Their Eyes Were Watching God Dialog Journal: AP Literature & Composition

Your task: Create and maintain a dialog journal for significant passages and your responses to these passages.

Directions: Set up a two column chart. One side will be dedicated to important passages, and the other, response analysis.

Passage Response

Passages should highlight and demonstrate: Strong syntax usage, particularly the

rhetorical devices we’ll study Strong imagery Themes Presence or absence of voice Perplexing incidents

Responses to the passages should use close-reading skills to reflect on the basic AP-style questions:

What? (e.g. What devices, diction, schemes and tropes do you see in the passage? Embed quoted details in your response.)

How? (e.g. How do those details create meaning in the text? How else is that meaning supported—by what other images, diction, syntax, etc.?)

Why? (e.g. Why is that idea important? How is it represented in other parts of the text? Why is that motif or theme significant?)

Guidelines:

Record at least one passage per chapter and appropriately respond to it in your dialog journal. You’ll turn in 20 entries by the end of the novel.

Your dialogue journal will be checked periodically during the reading assignments. So, make sure you keep up with the assignment and not leave it for the end.

Close Reading/Passage Analysis Steps:

Identify the important elements in your initial responses:

1. Categorize or explain the diction and its effect.2. Identify the sensory details and consider what senses they engage; what meaning do they communicate?3. Categorize the imagery; look for repetitions or extensions of images. What meaning do they suggest?4. Discuss the language (i.e. formal, clinical, jargon, colloquial, etc.); what’s the point?5. Identify syntactical patterns (i.e. schemes) and analyze their purpose6. Identify tropes (i.e. figures of speech) and analyze their purpose7. Consider how any of the steps above develop themes or motifs: what is so significant about this passage?

Only discuss these steps and devices that suggest a purposeful theme or pattern worthy of analysis.

In-text citations: Author-page styleMLA format follows the author-page method of in-text citation. This means that the author's last name and the page number(s) from which the quotation or paraphrase is taken must appear in the text, and a complete reference should appear on your Works Cited page. The author's name may appear either in the sentence itself or in parentheses following the quotation or paraphrase, but the page number(s) should always appear in the parentheses, not in the text of your sentence. For example:Wordsworth stated that Romantic poetry was marked by a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings"

(263). 

Romantic poetry is characterized by the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (Wordsworth

263).

Wordsworth extensively explored the role of emotion in the creative process (263).

Both citations in the examples above, (263) and (Wordsworth 263), tell readers that the information in the sentence can be located on page 263 of a work by an author named Wordsworth. If readers want more information about this source, they can turn to the Works Cited page, where, under the name of Wordsworth, they would find the following information:Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads. London: Oxford UP, 1967. Print.