The Scarlet Letter

"No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude,
without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true"

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlett Letter

Annotating The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

As you read The Scarlet Letter you will annotate the text. You may write in your own purchased copy, use sticky notes in a school provided copy, write/type on the PDF copy, or write/type your annotations separately from the text. Guidelines for annotating follow. Annotations due on 11/20.

Click on the scarlet letter for a pdf version of the text. Please download this to your device so that you are not dependent on Internet connectivity. Notability has served as both a good storage location and annotation tool for many students.

READ "Interrogating Texts: 6 Habits to Develop in Your First Year at Harvard" by Susan Gilroy BY CLICKING HERE.

“Previewing: Look “around” the text before you start reading” (Gilroy 11).
LAYOUT: Make observations about sections, chapters, pages, prefatory and end material. “How does the layout of the text prepare you for reading? Is the material broken into parts, subtopics, subsections, and the like? Are there long and unbroken blocks of text or smaller paragraphs or “chunks” and what does this suggest?” (Gilroy 11).

AUTHOR: “Is the author known to you? How does her reputation/credentials influence your perception of what you are about to read?” (Gilroy 11).

“Annotating: Make your reading thinking-intensive from start to finish” (Gilroy 11).
FOCUS: Prepare to actively engage in a “dialogue” with the author and the issues, ideas, and concepts you encounter (Gilroy 11).

HOW TO ANNOTATE AS YOU READ:
a. Use a pen to mark up the text. (If you can’t write in your copy of the book, modify these expectations for sticky notes or synthesis reading notes.) Annotating means that you will do the following as you read:
i. Underline important quotes.
ii. Mark up the margins of your text with words, phrases, notes – ideas that occur to you, notes about things that seem important to you, reminders of how issues in a text may connect with class discussion or course themes.
iii. Outline significant plot events in the margin of the text. This gives you an “at a glance” reference of the plot for discussion and essays (Gilroy 11).
iv. Look for repetitions and patterns. How are important concepts developed / treated in the story?
1. Recurring images
2. Repeated words, phrases, types of examples, or illustrations
3. Consistent ways of characterizing people, events, or issues
v. Use a symbol system to capture important ideas, concepts, or literary devices.
vi. Ask questions. What does this mean? How will this affect…? What are the implications of this event? How will this character react? etc. (Gilroy 11).

HOW TO ANNOTATE AFTER YOU READ: SUMMARIZE & ANALYZE
a. Summarize paragraphs, chapters, or sections. Depending on how much summary you need to stay engaged in the reading, write brief summaries of the significant events or concepts on the FIRST page of chapters or sections or at the beginning of paragraphs or pages. This means you will have to flip/scroll backwards after having read a section to write this summary in your book (Gilroy 11).
b. Analyze what you’ve read. At the END of each chapter or section, discuss its significance, impact, resonance, intertextuality, meaning, implications, etc. (Gilroy 11).
c. Contextualize: “Take stock of what you’ve read and put it in perspective. Re”view” what you’ve encountered” through its historical, cultural, material, or intellectual circumstances (Gilroy 11).
d. Compare and contrast: “Set course readings against each other to determine their relationships” or intertextuality (Gilroy 11).

The Scarlet Letter Children’s Book (THIS WILL BE DONE IN CLASS)

Assignment summary: As a class you will be re-writing several pages of The Scarlet Letter in order to make it accessible to younger children. As a class we will review lexile levels and how the readability of a text is determined primarily based on the diction and syntax of a piece. Using the lexile website as your primary tool, you will be altering the diction and syntax of The Scarlet Letter to take it from a lexile of 1420 to a lexile range of 700 – 1000 or a text level appropriate for a 6th grader.

Task #1: Choose passage. You may either work alone or with a partner. If you work alone you will need to choose one paragraph of substance. If you work with a partner you will need to choose two paragraphs (consecutive, please). DO not stop or start in the middle of a sentence. In some instances, you may need to go slightly over or under the "requirement" in order to make this happen.

Task #2: Diction. You will be responsible for keeping a list of words from the original text that you decided to change in order to change the lexile level. Each word must include the part of speech, the definition, a list of synonyms that could potentially be used to change the lexile and a brief explanation of the synonym that was ultimately chosen and why.
Sample entry: 1) Loquacious. Adjective. Having a tendency to talk too much. Wordy, talkative, long-winded, garrulous, rambling. I decided to use rambling because it decreased the lexile, kept the meaning of the original text, and is a word that most people are familiar with.

Task #3: Syntax. You will be responsible for keeping a list of the types of sentences that were changed and how they were changed in order to change the lexile level. You do not need to rewrite the original sentences.
Sample entry: 1) Sentence #1 is a compound complex sentence which has 32 words. A young child would be confused by such a long and involved sentence, so I decided the keep the two independent clauses making it compound, but we removed the dependent clauses which made it compound complex. I made those dependent clauses into a separate complex sentence.

Task #4: Final re-write. You will need to actually re-write and type this passage with the changed diction and syntax. You will then submit this to me digitally as a Google Doc at shuckabe@lexrich5.org. Please label your work LastNameLexile. If two of you worked together, include both last names.

*Please submit all of the above as one document, rather than three separate documents.