anyone I trust to bridge the gap between high culture, low culture, and pop culture, it’s the Goddess of Twitter. I used to host a book club dedicated to radical reads, and this was one of the first picks for the club; a week after the book club met, I spied a few of the attendees meeting in the café of the bookstore, and found out that they had bonded so much over discussing  Bad Feminist  that they couldn’t wait for the next meeting of the book club to keep discussing politics and intersectionality, and that, in a nutshell, is the power of Roxane. –Molly Odintz, CrimeReads Associate Editor

Rivka Galchen, Little Labors (2016)

Generally, I find stories about the trials and tribulations of child-having to be of limited appeal—useful, maybe, insofar as they offer validation that other people have also endured the bizarre realities of living with a tiny human, but otherwise liable to drift into the musings of parents thrilled at the simple fact of their own fecundity, as if they were the first ones to figure the process out (or not). But Little Labors is not simply an essay collection about motherhood, perhaps because Galchen initially “didn’t want to write about” her new baby—mostly, she writes, “because I had never been interested in babies, or mothers; in fact, those subjects had seemed perfectly not interesting to me.” Like many new mothers, though, Galchen soon discovered her baby—which she refers to sometimes as “the puma”—to be a preoccupying thought, demanding to be written about. Galchen’s interest isn’t just in her own progeny, but in babies in literature (“Literature has more dogs than babies, and also more abortions”), The Pillow Book , the eleventh-century collection of musings by Sei Shōnagon, and writers who are mothers. There are sections that made me laugh out loud, like when Galchen continually finds herself in an elevator with a neighbor who never fails to remark on the puma’s size. There are also deeper, darker musings, like the realization that the baby means “that it’s not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.” It is a slim collection that I happened to read at the perfect time, and it remains one of my favorites of the decade. –Emily Firetog, Deputy Editor

Charlie Fox, This Young Monster (2017)

On social media as in his writing, British art critic Charlie Fox rejects lucidity for allusion and doesn’t quite answer the Twitter textbox’s persistent question: “What’s happening?” These days, it’s hard to tell.  This Young Monster  (2017), Fox’s first book,was published a few months after Donald Trump’s election, and at one point Fox takes a swipe at a man he judges “direct from a nightmare and just a repulsive fucking goon.” Fox doesn’t linger on politics, though, since most of the monsters he looks at “embody otherness and make it into art, ripping any conventional idea of beauty to shreds and replacing it with something weird and troubling of their own invention.”

If clichés are loathed because they conform to what philosopher Georges Bataille called “the common measure,” then monsters are rebellious non-sequiturs, comedic or horrific derailments from a classical ideal. Perverts in the most literal sense, monsters have gone astray from some “proper” course. The book’s nine chapters, which are about a specific monster or type of monster, are full of callbacks to familiar and lesser-known media. Fox cites visual art, film, songs, and books with the screwy buoyancy of a savant. Take one of his essays, “Spook House,” framed as a stage play with two principal characters, Klaus (“an intoxicated young skinhead vampire”) and Hermione (“a teen sorceress with green skin and jet-black hair” who looks more like The Wicked Witch than her namesake). The chorus is a troupe of trick-or-treaters. Using the filmmaker Cameron Jamie as a starting point, the rest is free association on gothic decadence and Detroit and L.A. as cities of the dead. All the while, Klaus quotes from  Artforum ,  Dazed & Confused , and  Time Out. It’s a technical feat that makes fictionalized dialogue a conveyor belt for cultural criticism.

In Fox’s imagination, David Bowie and the Hydra coexist alongside Peter Pan, Dennis Hopper, and the maenads. Fox’s book reaches for the monster’s mask, not really to peel it off but to feel and smell the rubber schnoz, to know how it’s made before making sure it’s still snugly set. With a stylistic blend of arthouse suavity and B-movie chic,  This Young Monster considers how monsters in culture are made. Aren’t the scariest things made in post-production? Isn’t the creature just duplicity, like a looping choir or a dubbed scream? –Aaron Robertson, Assistant Editor

Elena Passarello, Animals Strike Curious Poses (2017)

Elena Passarello’s collection of essays Animals Strike Curious Poses picks out infamous animals and grants them the voice, narrative, and history they deserve. Not only is a collection like this relevant during the sixth extinction but it is an ambitious historical and anthropological undertaking, which Passarello has tackled with thorough research and a playful tone that rather than compromise her subject, complicates and humanizes it. Passarello’s intention is to investigate the role of animals across the span of human civilization and in doing so, to construct a timeline of humanity as told through people’s interactions with said animals. “Of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us,” Passarello writes in her first essay, to introduce us to the object of the book and also to the oldest of her chosen characters: Yuka, a 39,000-year-old mummified woolly mammoth discovered in the Siberian permafrost in 2010. It was an occasion so remarkable and so unfathomable given the span of human civilization that Passarello says of Yuka: “Since language is epically younger than both thought and experience, ‘woolly mammoth’ means, to a human brain, something more like time.” The essay ends with a character placing a hand on a cave drawing of a woolly mammoth, accompanied by a phrase which encapsulates the author’s vision for the book: “And he becomes the mammoth so he can envision the mammoth.” In Passarello’s hands the imagined boundaries between the animal, natural, and human world disintegrate and what emerges is a cohesive if baffling integrated history of life. With the accuracy and tenacity of a journalist and the spirit of a storyteller, Elena Passarello has assembled a modern bestiary worthy of contemplation and awe. –Eleni Theodoropoulos, Editorial Fellow

Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias (2019)

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is a kaleidoscopic look at mental health and the lives affected by the schizophrenias. Each essay takes on a different aspect of the topic, but you’ll want to read them together for a holistic perspective. Esmé Weijun Wang generously begins The Collected Schizophrenias by acknowledging the stereotype, “Schizophrenia terrifies. It is the archetypal disorder of lunacy.” From there, she walks us through the technical language, breaks down the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM-5 )’s clinical definition. And then she gets very personal, telling us about how she came to her own diagnosis and the way it’s touched her daily life (her relationships, her ideas about motherhood). Esmé Weijun Wang is uniquely situated to write about this topic. As a former lab researcher at Stanford, she turns a precise, analytical eye to her experience while simultaneously unfolding everything with great patience for her reader. Throughout, she brilliantly dissects the language around mental health. (On saying “a person living with bipolar disorder” instead of using “bipolar” as the sole subject: “…we are not our diseases. We are instead individuals with disorders and malfunctions. Our conditions lie over us like smallpox blankets; we are one thing and the illness is another.”) She pinpoints the ways she arms herself against anticipated reactions to the schizophrenias: high fashion, having attended an Ivy League institution. In a particularly piercing essay, she traces mental illness back through her family tree. She also places her story within more mainstream cultural contexts, calling on groundbreaking exposés about the dangerous of institutionalization and depictions of mental illness in television and film (like the infamous Slender Man case, in which two young girls stab their best friend because an invented Internet figure told them to). At once intimate and far-reaching, The Collected Schizophrenias is an informative and important (and let’s not forget artful) work. I’ve never read a collection quite so beautifully-written and laid-bare as this. –Katie Yee, Book Marks Assistant Editor

Ross Gay, The Book of Delights (2019)

When Ross Gay began writing what would become The Book of Delights, he envisioned it as a project of daily essays, each focused on a moment or point of delight in his day. This plan quickly disintegrated; on day four, he skipped his self-imposed assignment and decided to “in honor and love, delight in blowing it off.” (Clearly, “blowing it off” is a relative term here, as he still produced the book.) Ross Gay is a generous teacher of how to live, and this moment of reveling in self-compassion is one lesson among many in The Book of Delights , which wanders from moments of connection with strangers to a shade of “red I don’t think I actually have words for,” a text from a friend reading “I love you breadfruit,” and “the sun like a guiding hand on my back, saying everything is possible. Everything .”

Gay does not linger on any one subject for long, creating the sense that delight is a product not of extenuating circumstances, but of our attention; his attunement to the possibilities of a single day, and awareness of all the small moments that produce delight, are a model for life amid the warring factions of the attention economy. These small moments range from the physical–hugging a stranger, transplanting fig cuttings–to the spiritual and philosophical, giving the impression of sitting beside Gay in his garden as he thinks out loud in real time. It’s a privilege to listen. –Corinne Segal, Senior Editor

Honorable Mentions

A selection of other books that we seriously considered for both lists—just to be extra about it (and because decisions are hard).

Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings (2010) · Joyce Carol Oates, In Rough Country (2010) · Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (2011) · Christopher Hitchens, Arguably (2011) ·  Roberto Bolaño, tr. Natasha Wimmer, Between Parentheses (2011) · Dubravka Ugresic, tr. David Williams, Karaoke Culture (2011) · Tom Bissell, Magic Hours (2012)  · Kevin Young, The Grey Album (2012) · William H. Gass, Life Sentences: Literary Judgments and Accounts (2012) · Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012) · Herta Müller, tr. Geoffrey Mulligan, Cristina and Her Double (2013) · Leslie Jamison, The Empathy Exams (2014)  · Meghan Daum, The Unspeakable (2014)  · Daphne Merkin, The Fame Lunches (2014)  · Charles D’Ambrosio, Loitering (2015) · Wendy Walters, Multiply/Divide (2015) · Colm Tóibín, On Elizabeth Bishop (2015) ·  Renee Gladman, Calamities (2016)  · Jesmyn Ward, ed. The Fire This Time (2016)  · Lindy West, Shrill (2016)  · Mary Oliver, Upstream (2016)  · Emily Witt, Future Sex (2016)  · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (2016)  · Mark Greif, Against Everything (2016)  · Durga Chew-Bose, Too Much and Not the Mood (2017)  · Sarah Gerard, Sunshine State (2017)  · Jim Harrison, A Really Big Lunch (2017)  · J.M. Coetzee, Late Essays: 2006-2017 (2017) · Melissa Febos, Abandon Me (2017)  · Louise Glück, American Originality (2017)  · Joan Didion, South and West (2017)  · Tom McCarthy, Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (2017)  · Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can’t Kill Us Until they Kill Us (2017)  · Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (2017)  ·  Samantha Irby, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life (2017)  · Alexander Chee, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (2018)  · Alice Bolin, Dead Girls (2018)  · Marilynne Robinson, What Are We Doing Here? (2018)  · Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done (2018)  · Maggie O’Farrell, I Am I Am I Am (2018)  · Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race (2018)  · Rachel Cusk, Coventry (2019)  · Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror (2019)  · Emily Bernard, Black is the Body (2019)  · Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)  · Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations (2019)  ·  Rachel Munroe, Savage Appetites (2019)  · Robert A. Caro,  Working  (2019) · Arundhati Roy, My Seditious Heart (2019).

Emily Temple

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Novel study planning: Selecting Your Framework

By  MARISSA DESPINS  Updated Sept 19, 2023

Welcome back to my next post in my series all about novel study planning. In my previous posts, we talked about what novel studies are and tips for defining your purpose . In today’s post we talk all about framework selection.

Looking for a FREE Step by Step Novel Study Planning Guide? Click on the image or button below to download the FREE guide!

For more information on teaching specific novels, you won’t want to miss our posts on teaching  Because of Winn Dixie ,  Wonder ,  The Hunger Games ,  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory , and  The Outsiders!

Novel Study Planning Tips

After defining the purpose of your novel study , the next step in the novel study planning process is to choose the framework that best fits your students’ needs and abilities. There are three common frameworks to consider: whole-class novel study, small-group novel study, and independent novel study.

Whole class novel studies

A whole-class novel study is a common approach in education. It is often used in classrooms because of its ability to foster a sense of unity among students. This approach involves the entire class reading the same book. Doing this creates a shared experience and enables students to engage with the text, supplementary materials, and assessments collectively.

While this style of novel study planning may seem like a one-size-fits-all approach, whole-class novel studies offer flexibility. They do this through the incorporation of various activities and reading techniques . This can include things like whole-class, partner, and independent reading . By providing opportunities for diverse reading experiences, this approach enhances student engagement. Also, it encourages critical thinking and deeper analysis of the text as a group. Through discussions and interactions, students can develop a deeper understanding of the book’s themes, characters, and literary elements. This helps to enrich their overall reading comprehension and analytical skills.

One of the key advantages of the whole-class novel study planning approach is its potential to foster a sense of community within the classroom. As students embark on the same literary journey, they form a shared bond through their exploration and interpretation of the book. This shared experience enables students to connect with one another. They are also able to exchange ideas and develop empathy as they discuss their perspectives on the characters and events of the text. By participating in group discussions, students learn to value and appreciate diverse viewpoints. This helps to broaden their own understanding of the book and the world around them.

This collaborative learning environment enhances social skills. Also, it cultivates a supportive atmosphere that encourages students to take risks in their thinking and express themselves confidently. Ultimately, a whole-class novel study nurtures a strong sense of community, enabling students to grow both academically and emotionally.

If you are struggling with choosing the perfect book for your next novel study, you won’t want to miss our lists of favorite  middle school  and  upper elementary novels!

Small group novel studies

In a small-group novel study, the focus shifts to providing students with different texts based on their abilities and interests. While it can be valuable to involve students in the book selection process, the priority lies in ensuring that each student is matched with a book that aligns with their reading level and challenges them appropriately.

The small groups may be organized based on the needs of the students. This allows for targeted instruction and support. Depending on the specific needs of the classroom, the groups may work on similar or different skills and tasks. This tasks can be tailored to the abilities of each group.

Despite the variation in texts and activities, it is recommended to establish a unifying theme, essential question, or shared experience across all the books if possible. This common thread provides an opportunity for students to come together during whole-class discussions. They are then able to exchange insights and draw connections between the different texts. By engaging in these discussions, students broaden their understanding of various perspectives. It also helps students develop critical thinking skills.

Independent novel studies

An independent novel study is an approach that empowers students to select and read their own texts, offering a high level of autonomy and individuality. In this method, students take on the responsibility of managing their reading progress and completing assignments independently. While the teacher may provide occasional mini-lessons or guidance throughout the unit, the focus is primarily on the students’ self-directed learning. This approach allows students to choose books that align with their personal interests and reading preferences, fostering a sense of ownership and intrinsic motivation in their learning journey. It also encourages students to develop time-management skills and self-discipline as they set their reading goals and work towards achieving them.

However, it is important to note that an independent novel study may not be suitable for struggling or reluctant readers. These students often require additional support and scaffolding to develop their reading skills and comprehension. In such cases, a more structured and guided approach, such as a whole-class or small-group study, can provide the necessary guidance and support to help struggling readers build their confidence and improve their reading abilities.

On the other hand, for highly advanced readers, an independent study can offer a challenging and enriching experience. These students can explore complex texts, delve into deep analysis, and engage in higher-level thinking independently. An independent novel study allows advanced readers to pursue their unique interests, explore diverse genres, and broaden their literary horizons beyond the constraints of a set curriculum. It provides them with the freedom to explore their passions, develop critical thinking skills, and take ownership of their learning process.

Looking for ways to keep students engaged during independent reading time? Check out list of tips and tricks for independent reading success!

Choosing a novel study framework: Factors to consider

Choosing the appropriate framework for your novel study depends on several factors, such as your students’ reading abilities, the curriculum standards you are targeting, and the goals of the unit. For elementary grades, a whole-class or small-group novel study is recommended, as it provides a more structured and guided approach. However, if your students require more individualized attention, a small-group novel study may be more appropriate. For middle and high school grades, an independent novel study can provide an opportunity for students to work on their own pace and take more ownership of their learning.

If you are unsure which framework to choose, you may consider starting with a whole-class novel study to lay the foundation, introducing students to the components and expectations of this type of unit. Then, follow up with a small-group novel study later in the year to accommodate varying needs or simply give students more autonomy. Regardless of the framework you choose, it’s essential to monitor your students’ progress regularly and provide ongoing support and feedback to ensure they are achieving the desired learning outcomes.

Looking for more information on Teaching Novel Studies?

Check out these related posts!

Planning Novel Studies Your Learners will Love: What is a Novel Study?

Novel Study Text Selection Tips

Building Novel Study Engagement

Hatchet Novel Study Activities

The One and Only Ivan Novel Study Activities

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Creative Classroom Core has over  30 different COMPLETE novel studies  available! Check them out on TPT by clicking on the image below!

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General Novel Study Guide

In ELA classrooms, teachers will often employ a variety of activities in their literary unit plans. These novel study activities can be in the form of worksheets, discussions or specific lessons to enhance students' understanding of the story as well as to broaden their vocabulary and improve their analytical skills. Using Storyboards as a part of your novel studies can help teachers utilize research-based reading comprehension strategies all while engaging students! Students will have so much fun, they will not even realize how much they are learning! These novel study lesson plans for the classroom are designed for teachers to use with any book, as a whole class, small groups, or as an independent novel study. While we have hundreds of tailored lesson plans in our Teacher Resources , if teachers cannot find a particular book, they can find plenty of lessons and activities in the novel study resources below!

Student Activities for Novel Study

Novel Study Guide for Teachers

In this novel study guide for the classroom, teachers can pick and choose from the various activities to suit their needs for any book. The first six activities are widely used lessons when conducting a novel study: Character Map, Plot Diagram, Setting, Visual Vocabulary, Themes, Symbols, and Motifs , and finally, Favorite Quote or Scene . These generic novel study activities make use of the universally well-known story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears for the examples to help illustrate what a final product can look like for students. These activities are often used in novel study lesson plans as they encourage students' to increase their comprehension skills.

The ten additional activities offer deeper analysis and investigation into literary devices as well as more engaging ways for students to "show what they know". They can be used for a broad range of novels, plays and short stories across any grade level, and instructions can be tailored and scaffolded to meet the needs of students. With all of these novel study activities, students' work can be printed and displayed or projected onto the board and include a presentation aspect as well!

It is so easy to customize these novel study activities to meet the individual needs of your students. Teachers can differentiate by adding multiple templates for each assignment. They can include sentence starters or prompts to help students who need more support. Every lesson is designed as a springboard for teachers to customize and make their own!

Novel Study Essential Questions

Teachers can tailor the generic essential questions below to fit the needs of their novel study.

• Who are some of the main characters and what challenges do they face?
• What are some of the symbols and motifs present in the novel? How does the symbolism help you better understand the characters and their motivations?
• What are some of the themes present in the novel?
• What are some allusions and historical references within the text? How does this help you better understand the characters and their motivations?
• Can you relate to the challenges the character's face in the story? How would you try to overcome the obstacles they face?
• How does the author imply the tone and mood of the story?
• How can a person’s choices, actions and decisions change their life?
• What is bildungsroman in literature and is this novel an example of one?
• How can reading fictional stories affect your own life?
• What messages, lessons, or morals does the author try to impart to the reader?

More Information about our Novel Study Lesson Plans and Activities

Character maps.

Character maps can be used in any novel study unit and are a helpful tool for students to use as they read or after completing a book. Students can create character maps of the characters in the story, paying close attention to the physical attributes and the traits of both major and minor characters . They can also provide detailed information regarding the challenges the character faces, the challenges the character imposes, and the importance of the character to the plot of the story. Every time students meet a new character in the story, they can add them to the character map. This makes for a perfect quick assessment for teachers to gauge how far along students are in the book and how well they are comprehending the story.

Visual Vocabulary Storyboards

A popular reading comprehension strategy is to start a unit or lesson with key vocabulary terms. This aids in overall comprehension and encourages students' retention. Prior to reading, teachers can introduce a word list to students that they will encounter when they read. Students can look up the definitions and create storyboards to demonstrate their understanding.

Alternatively, teachers can have students create visual vocabulary boards while they read and update them throughout the unit. Every time students come across a new or unfamiliar word, they can add it to their storyboard!. Students can include the term, definition and an illustration to demonstrate its meaning. By defining and illustrating key terms found in the book , students will be able to better understand the story and retain the vocabulary for future use which is always the primary goal.

Analyzing Themes, Symbols and Motifs

Novels often have a variety of themes, symbols, and motifs that students can identify and analyze. This helps students gain a deeper understanding of the book.

Theme in literature refers to the main idea or underlying meaning the author is exploring throughout a novel, short story, or other literary work. Symbolism in a story is when an object or situation is more than it appears on the surface. The author is using it to represent something deeper and more meaningful. For example, an object that is the color red might have a deeper meaning of passion, or love, or devotion attached to it. Motifs are a technique employed by the author whereby they repeat a certain element more than once throughout the course of the story. This element has symbolic significance and is meant to draw the reader's attention and illuminate a deeper meaning to the story as it is repeated.

All of these literary elements can be conveyed through characters, setting, dialogue, plot, or a combination. Students can explore themes, symbols, and motifs by identifying these elements themselves or in an “ envelope activity ”, where they are given one or more to track throughout their reading. After identifying one or more themes, symbols, or motifs, students can then create a spider map or storyboard where they label, describe, and illustrate what they found!

Plot Diagrams

Any novel unit would be incomplete without a plot summary or plot diagram! Creating a plot diagram not only helps students learn the parts of the plot, but it reinforces major events and helps students develop a greater understanding of literary structures. Students can create a storyboard capturing the narrative arc of a story with a six-cell storyboard containing the major parts of the plot diagram: the Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Resolution.

Beginning, Middle, End Summaries

A simpler way for students to summarize plot is by creating a Beginning, Middle, End Storyboard! Summarizing a story in three parts is a great way to introduce plot structure and parts of a story to students in younger grades or to shorten the length of the assignment.

Students can create a narrative storyboard that summarizes the story in three parts: the beginning, the middle, and the end. Their storyboard should include three cells. The beginning , which introduces the story and the problem; the middle , which showcases main events and the climax; and the end , which illustrates how the problem is resolved and the conclusion of the story.

Chapter Summaries

Creating a chapter summary helps students identify the important events in each chapter and provides teachers with an engaging "check in" activity to see how well students are understanding the story. Teachers may choose to do this activity every few chapters throughout the novel study and students will end up with a comprehensive plot summary in storyboards! These chapter summary storyboards can be printed out and made into a book to mimic a graphic novel of the story! A wonderful way for students to "publish" their work!

Storyboarding Text to Self Connections

Having students choose a favorite quote or scene from the book allows them to express which parts of the story resonated with them on a personal level. In this way, students are making a text-to-self connection that demonstrates their understanding of the characters and their development or the themes of the novel. Some students may end up choosing the same quote, but have different perspectives. This is always interesting for students to see and can open up a discussion as to how not everyone can read the same lines in the same way based on their own perspectives and personal experiences.

Storyboarding Setting

The setting of a story is the location and time frame, or the where and when of the story. Settings often play a crucial role in the story as they influence the characters, their motivations, and their actions. The setting can also include the environment, like the weather or the social and political factors within the time period both locally and globally.

Students can create a setting chart to identify the time and place of the story, allowing them to gain a deeper understanding of the characters and their situation. If a story has multiple settings or time periods, they can also explain how those changes affect the characters and plot.

TWIST Analysis

A great way to engage your students in a text is through the creation of storyboards that examine Tone, Word Choice, Imagery, Style, and Theme. This activity is referred to with the acronym “ TWIST ”. In a TWIST analysis, students focus on a particular paragraph or a few pages, to look deeper at the author’s meaning. This can be used for poems, short stories, and novels. Using an excerpt, students can depict, explain, and discuss the story using a TWIST analysis using a storyboard!

Text-to-Text Connections

Many stories are told in different adaptations, with different points of view and in different ways across the globe. It is a great way to examine what is important in a particular culture, or how stories change and adapt as they are spread throughout the world and over time. This activity is wonderful for students to use when reading different adaptations of the same story or while comparing the movie version to a book. Students can complete a storyboard chart filling in each row and column with the texts they are comparing and include illustrations and descriptions.

Storyboarding Point of View

Understanding a book's point of view is something that helps students better understand the story. Point of View (POV) refers to who is telling or narrating a story. A story can be told from the first person, second person, or third person point of view. First person is when “I” am telling the story. The character relates their experiences directly. Second person is when story is told to “you.” Third person limited is about “he”, “she", or "they". The narrator is outside of the story and relating the experiences of a character. Third person omniscient is when the narrator is “he”, "she", or "they", but the narrator has full access to the thoughts and experiences of all characters in the story. After reading the book and discussing the point of view, students can create a storyboard that describes what type of narrator(s) the story has and the perspective(s) in the story using descriptions and illustrations. Students can provide evidence from the text by way of quotes or dialogue to support their claims. Be sure that students understand point of view vs perspective prior to this activity.

Analyzing Figurative Language

Many novels and stories have examples of figurative language that enhance the reader's understanding and help them visualize the events of the story, the characters, their motivations and their emotions. Figurative language is a technique used by the author to describe something by comparing it to something else. The words or phrases are not literal but use metaphors, similes, hyperboles, personification, and other examples to describe the object, feeling, or event they are talking about. With a figurative language storyboard, students can identify different instances of figurative language and illustrate the examples from the text.

Storyboarding Literary Conflict

Literary conflict is often taught during ELA units. Different examples of 'conflict in literature' are: person vs. person, person vs. self, person vs. society, person vs. nature and person vs. technology. An excellent way to focus on the various types of literary conflict is through storyboarding! Students can identify and choose a type of literary conflict and illustrate examples from the text in a storyboard chart.

Analyzing Allusions

Allusions are present in many stories, referencing actual people, places, events, art, and literature. They help to plunge the reader into the time period in which the story takes place. Allusions can reference the political, social, artistic, and technological influences that are present in the characters' lives and, therefore, provide greater insight into the characters' thoughts and motivations. Analyzing allusions is also the perfect way to tie in social studies and provide a cross curricular opportunity for students. Students can create a spider map or chart to identify different allusions referenced in the story and describe them in words and illustrations.

Character Comparison Venn Diagrams

Novel study worksheets such as Venn diagrams are an effective tool to compare characters or events. Comparing characters is a great way for students to understand how different people are, and how different characters affect a story. Using a Venn diagram, students can identify similarities and differences between the main characters in the book. Using Storyboard That to create your Venn Diagram is even better! Students can add images and words to represent the characters, their experiences, personalities, and interests. Using the outer portions of the ovals, they can identify traits, experiences, and attributes that are singular to the character and in the overlapping portions, they can list the ways in which the characters are the same.

Newspaper Front Page Project

Retelling the events of a story doesn't have to be as simple as a written summary. An alternative is to create the front page of a newspaper! This can be done for any book, though historical fiction books may allow students to also "report" on important events that would have affected the life of characters. Students can retell key events from the story as if it were a newspaper. They can include a catchy headline, create images, and write descriptions for each to imitate the look of the front page of a newspaper highlighting the key events of the story.

Book Movie Poster Project

Movie posters are a fun way for students to boil down the most important aspects of a novel. After reading the novel, students can create a movie poster that showcases the setting, characters and a chosen scene or overarching themes of the story. Students can include the title and author of the book, a catchy tagline, and a "critic's review" informing the audience why they should go to see the movie and briefly describing the compelling story. There is a great amount of complex critical thinking involved with creating a movie poster for a book, however, students will be having so much fun, they won't even notice!

Graphic Novel Project

A Graphic Novel Project is the perfect way for students to summarize the plot of a graphic novel that they have read or transfer their knowledge of another piece of literature into graphic novel form! Many popular novels have been turned into graphic novels to meet a broader audience and introduce students of all abilities to rich literary content. Students can summarize the entire story into a graphic novel poster or they can create a poster for each chapter or section of a book. There are many ideas for graphic novels to choose from!

More Storyboarding Ideas for Post Reading Activities!

In addition to our premade activities above, here are some ideas that teachers can customize and assign to students to spark creativity in individual students, pairs, or small groups for a final project. Several of these ideas include Storyboard That template that can be printed out or copied into your teacher dashboard and assigned digitally. All final projects can be printed out, presented as a slide show, or, for an extra challenge, as an animated gif!

• For Groups: Choose a scene from the story and write a short play to reenact it to the class. Use the traditional storyboard layout to plan out your scenes. You can add text to your storyboards, or simply use the cells to visualize each scene of your play.
• Using the timeline layout, retell the story in chronological order. Our timeline layout gives you the options to include year, month, day, and even hour! You may also choose to omit these altogether.
• Choose a setting from the story and create a map of the setting using the small poster or worksheet layout. Use free form or other text boxes to include a key or label the different parts of the map.
• Using one of Storyboard That’s board game templates , create a game based on the book for your classmates to play!
• For Groups: Divide the chapters of the book amongst your group members. Each member of the group creates a storyboard for their assigned chapter. This can be done as a collaborative project, or separately for longer novels.
• Using the worksheet layout and Storyboard That’s worksheet assets, create a test or a quiz for other students in the class. You can create all kinds of questions such as multiple choice, short answer, and even matching! When you are done, be sure to make an answer key.
• Using one of Storyboard That’s biography poster templates, create a poster about the character of your choice. Be sure to include important biographical features such as: place and date of birth, family life, accomplishments, etc.
• Choose a chapter from the novel and create a storyboard that shows that chapter from another character’s point of view. For an extra challenge, use the T-chart layout to compare the original point of view with another character’s point of view!
• Create a book jacket of the novel using one of Storyboard That’s book jacket templates. Use Storyboard That art to create the cover, and write a summary of the story on the back, just like real books have!
• Using one of Storyboard That’s social media templates as a starting point, create a social media page for one or more of the characters in the novel. Be sure to think how the character thinks while creating this page.
• Create a scrapbook page made by one of the characters in the novel. Storyboard That has lots of premade templates that you can use as is, or change to fit your character’s personality! Check out our scrapbook templates today!

How to Encourage Students to Reflect on Their Personal Responses and Connections to the Novel Through Guided Journaling or Reflection Activities in a Study Guide

Set the stage for reflection.

Introduce the concept of reflection and its importance in understanding literature on a personal level. Explain to students that reflecting on their personal responses and connections can deepen their engagement with the novel and enhance their understanding of its themes and messages.

Provide Guiding Questions

Create a list of guiding questions that prompt students to reflect on their personal responses and connections to the novel. These questions should encourage students to explore their emotional reactions, relate the events or characters to their own lives, and consider the relevance of the novel's themes to the world around them.

Model the Reflective Process

Model the reflective process by sharing your own personal responses and connections to the novel. This can be done through a think-aloud activity or by providing a written example. Emphasize that reflection is subjective and that there are no right or wrong answers, as it is a personal exploration of thoughts and feelings.

Engage in Journaling or Reflection Activities

Provide students with dedicated journaling or reflection activities in the study guide. These activities can include open-ended prompts, specific scenes or quotes to respond to, or guided questions that target different aspects of the novel. Encourage students to write freely and honestly, allowing their thoughts and emotions to flow.

Encourage Sharing and Discussion

Create opportunities for students to share their reflections with their peers. This can be done through small group discussions, whole-class sharing, or online platforms. Encourage respectful and constructive feedback to foster a supportive learning community where students can learn from each other's perspectives.

Synthesize and Apply Insights

Guide students in synthesizing their reflections and applying their insights to other aspects of the novel or their lives. Encourage them to make connections between their personal responses and the larger themes or messages of the novel. Help them see the value of their reflections in developing a deeper understanding of the text.

Frequently Asked Questions about Novel Studies

What is the purpose of a novel study guide for the classroom.

Using Storyboard That's lesson plans to delve into a novel study with your students gives them the opportunity to develop their reading comprehension with all different types of literature. It allows students of all abilities to engage in high-level thinking about literary elements and display their understanding in a unique and equitable way. It also affords them the chance to have greater retention of the concepts and terms as they are actively creating while they learn and not just passively learning or utilizing rote memorization. When using a novel study with a small group or whole class, students get to engage with each other fostering a community of learners all while developing a deeper understanding of the novel and a love of literature.

What are the main elements of a novel study?

Novel studies can explore a range of topics but primarily are focused on plot, characters, setting, point of view, new vocabulary, new concepts or allusions in the novel, themes, symbolism, figurative language and other literary devices.

What are the 4 C's in reading?

Storyboarding encourages the 4 C's of reading and learning: Critical Thinking , Creativity , Communication , and Collaboration . Storyboard That helps students of all abilities reach their potential by promoting student agency and active learning.

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5 Lessons to Make the Most of Classroom Novel Study

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Novel study is essential part of language arts instruction. Different teachers may approach novel study from different pedagogical perspectives . Regardless of how you approach classroom novel study, reading novels in the classroom can provide teachers and students with the opportunity to focus on specific skills.

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Novel Study as a Window into Author’s Craft

Author’s craft is part of all literature. But a novel is such a tremendous undertaking that it requires writers to bring all their talents to bear. For students and teachers, this provides an opportunity to study author’s craft in all its forms.

Furthermore, a novel represents a unified effort. In the classroom, we recognize this unified effort by discussing theme . Analyzing author’s craft helps students appreciate how every move an author makes complements their purpose .

To begin, the length of novels makes them perfect opportunities to discuss plot structure . In fact, plot diagrams are one of my favorite ways to use anchor charts in the classroom. Visualizing the text helps students evaluating how the author uses the plot structure to “hold” and support the theme. These task cards are some of my favorite tools for analyzing plot and conflict.

Novel Study Creates Productive Discussion

This may seem like an unusual skill set to teach with a novel study. But a well-chosen novel study is usually high interest and creates controversy or connection for student readers. While students absolutely can and should discuss other forms of literature like short stories and poetry , the length of novel study allows students to participate in multiple discussions over a single text.

With this in mind, using novel studies becomes a good way to establish, refine, and practice civil and productive class discussions.

Begin the process of classroom discussion by establishing discussion norms. As a new teacher , establishing norms was something at which I scoffed . Boy, was I wrong. Establishing discussion norms helps students take ownership of their learning and provides a sense of safety through predictability. Here are some details to consider when establishing discussion norms:

• Firstly, make clear what your role as a teacher will be. Will you be a silent listener? A full participant? An occasional traffic guard?
• Secondly, determine how students should handle “dead air” and repetitive or circular conversations
• Finally, establish how students should respond to disagreements and productively express diverse perspective

Finally, make room in discussion for reflection. At the end of a discussion, create time for metacognition . Then, encourage students to reflect on which parts of the discussion worked and which could use improvement. This is really the most important part of using novel study to teach civil discussion. Providing students the chance to continually revise their expectations for classroom discussions emphasizes growth mindset. And the necessity of regular conversations during novel study makes them a great place for practicing these skills.

Responding to Literature

Finally, classroom novel study provides opportunities for students to practice responding to literature. Writing and reading are complementary skills. For this reason, teachers can use the length of a novel study to help students repeatedly practice responding to literature.

At the beginning of a novel study, students might begin with text-self connections and first-impressions book reviews . Low-stakes writing like journals can help students get in the habit of responding to literature.

Toward the middle of the novel, as the theme and author’s purpose begin to take shape, students can move to shorter, more structured writing. Students can begin finding evidence to support claims about author’s craft.

At the end of the novel, students can move to more complete written analysis. Students can use their shorter writings to buttress longer written analysis. Longer analysis can take the form of written commentary, literary criticism , or traditional essays and constructed responses.

Here are some other posts and resources for novel study in your classroom:

• Paired Texts for teaching To Kill a Mockingbird
• To Kill a Mockingbird Synthesis Bundle
• Gatsby Paired Texts: Ideas and Inspiration
• The Great Gatsby Synthesis Bundle
• 8 Paired Texts for Teaching Things Fall Apart
• Things Fall Apart Synthesis Bundle

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Athol Fugard

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on Athol Fugard's Tsotsi . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Tsotsi: Introduction

Tsotsi: plot summary, tsotsi: detailed summary & analysis, tsotsi: themes, tsotsi: quotes, tsotsi: characters, tsotsi: terms, tsotsi: symbols, tsotsi: theme wheel, brief biography of athol fugard.

Historical Context of Tsotsi

Other books related to tsotsi.

• Full Title: Tsotsi
• When Written: 1960–1962
• Where Written: England, South Africa
• When Published: 1980
• Literary Period: Postmodernism
• Genre: Novel, Realism
• Setting: South Africa
• Climax: Tsotsi dies trying to save the baby he has adopted.
• Antagonist: Apartheid
• Point of View: Third Person

Extra Credit for Tsotsi

Winning Adaptation: In 2005, South African director Gavin Hood adapted Tsotsi into a movie, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Religious Outtake: Athol Fugard’s original notes for Tsotsi include plans for a dramatic scene in which Tsotsi enters a church, threatens a priest, and defiles a cross. This scene did not make it into the published version of the novel.

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Novel Study

EN4-RVL-01 uses a range of personal, creative and critical strategies to read texts that are complex in their ideas and construction

EN4-URA-01 analyses how meaning is created through the use of and response to language forms, features and structures

EN4-URA-02 examines and explains how texts represent ideas, experiences and values

EN4-ECA-01 creates personal, creative and critical texts for a range of audiences by using linguistic and stylistic conventions of language to express ideas

EN4-ECB-01 uses processes of planning, monitoring, revising and reflecting to support and develop composition of texts 

This term, you will be reading a class novel and learning how to construct an analytical essay. 

In order to successfully meet the outcomes of this unit, you need to demonstrate that you have passed the following checkpoints:

Checkpoint 1: Multiple Choice Quiz

Checkpoint 2: Individual Semantic Wave

Checkpoint 3: Completed Essay

Checkpoint 4: Goal Setting

ESSAY QUESTION

By the end of this unit, you will compose an essay that answers the following question:

Literature is an exploration of how people grow.

How is this statement explored in your prescribed text? 

Law, Morality and Judicial Reasoning

Essays on W. J. Waluchow’s Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory

• © 2024
• Thomas Bustamante 0 ,
• Saulo de Matos 1 ,
• André L. S. Coelho 2

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About this book

This book provides a critical outlook on, and an inquiry into the practical implications of, the works of Professor W.J. Waluchow, one of the most important jurisprudence scholars of the early twenty-first century, while also reflecting on the interconnections between his legal theory and his theory of constitutional interpretation. It also features an interview with Waluchow, in which he responds to some of the chapters and shares a first-person perspective on his main philosophical ideas, how they emerged, and how they can be further developed and applied.

The book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary legal philosophy by asking and providing different answers (from prominent legal philosophers and newer scholars in the field) to questions such as ‘How does Waluchow’s jurisprudence relate to his theories of legal reasoning and constitutional interpretation?’, ‘On what terms should we understand inclusive legal positivism?’, ‘Can inclusive legal positivism be reconciled with an interpretivist theory of adjudication?’, ‘How does it compare with Raz’s model of legal authority?’, ‘Can Waluchow’s notion of “community constitutional morality” be applied to contexts such as international law, pluralist legal communities, and indigenous laws?’, and ‘Is Waluchow’s methodology equipped to provide interpretive directives in unstable and extremely unequal legal systems?’.

The chapters, all written by experts on jurisprudence (including some of the scholars who helped develop the tradition known as inclusive legal positivism), offer a unique analysis of Waluchow’s most complex and intriguing theses, providing not only a valuable exegetical analysis of his work but also a range of answers to the challenge of interpreting legal and constitutional values, as well as practical resolutions to persisting controversies in the philosophy of law.

• Legal Positivism
• Inclusive Legal Positivism
• Judicial Review
• Jurisprudence
• Constitutional Law

Table of contents (17 chapters)

Front matter, introduction.

• Thomas Bustamante, Saulo de Matos, André L. S. Coelho

Waluchow’s Jurisprudence Restated

Incorporationism, inclusivism, and indeterminacy.

• Matthew H. Kramer

Inclusive Legal Positivism and the Fallibility of Officials

• Kenneth M. Ehrenberg

Responses to Waluchow on Raz

André L. S. Coelho

Waluchow on Institutional Forces of Law

• João Vitor Penna

Some Issues Concerning Waluchow’s Early Critique of Dworkin in Inclusive Legal Positivism

• Ronaldo Porto Macedo Junior

Competing Legal Positivisms, Methodology and Distinctive Visions of Law

• Brian H. Bix

Constitutional Reasoning, Political Morality and Judicial Review

Waluchow and dworkin’s disagreement on legal theory, precedent and adjudication: a family affair.

Thomas Bustamante

Lessons from Waluchow: Necessity, Desirability, and Intelligibility of (Weak) Judicial Discretion

• Imer B. Flores

Fixed and Non-fixed Meaning in Constitutional Interpretation: Waluchow’s Answer to Humpty Dumpty’s Paradox

• Saulo de Matos, Ricardo Dib Taxi

Waluchow’s Theory of Constitutional Interpretation from a Rhetorical-Argumentative Point of View

• Katharina Stevens

Waluchow on Reasoning with the Morality of the Community

• Fábio Perin Shecaira

Constitutional Morality Applied

Reconciliation and the living tree metaphor.

• Michael Giudice, Xavier Scott

Global Justice, Indigenous Knowledge, and the Epistemic Merits of Institutionally Embodied Moral Intuitions

• Jorge Sanchez Perez

The Common Law Methodology in Barren Soil: Prospective Judicial Precedents and Abstract Judicial Review

• Breno Baía Magalhães

Democracy and Adjudication in Latin America: A Critical Analysis of Wil Waluchow’s Common Law Theory of Judicial Review

• Francisco Tarcísio Rocha Gomes Júnior

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Saulo de Matos

About the editors

Prof. Thomas Bustamante  is Professor of Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and Research Productivity Fellow of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), Brazil. He was a Global Research Fellow with a Fulbright Visiting Research Grant at the New York University, from 2020 to 2022, and a Research Fellow at King’s College London from 2022 to 2023. He holds a PhD from the Pontifical Catholic University, Rio de Janeiro.

Prof.  Saulo de Matos  is Professor of Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law at the Federal University of Pará, Brazil, and Vice-director of the Master and PhD Program in Human Rights of the same University. He holds a PhD from University of Gottingen, Germany, and a Master’s degree from the University of Heidelberg, Germany.

Prof. André Coelho  is Professor of Legal Theory and Philosophy of Law at the Law School of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, in Brazil. He holds an M.Phil and a Ph.D in Philosophy from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, with a Research Visit at the Goethe Universität of Frankfurt, Germany. He has previously taught at CESUPA and The University of Amazon, both in Brazil.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : Law, Morality and Judicial Reasoning

Book Subtitle : Essays on W. J. Waluchow’s Jurisprudence and Constitutional Theory

Editors : Thomas Bustamante, Saulo de Matos, André L. S. Coelho

Series Title : Law and Philosophy Library

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61879-6

Publisher : Springer Cham

eBook Packages : Law and Criminology , Law and Criminology (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-031-61878-9 Published: 29 August 2024

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-031-61881-9 Due: 12 September 2025

eBook ISBN : 978-3-031-61879-6 Published: 28 August 2024

Series ISSN : 1572-4395

Series E-ISSN : 2215-0315

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : X, 313

Topics : Theories of Law, Philosophy of Law, Legal History , Philosophy of Law

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