Exercises — Week 9: Week 9 — Paired Literary Passages: Theme Across Texts

1. Theme Across Two Texts: Chart and Comparison Paragraph

1. Read Passage 1 (a short story scene): "Marcus spent the whole Saturday with his grandfather's old radio spread across the kitchen table. He did not need it; his phone streamed every station in Baltimore. But when the speaker finally crackled and a ballgame came through, thin and far away, he sat back and laughed out loud, the way his grandfather used to when the Orioles scored." Then read Passage 2 (a poem): "My mother's recipe card is stained / with forty years of butter. / I could find the dish online, / but the card tells me / where her thumb pressed down, / where she crossed out salt / and wrote, in smaller letters, / less."
2. Make a two-column chart. In each column, write the passage's theme as a complete sentence and copy the one quotation that best supports it.
3. Under the chart, write one sentence naming a similarity in the themes and one sentence naming a difference in how each author develops the theme (for example, action and sound in Passage 1 versus a single object and its marks in Passage 2).
4. Write a 6–8 sentence comparison paragraph: a comparative claim, one quotation from each passage, and at least two sentences explaining how each quotation shows the theme.
5. Reread your paragraph and underline the claim once and each piece of evidence twice. If either passage has no underlined evidence, add it.