Chapter 10: The Jane Schaffer Paragraph Method
What Is the Jane Schaffer Method?
The Jane Schaffer Paragraph Method is a structured writing framework developed by San Diego teacher Jane Schaffer in the 1990s. It was originally designed to help middle school and high school students write organized, evidence-based literary analysis paragraphs. Today, it is one of the most widely taught academic writing structures in American schools and is used in English, history, social science, and other subjects.
The method works by giving each part of the paragraph a specific name and function. Rather than writing loosely and hoping the argument comes together, students learn to build paragraphs from clearly labeled components that each do a defined job. The result is a paragraph that is well-organized, evidence-driven, and analytically complete.
The Building Blocks of a Schaffer Paragraph
TS — Topic Sentence: The first sentence of the paragraph. States the main argument or point of the entire paragraph. It should be specific, arguable, and directly connected to the essay’s thesis. It never begins with ‘I’ and never starts with a quote.
CD — Concrete Detail: A piece of evidence drawn from the text, a source, a historical event, or a real-world example. It is a FACT — something that can be verified. In literary analysis, the CD is typically a direct quotation or close paraphrase from the literary work. A CD never contains the student’s opinion.
CM — Commentary: The student’s own analysis, interpretation, or explanation of the Concrete Detail. The CM answers the question: ‘So what? Why does this evidence matter? What does it mean? How does it prove the topic sentence?’ Commentary is NEVER a summary — it is an original analytical thought. In standard Schaffer formatting, there should be at least TWO CMs for every ONE CD.
CS — Concluding Sentence: The final sentence of the paragraph. It restates the topic sentence in different words and summarizes what the paragraph has proven. In a multi-paragraph essay, it may also transition toward the next paragraph’s idea.
| The Golden Rule of the Schaffer Method: There should always be MORE commentary than concrete detail in a Schaffer paragraph. A common guideline is a 2:1 ratio — two CM sentences for every one CD sentence. This forces writers to analyze, not just summarize. A paragraph that is all CD and no CM is reporting. A paragraph with CM grounded in CD is thinking. |
The 1-Chunk Paragraph Model
A 1-chunk paragraph contains one Concrete Detail supported by two Commentary sentences. It is the most basic complete unit of the Schaffer method and is the foundation on which all other models are built. A ‘chunk’ is the pair of CD + its 2 CMs.
| 1-Chunk Structure: TS (Topic Sentence) CD (Concrete Detail — 1 piece of evidence) CM (Commentary — analysis #1 of the CD) CM (Commentary — analysis #2 of the CD) CS (Concluding Sentence) Total sentences: 5 | CD:CM ratio: 1:2 |
1-Chunk Example 1: Literary Analysis of The Outsiders
| Labeled Paragraph: [TS] In S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, Ponyboy Curtis’s love of sunsets reveals that beauty and sensitivity exist in people that society has dismissed as violent or worthless. [CD] When Johnny urges Ponyboy to ‘stay gold,’ he is referring to the Robert Frost poem Ponyboy recited earlier — a poem about the fleeting nature of innocence and beauty, two things Johnny sees preserved in Ponyboy despite the hardness of their lives. [CM] This moment reveals that Ponyboy’s appreciation for sunsets and poetry is not a weakness or an anomaly but the core of who he is — the part of him that has not been crushed by poverty, violence, or social exclusion. [CM] Hinton uses Johnny’s dying words as a message to the reader as much as to Ponyboy: that maintaining sensitivity and wonder in a brutal world is not naivety but a form of moral courage, one that the novel ultimately argues is more valuable than toughness. [CS] Through Ponyboy’s relationship with beauty, Hinton challenges the reader to look beyond social labels and recognize the inner richness of those written off by a stratified society. |
1-Chunk Example 2: Historical Argument
| Labeled Paragraph: [TS] The invention of the printing press in 1440 was one of the most consequential acts of technological disruption in human history, because it transferred control of information from a small elite to an increasingly broad public. [CD] Before Gutenberg’s press, the production of a single book required a trained scribe months of labor, making books so expensive that only monasteries, universities, and noble households could afford them; within fifty years of the press’s invention, an estimated 20 million books had been printed across Europe. [CM] This explosive multiplication of books meant, for the first time, that a merchant, farmer, or craftsperson could own texts that had previously been the exclusive property of the educated classes — a democratization of knowledge with no prior parallel. [CM] The implications were not merely educational but political and religious: the Protestant Reformation was inseparable from the printing press, since Martin Luther’s 95 Theses spread across Europe within weeks of their composition — a speed of distribution that would have been impossible in the manuscript age and that the Catholic Church had no mechanism to control or suppress. [CS] The printing press did not merely make reading more common; it fundamentally reorganized who held the power to shape what people knew, believed, and questioned. |
1-Chunk Example 3: Social Issues Analysis
| Labeled Paragraph: [TS] The persistent gender pay gap in the United States reflects not simply individual employer discrimination but the systematic undervaluation of work historically associated with women. [CD] Research by economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz found that when women have entered a profession in large numbers, the average wages for that profession tend to decrease relative to other fields — a phenomenon observed in biology, design, recreation management, and ticket-agent work, all of which saw wage declines following feminization of the workforce. [CM] This pattern of wage decline following female entry cannot be explained by differences in skill, education, or productivity — in most of these fields, the nature of the work did not change; what changed was the gender composition of the workers performing it, and the cultural perception of that work’s worth shifted accordingly. [CM] The implication is profound: closing the pay gap requires not just ensuring that women are paid the same as men for identical work, but reconsidering how our economic system assigns value to entire categories of labor — a far more difficult and culturally deep problem than anti-discrimination law alone can solve. [CS] True wage equity demands not just legal protection from discrimination but a cultural reckoning with the embedded assumption that work women do is inherently worth less. |
The 2-Chunk Paragraph Model
A 2-chunk paragraph contains two Concrete Details, each followed by two Commentary sentences. This is the most commonly taught version in middle school and high school and produces a full, well-developed academic paragraph. The two chunks should support the same topic sentence from different angles, with different pieces of evidence.
| 2-Chunk Structure: TS (Topic Sentence) CD1 (First Concrete Detail) CM1 (Commentary on CD1 — first analysis) CM2 (Commentary on CD1 — second analysis) CD2 (Second Concrete Detail) CM3 (Commentary on CD2 — first analysis) CM4 (Commentary on CD2 — second analysis) CS (Concluding Sentence) Total sentences: 8 | CD:CM ratio: 2:4 |
2-Chunk Example 1: Literary Analysis of To Kill a Mockingbird
| Labeled Paragraph: [TS] In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch embodies moral courage not as the absence of fear but as the willingness to act rightly despite social consequences. [CD1] When Atticus accepts the appointment to defend Tom Robinson — a Black man falsely accused of assaulting a white woman — he tells his daughter Scout, ‘Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason for us not to try.’ [CM1] This admission that he expects to lose is crucial: Atticus is not operating under the illusion that the legal system will deliver justice, nor does he comfort himself with optimism. [CM2] His decision to defend Tom Robinson is therefore not a calculated bet on winning but a principled refusal to participate in a system he knows to be unjust through silence — which Lee presents as the truest possible definition of integrity. [CD2] Later in the novel, when a mob gathers at the jail to lynch Tom Robinson, Atticus positions himself in front of the jail alone, sitting in the lamplight reading — a posture of such deliberate calm that it forces the mob to confront the absurdity of what they intend to do. [CM3] The physical image of Atticus reading by lamplight in the face of a mob is a masterpiece of symbolic staging: his act of reading — an act of civilization, of patient, individual thought — placed against the collective, irrational violence of the mob communicates everything Lee wants to say about reason versus prejudice. [CM4] That it is ultimately Scout’s innocent questions that dissolve the mob, not Atticus’s legal arguments, suggests that Lee’s deepest faith is not in the law but in the power of human decency to persist — a decency Atticus embodies and that he has, through his example, cultivated in his daughter. [CS] Through Atticus’s choices in the courtroom and at the jailhouse, Lee argues that moral courage is not heroic in the Hollywood sense but quietly persistent, rooted in the daily refusal to abandon one’s principles regardless of the cost. |
2-Chunk Example 2: Historical Essay Paragraph
| Labeled Paragraph: [TS] The New Deal programs of the 1930s marked a permanent redefinition of the relationship between the federal government and American citizens, establishing the precedent that the government bore responsibility for the economic welfare of its people. [CD1] The Social Security Act of 1935 created a federal system of retirement insurance, unemployment benefits, and aid to dependent families — programs that had never before existed at the federal level and that were funded through payroll taxes, making them a right of contribution rather than a charity. [CM1] By framing Social Security as something Americans paid into rather than something given to them, Roosevelt’s administration brilliantly neutralized the ideological objection that such programs were ‘handouts’ — the program was, in its design, a social contract. [CM2] The lasting significance of the Social Security Act is not only its immediate benefit to millions of elderly and unemployed Americans during the Depression but the conceptual precedent it set: that a citizen’s economic security in old age or adversity is a matter of public responsibility, not merely private fortune. [CD2] The Works Progress Administration (WPA), established in 1935, employed over 8.5 million Americans in the construction of 650,000 miles of roads, 125,000 public buildings, and thousands of bridges and parks — while also funding artists, writers, and musicians through programs like the Federal Art Project and Federal Writers’ Project. [CM3] The WPA’s inclusion of artists and writers alongside engineers and construction workers was a radical statement about the government’s responsibility not just to the economic survival of its citizens but to the cultural vitality of the nation — a claim that government had a stake in the flourishing of the arts as a public good. [CM4] The physical legacy of the WPA — post offices, schools, murals, and roads still in use today — is a visible reminder that the New Deal’s ambition was not temporary relief but a permanent reconstruction of what government was for. [CS] Together, the Social Security Act and the WPA demonstrate that the New Deal did not merely respond to a crisis but fundamentally reordered the social contract, creating obligations and expectations between citizens and their government that persist to this day. |
2-Chunk Example 3: Argument About Education
| Labeled Paragraph: [TS] American public schools’ reliance on standardized testing as the primary measure of student learning undermines both the quality of instruction and the breadth of skills that education is supposed to develop. [CD1] A 2015 study by the Center for American Progress found that students in the largest U.S. school districts spent an average of 20 to 25 hours per year taking standardized tests — time that does not include the far greater number of hours spent on test preparation activities, which in many schools displace other subjects and approaches for weeks before exam dates. [CM1] The 20 to 25 hours of direct test-taking time is only a fraction of the true cost: when test preparation determines instructional priorities for weeks or months per year, the curriculum effectively narrows to the skills the test rewards, cutting time for art, physical education, project-based learning, debate, and the kind of open-ended inquiry that develops critical thinking. [CM2] The irony is that standardized tests were designed to measure learning, not to drive it; when preparation for the measurement tool becomes the dominant instructional activity, the measurement tool has taken over the function it was meant to evaluate. [CD2] Research by Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond has documented that nations outperforming the U.S. on international educational rankings — Finland, Singapore, and Canada among them — use standardized testing far less frequently and rely instead on teacher observation, portfolio assessment, and project evaluation to measure student progress. [CM3] The comparison reveals that the American assumption that more testing produces better outcomes is not supported by international evidence; countries that trust their teachers to assess learning in context rather than outsourcing that judgment to a standardized instrument consistently produce students who perform better on the very international measures the U.S. is trying to improve. [CM4] This suggests that the solution to America’s educational challenges is not better tests but more trust: trust in teachers’ professional judgment, trust in diverse assessment methods, and trust in students’ ability to demonstrate learning in multiple ways beyond filling in bubbles on a scantron. [CS] Until American education shifts its primary measure of learning from standardized test scores to the full range of skills that a functioning citizen and lifelong learner needs, it will continue to optimize its schools for a narrow, test-shaped version of intelligence at the expense of everything else. |
The 3-Chunk Paragraph Model
A 3-chunk paragraph contains three Concrete Details, each supported by two Commentary sentences. This is the most developed single-paragraph form of the Schaffer method and approaches the scope of a short essay. It requires three distinct, non-repetitive pieces of evidence, each analyzed with original thought. The 3-chunk model is appropriate for complex argumentative essays, research papers, and high-level academic assignments.
| 3-Chunk Structure: TS (Topic Sentence) CD1 → CM1 → CM2 CD2 → CM3 → CM4 CD3 → CM5 → CM6 CS (Concluding Sentence) Total sentences: 11 | CD:CM ratio: 3:6 |
3-Chunk Example 1: Argument About Animal Intelligence
| Labeled Paragraph: [TS] Scientific research over the past three decades has established beyond reasonable dispute that many animals possess cognitive and emotional capacities far richer than previously recognized, demanding a fundamental revision of how humans justify their treatment of other species. [CD1] Studies of chimpanzees conducted by primatologist Frans de Waal documented extensive evidence of empathy and moral behavior in chimps: they console distressed companions, share food unequally based on social relationships, reconcile after conflicts, and demonstrate what de Waal calls ‘precursors of human morality.’ [CM1] The significance of de Waal’s findings is not simply that chimps are smart but that they appear to have something resembling an emotional inner life with social complexity — grief, loyalty, political maneuvering, and comfort-seeking — that humans have traditionally insisted was uniquely their own. [CM2] If the behaviors that ground our moral framework — empathy, social bonding, awareness of others’ suffering — are not uniquely human but exist on a continuum across species, then the philosophical basis for treating animal suffering as morally irrelevant requires a much more sophisticated justification than we have traditionally offered. [CD2] Neuroscientists at the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness, issued in 2012 and signed by a distinguished group of international researchers, formally declared that ‘nonhuman animals possess the neurological substrates that generate consciousness,’ explicitly including all mammals, birds, and even octopuses. [CM3] The Cambridge Declaration is remarkable not only for its scientific content but for its cultural significance: it represents the scientific community formally aligning itself with what animal welfare advocates had argued for decades on moral grounds, bringing empirical weight to bear on an ethical debate that had previously been dismissed as sentimental. [CM4] Consciousness — the capacity to have subjective experiences, to feel — has long been considered the key threshold for moral consideration; if octopuses, crows, and pigs are conscious, then practices that cause them suffering cannot be morally dismissed as acts performed on mere objects. [CD3] Behavioral research on elephants has documented grief rituals in which elephants return repeatedly to the bodies of dead herd members, touching the bones gently and showing what researchers describe as prolonged distress; one well-documented case followed a mother elephant who carried her dead calf for several days before leaving it. [CM5] Grief, as a concept, requires the capacity to have formed an attachment significant enough that its ending produces distress — which means that in acknowledging elephant grief, we are acknowledging elephant love, however differently from human love it is experienced. [CM6] The ethical weight of this research accumulates: if animals form attachments, mourn losses, console each other in distress, and experience consciousness, then the moral framework that treats them primarily as resources for human use is not a carefully reasoned ethical position but a convenient default maintained by those who benefit from it. [CS] The evidence from ethology, neuroscience, and behavioral research has made the question of animal moral status not a fringe philosophical debate but an urgent scientific one — and the answer it is producing demands that we reconsider practices and assumptions we have treated as settled for far too long. |
3-Chunk Example 2: Literary Analysis of 1984
| Labeled Paragraph: [TS] In George Orwell’s 1984, the Party’s destruction of the English language through the development of Newspeak is not merely a tool of oppression but the novel’s central argument: that freedom of thought is impossible without freedom of expression, and that controlling language is the most complete form of controlling minds. [CD1] The philologist Syme explains to Winston that the purpose of Newspeak is ‘to narrow the range of thought,’ and that ‘every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.’ [CM1] Syme’s explanation reveals the terrifying logic of Newspeak: if the word for rebellion is eliminated from the language, the concept of rebellion becomes literally unthinkable — not suppressed but abolished, the way a color disappears when you can no longer see the wavelength. [CM2] Orwell’s argument is a linguistic version of a deep philosophical claim: thoughts require words, and the vocabulary available to a person defines the range of reality they can perceive. Deprive people of the words for freedom, injustice, and truth, and you have not simply silenced them — you have amputated the cognitive tools they would need to even want to rebel. [CD2] The Party’s slogan ‘War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength’ is an example of what Orwell called doublethink — the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and believe both, achieved by never subjecting either to rational examination. [CM3] Doublethink is only possible in a language designed to prevent examination: the slogans work because Newspeak has stripped out the precise connective vocabulary — ‘but,’ ‘however,’ ‘unless,’ ‘in contrast’ — that would allow a mind to notice the contradiction between the terms. [CM4] In this way, the Party’s control of language is more powerful than its telescreens and thought police: those mechanisms punish people who think wrongly, but Newspeak prevents the wrong thought from forming in the first place — a form of control that requires no enforcement because it has pre-empted the need for it. [CD3] The Appendix of 1984, written in past tense as if by a scholar from an unspecified future, describes the history of Newspeak as something that ‘had been abandoned’ — a small, grammatically encoded suggestion that the Party ultimately fell, and that even the most complete linguistic oppression was not permanent. [CM5] Orwell buries this note of hope in the grammatical tense of a footnote, as if to say: hope, like rebellion, survives in language even when language itself has been weaponized against it — the past tense of the appendix is itself a subversive act. [CM6] This structural choice mirrors the novel’s deepest argument: that language carries meaning the oppressor cannot fully control, that words retain memory and possibility even under totalitarian pressure, and that as long as even one writer writes in a past tense that implies a future, thought cannot be fully extinguished. [CS] Through Newspeak, doublethink, and the grammatical ghost in the appendix, Orwell constructs an argument that goes beyond political satire: that language is not merely a tool for communicating freedom but the very medium in which freedom exists, and that its destruction is not a metaphor for tyranny but its completion. |
3-Chunk Example 3: Scientific/Social Argument
| Labeled Paragraph: [TS] The growing body of research on chronic sleep deprivation in American adolescents constitutes a public health crisis that demands structural solutions — specifically, later school start times — rather than advice directed at teenagers to simply go to bed earlier. [CD1] The American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine have all issued joint statements recommending that middle and high schools begin no earlier than 8:30 a.m., citing research showing that adolescent circadian rhythms shift during puberty, making it biologically impossible for most teenagers to fall asleep before 11 p.m. regardless of when they wake. [CM1] This biological fact — not laziness or poor choices — is the foundational point that most public discussions miss: teenagers who cannot fall asleep before 11 p.m. and who must wake at 6:00 a.m. for a 7:30 start time are not choosing to be sleep-deprived; they are victims of a schedule designed around adult work hours rather than adolescent physiology. [CM2] The unanimous professional consensus of three major medical organizations issuing identical policy recommendations is itself significant evidence: this is not a controversial claim within the relevant scientific community, making the failure of most school districts to act on it an example of institutional inertia triumphing over clear public health guidance. [CD2] A 2017 RAND Corporation study of the economic effects of school start time changes estimated that shifting to an 8:30 a.m. start would contribute $9.3 billion to the U.S. economy within a decade, primarily through improved academic performance, reduced car accident rates among teen drivers, and decreased rates of obesity, depression, and substance use. [CM3] The economic framing reframes the school start time debate in terms that even those unmoved by student well-being arguments must engage with: this is not a soft quality-of-life issue but a measurable productivity and public safety question with a nine-billion-dollar answer. [CM4] The RAND study also documents reduced car accident rates — a benefit that extends to everyone on the road, not just teenagers. When sleep-deprived teen drivers crash into other vehicles, the cost is borne not only by the families involved but by insurance systems, hospitals, and road infrastructure. Later start times are therefore a public safety measure, not a favor to adolescents. [CD3] Districts that have implemented later start times, including those in Seattle, Washington and Fairfax County, Virginia, have documented measurable improvements in student health outcomes and academic performance: Seattle’s shift to an 8:45 a.m. start correlated with a 34% increase in median sleep duration and a 4.5% increase in grades among its students, as published in a 2020 study in the journal Science Advances. [CM5] Seattle’s data is especially compelling because it is not a simulation or a projection but a real-world outcome from a large urban district — evidence that the change works in practice, not just in theory, and that the logistical challenges districts routinely cite as reasons for inaction are, in fact, surmountable. [CM6] A 34% increase in sleep and a 4.5% improvement in grades are not marginal benefits to be weighed against scheduling inconvenience — they are the difference between a generation of students operating at or near their cognitive potential and a generation chronically impaired by a policy that could be changed with sufficient political will. [CS] The evidence is not preliminary, not contested within the relevant scientific community, and not without successful precedent: the only remaining obstacle to protecting adolescent health through later school start times is the unwillingness of institutions to prioritize what research has clearly identified as the right choice. |
Extended Dialogue: Teaching the Schaffer Method
The following dialogue shows a high school English teacher walking two students through the Jane Schaffer method, from understanding the structure to revising a weak paragraph into a strong one.
| Extended Dialogue: [High School English Class — After-School Tutoring Session] Teacher (Ms. Walden): Okay you two — you both struggled with the last essay, and I want to troubleshoot before the next one. Let’s start from the beginning. Maya, tell me what you know about the Schaffer method. Maya: Topic sentence, then concrete detail, then commentary, then concluding sentence. Ms. Walden: Good skeleton. Devon, what’s the difference between a concrete detail and commentary? Devon: Concrete detail is the evidence — like a quote from the book. Commentary is my analysis of the quote. Ms. Walden: Exactly. Now here’s the part that trips everyone up — commentary is NOT a summary of the quote. Let me show you what I mean. Maya, read me the commentary you wrote after quoting Scout’s first day of school in To Kill a Mockingbird. Maya: [reading] ‘In this quote, Scout describes her first day of school. Miss Caroline does not like that Atticus taught Scout to read. This shows that Miss Caroline is strict.’ Ms. Walden: How many of those three sentences told me something new about the meaning of the scene? Something that wasn’t already in the quote itself? Maya: …None of them? I just summarized what happened. Ms. Walden: Exactly. True commentary answers ‘so what?’ It doesn’t retell — it interprets. Let me ask you a leading question: WHY does Miss Caroline object to Scout knowing how to read? What does that tell us about the educational system Lee is depicting? Maya: Oh… because she wants everyone at the same level? Or because she only wants to teach things a certain way, and anything that already happened is a threat to her control? Ms. Walden: Now THAT is commentary. ‘Miss Caroline’s hostility to Scout’s prior knowledge reveals an educational system more invested in institutional conformity than in student development.’ See the difference? You’re making an argument about the MEANING, not just describing what happened. Devon: What about when you don’t have enough to say about a quote? Sometimes I pick a quote and I can only think of one thing to say about it. Ms. Walden: Two possibilities. One: you picked the wrong quote. A great Schaffer concrete detail is a rich one — something that contains multiple layers of meaning that reward analysis. If you pick a thin quote, you’ll only get thin commentary. Devon: What’s the second possibility? Ms. Walden: You’re only looking at the quote’s surface. Try asking yourself four questions for any piece of evidence: What does this mean literally? What does this imply beyond the surface? What technique is the author using and why? And how does this connect to the essay’s larger argument? If you ask all four, you’ll almost never run out of commentary. Maya: Okay, so for the 3-chunk model — we need three separate pieces of evidence. Do they have to be from three different places in the text? Ms. Walden: Ideally, yes — or at least from different moments or aspects of the text. The three chunks should build on each other. Think of them as three different angles on the same claim. If your topic sentence is ‘Atticus embodies moral courage,’ Chunk 1 might look at his decision to take Tom’s case, Chunk 2 at the jail scene, Chunk 3 at his closing argument. Three different moments, three different expressions of the same quality. Devon: And they should be in some kind of order? Like build to the most important one? Ms. Walden: That’s sophisticated thinking, and yes — you can organize your chunks by chronological order in the text, by increasing complexity, or by saving your best evidence for last. ‘Best for last’ is often the most persuasive because readers remember the final impression. Maya: What about the concluding sentence? Mine always feel like I’m just repeating the topic sentence. Ms. Walden: Because you probably are. A concluding sentence should do three things: restate the point in NEW words, synthesize what all the evidence has proven together, and optionally, open a door to the bigger picture. Not ‘In conclusion, Atticus shows moral courage’ — but ‘Atticus’s consistent willingness to stand against injustice regardless of the personal cost offers Lee’s most complete answer to the question the novel poses from its opening page: what does it mean to do the right thing in a world designed to make doing the right thing costly?’ Devon: That’s actually a good sentence. Ms. Walden: It’s a good concluding sentence because it earns its scope. It doesn’t start big — it arrives there after the paragraph has done the work to justify it. That’s the Schaffer method in a sentence: do the work first, then claim the meaning. Maya: I think I finally understand why the ratio is two commentaries for every one concrete detail. Because the analysis is supposed to be bigger than the evidence. Ms. Walden: Exactly right. The evidence is the foundation. Your thinking is the building. A paragraph that is mostly evidence and barely any commentary is just a foundation — impressive material, maybe, but it hasn’t become anything yet. Your job as a writer is to build. |
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