imagine walking into a heated conversation between two people and you have no idea what they're talking about after a couple seconds you start to realize that it's about a friend of yours and you start to understand what the argument is about and then they bring up another name and they bring up another topic and you're lost all over again that's not how you want your readers to feel when they step into your essay so today we're going to be talking about line of reasoning hello my name is carlos escobar and i'm so excited to be
with you once again from miami florida today like i mentioned we are going to be talking about line of reasoning but i want you to understand specifically what it is why does it matter and how we develop our line of reasoning in an essay let's review but before we review i want to show you this it's some of my daughter's yarn and it probably looks or at least it represents what our thoughts and and our mind looks like when we first start writing an essay or when you first start reading a passage you have so
many jumbo thoughts they're all over the place but can you imagine trying to follow this trying to pick out the pink or the white or the purple and it's really all over the place and we don't want this craziness when we're writing our essay we want to have a straight line between our beginning and our end and that's precisely what our line of reasoning looks like or what it does within the essay the anchor for all of this is our thesis this is what tells us precisely what we're going to be talking about and from
this thesis we make claims we make claims in each of our body paragraphs these are topic sentences how we open the body paragraphs should rely on what we said in that thesis statement and because we open our body paragraphs with these claims we know by now that we need to have evidence right these claims need to be different therefore the evidence that we provide should not be the same so now we're developing paragraphs and i want you to notice how everything is connected interrelated and yet they all stem from the thesis after we provide the
evidence in each body paragraph now we need commentary and this commentary is really the place where your voice comes in and you explain how all that you have brought up these claims this evidence and this exploration of the significance of the evidence how it all ties back to your original position that defensible thesis you provided in the beginning this visual here is precisely what the line of reasoning is about a clear direction from beginning to end of what your argument is all about and why does this matter why should we think about line of reasoning
well we have to ground ourselves on the scoring guidelines because there's tons of good advice that teachers can give you there's tons of good advice that i can give you but i want us to focus specifically on the requirements what is it that will earn you points on this scoring guideline and i want us to focus on these two statements here to earn all four points in row b you need to provide specific evidence to support all claims in a line of reasoning and you have to consistently explain how the evidence supports a line of
reasoning so clearly this notion of line of reasoning this see-through line in your essay is significant if you want to maximize your points in row b which is truly going to be the most significant uh portion because that's where you're going to earn the most number of points provided that you have a solid thesis that you have started from so how do we develop this line of reasoning clearly it's significant clearly it's something that we have to focus on and we saw the progression but now let's explore it a little bit more closely like i
said earlier we begin with the thesis and from this thesis and we're going to see this as an example later on from this thesis we determine what our topic sentences should be then when we're in the middle of this body paragraph defending the thesis defending this topic sentence we provide evidence and we provide commentary and this is where my students struggle sometimes because they say mr escobar i i can write my thesis i can provide an answer i'm not sure if i'm right or wrong about my answer and then you know i tell them there's
no right or wrong there's so many different interpretations but then they say when it comes down to the commentary i just don't know what to say i've already asserted my claim i've already given you evidence what is left so let's explore that very carefully for a few minutes you need to discuss the significance of textual evidence you are selecting what to quote you're selecting what from the poem from a passage from a novel or play that you read for for question three you're selecting what from those pieces you're bringing into your essay so if you're
quoting this there's it's got to be significant you thought that it was important enough to bring it into your essay i want you now to tell me what that significance is i don't need for you necessarily to tell me what the quote means i don't need for you to restate or summarize or paraphrase the quotation i want you to speak to the function and if you've watched any of my other videos i always talk about the importance of function for every single element you bring into your essay you want to discuss how it's working towards
supporting or defending that thesis the other thing that you can do as part of your commentary is explain how your analysis relates to the topic sentence and to the thesis if we go back to that argument in the beginning that that you know your friends are having and you step into it and you're trying to understand what it is that they're saying we don't always follow because you weren't there for the beginning you missed the setup now your reader hasn't missed the setup but because you're bringing in so much information you're providing evidence you're you're
providing commentary throughout the essay it's helpful sometimes to to guide the reader to hold the reader's hand and tell them very specifically hey this claim that i just made which i just supported with this piece of evidence relates to my thesis in this manner it tells us also that you haven't forgotten your thesis it tells us that you know exactly what it is that you're defending you know exactly what it is that you're arguing in this essay what's the best part of ap english literature in class is it the test is it the essay writing
you know i would venture to say that you'd probably think that it's the discussions it's the interactions with your classmates it's the interaction with your teachers the the dynamics of what happens when people gather and discuss literature is is is nothing short of magical but in a test examination in a test you're alone it's just you and that piece of paper but the conversation has to continue you have to have a conversation with yourself and the way that you do that is you build upon your commentary it's okay in body paragraph number three for you
to bring up something that you mentioned embody paragraph number one or number two as long as you propel the argument forward so you might say we already explored one aspect of hamlet's character in paragraph two where we noted that he was quite pensive but this new evidence now demonstrates that he's also a strong leader so you're hearkening back to something you mentioned but developing it moving the argument forward that conversation with different parts of your essay is something that you can include and should include as part of your commentary the the conversation is not just
about mentioning something you already mentioned because we don't want you to be repetitive but it's about adding like i mentioned in number three here the nuances the the the slight new insight that you develop you know we don't expect students to know every word that they're gonna say that they're gonna write about at the start of that essay discoveries happen and those discoveries you share them in your commentary you don't have to rewrite your thesis all you have to say is you know this exploration of this character this exploration of this setting the the further
that we look into it this other aspect is now revealed that sense of fresh uh realization is really insightful it's really uh rewarding when we see it in students and finally in your commentary we want you to discuss the literary elements again the function of these literary elements you'll provide evidence you'll tell us what line contains let's say the metaphor but none of those references will earn you any points unless you speak to how the elements contribute to meaning i think that if we look at an example you're going to be able to see precisely
what it is that i'm talking about in terms of the line of reasoning and the development of the the commentary i want to share a student sample with you okay this is the introduction and what i want us to do with the student sample is think about line of reasoning what has the student included within the introduction what has the student included within the thesis to give us a road map and and that's the key idea i think you have to provide a road map for your essay so if i read your introduction if i
read your thesis i should have an idea as to what some of your body paragraphs will be so let's see what this student gives us in a scene from nov from the novel kiss and tell british novelist alan de barton humorously depicts the relationship between a set of socially oblivious rather crass parents and their embarrassed adult daughter isabelle using believable dialogue detailed vivid characterization and an absurd situation the botan creates a scene that brings comic delight out of the universal experience of a child's humiliation by her parents so think about this for a few a
few seconds what can we pull from this introduction that will give us an idea as to what the rest of the essay will look like i focus particularly here this seems to be the the main part of this thesis statement where we see some of the the language issues right believable dialogue detailed vivid characterization so these are the literary elements and techniques and then we get these these claims about the comic delight is coming out of the universal experience of a child's humiliation by her parents this student has recognized that the central part of all
humor is being able to relate to it right we've all had that experience of you're out and about with friends and you see your parents or your parents come to school or they yeah you're just hoping that they don't say anything embarrassing and you know parents don't mean to say anything embarrassing but we find them uh embarrassing anyways so we we take this introduction and we ask ourselves where is this essay headed and i pull these five bullet points i see that this student is going to talk about believable dialogue the student is going to
discuss the detailed vivid characterization the absurd situation the idea of providing comic delight and the universal experience of the child's humiliation by her parents each of these could lead excuse me each of these could lead to a body paragraph all stemming from the introduction all stemming from the thesis and therefore there's that string between the thesis the topic sentence that opens the body paragraph and ultimately the support and the commentary that is provided within that paragraph so i want you to practice i want you to take this idea and let's apply it to one of
your essays so go ahead and pause the video now and grab one of your essays or return to this video once you have one of your essays because i'm going to walk you through a series of of questions and topics that i want you to consider when you're analyzing your writing i want you to read the introduction to the essay that you've selected and consider does your introduction provide a road map for the essay can i read your introduction and imagine what some of your body paragraphs will be about or is there no road map
is it simply a restating of the prompt is it simply a general statement without the different aspects or the nuances of your argument then i want you to turn to your body paragraph go ahead and pause the video and read your body paragraph and then return to this slide after you've read the body paragraph i want you to consider these three questions does your topic sentence align with the thesis do you see a direct relationship a connection an echo of the thesis in your topic sentence and your topic sentence should be that first sentence the
opening sentence of the body paragraph i want you to look at the evidence that you provide is that evidence working to support the claim that you made in the topic sentence and you know the beauty of it is that if the evidence is supporting the topic sentence and the topic sentence comes from an idea in your thesis then all the evidence you provide in your essay will essentially be arguing or defending the thesis that you open the essay with then i want you to look at the commentary that you provided and and we came up
with a list of many things that you can provide as commentary so let's look at those again right read through these i've written them here in green read through them again and see which ones you're doing if there's one that you're not too sure you know what what it means then then go back through this video or ask your teacher to explain what i mean by one of those check marks and then see how you can develop it in your body paragraph i want wanted to take a moment though for that final check and you
know say a few words about the literary elements and techniques i don't want you to worry about memorizing obscure difficult challenging terms there's no point in doing that stick to the ones you know stick to the ones that you're most comfortable with but remember what i said earlier and what i've said in some of the other videos you need to speak about the function of those literary devices the scoring guideline tells us that you need to discuss multiple literary devices to maximize your points in row b and here we see the bottom right explains how
multiple literary elements or techniques in the passage contribute to its meaning and i like a graphic organizer i like something that looks like this where you you list the techniques on the left then you provide the textual evidence give the line number and then probably the widest column should be that final column what is the connection between that literary element or technique that textual evidence that you provided and the meaning you know that that could also say what is the connection to your thesis because that's essentially what we're doing if you want to watch a
video where i detail this process where we take the literary elements and we you know we start to fill in this table you might want to turn into review session number four because in that video i discussed this table using a different example so what should we take away from this idea you know there's this notion that the line of reasoning is something new that you've never heard about this before let's say maybe your teacher hasn't used that language but this isn't anything novel and it's also it shouldn't be new you've been writing in this
manner for a very long time so let's visualize what this looks like again you have a thesis and from that thesis you develop topic sentences right we go from our introduction to our body once you have that topic sentence you have provided a promise of what this body paragraph will be about so now what we need is commentary we need evidence and commentary and these three things come together to form the line of reasoning again the thesis yields the topic sentences the topic sentences instruct us as to what our commentary should be and the topic
sentences remember come from the thesis therefore our commentary is really an exploration of the topic sentences and ultimately an exploration of that thesis statement line of reasoning is not something novel you know that you need your argument to be organized if we go back to that discussion that i opened with it would help when you approach your friends and they're having a heated discussion if they took the time to say oh hi welcome let me tell you what we're talking about if they were to give you the thesis then you would never be in the
dark as to what their discussion is all about i want you to i want to thank you for joining us i know that you have many many responsibilities you have so many things to do i want to encourage you to continue to watch these videos because you know after sitting in these classes for an entire year just a little push at the end watching these videos going through the practices going through the activities that we're talking about will make all the difference best of luck take care nice to see you again you
