The Gettysburg Address: Identifying Text, Context, and Subtext

Objective

This lesson is part of Gilder Lehrman'due south series of Mutual Core State Standards–based instruction resources. These resources were developed to enable students to understand, summarize, and clarify original texts of historical significance. Through a stride-by-pace process, students will acquire the skills to analyze any chief or secondary source material.

Overview

Over the class of this lesson, students volition examine text, context, and subtext, too as the types of rhetorical devices that Lincoln employed in the Gettysburg Accost. The teacher should provide more than modeling for center-level grades.

Introduction

This lesson should be used within a larger Ceremonious War unit. It asks students to identify and explicate how an author crafts and structures a text in guild to frame central ideas.

Materials

  • The Gettysburg Address with Text, Context, and Subtext (PDF)
  • Teacher Resource: The Gettysburg Accost (PDF)
  • Gettysburg Accost Wordle (PDF). Source: world wide web.wordle.cyberspace
  • The VERY Short List of Lincoln'south Literary/Rhetorical Devices (PDF)
  • Gettysburg Address: Literary and Rhetorical Device Analysis (PDF)

Vocabulary

Students may encounter vocabulary and phrases they are unfamiliar with. Students should endeavor to reason out the meanings of words and phrases within the context of the text. If students go stuck, post words and phrases and discuss as a whole class what they might mean.

Procedure

  1. Discuss the post-obit with your students:
    • Tier 1: Common Everyday Spoken language - Words they utilise usually.
    • Tier 2: Domain Crossers - Words they don't use every day simply know (e.thou., irony, cool).
    • Tier 3: Domain Specific Vocabulary - Words similar emancipation, or other terms that the instructor expects them to define, that a book puts in bold, or something they might expect up in a index, etc.
  2. Handout: The Gettysburg Address with Text, Context, and Subtext. Read the address aloud and then have them expect for tiered vocabulary. Say: Lincoln doesn't utilise many T3 words. Why is that?
  3. Ask them for the context: Where is he giving the address? What happened at that place? Have the class brainstorm events leading up to the Gettysburg Address.
  4. Have students circle adjectives within the text and underline any words that repeat. Tell them that many times adjectives and repeating words betoken the tone of a document (how the author feels) and allow united states to ameliorate understand how someone in the audience might take felt (mood). Begin and discuss tone and mood words. Ask for the words they come across repeated the well-nigh. And so testify them the wordle sample. Words that are repeated the most are the largest in the wordle.
  5. Ask them to think of ane word that best describes the document as a whole and to write it downwardly. Take the students share out their suggestions.
  6. Students summarize what is in the address.
  7. Give students the handout of Lincoln's Literary and Rhetorical Devices. Go through each device together and take them think of their own examples. Yous can even assign this as homework and take the students come in with a few of their own. The Net is full of examples of such literary and rhetorical devices and explanations of them.
  8. Discuss the steps in analyzing rhetorical and literary devices.
  9. Had out theGettysburg Address: Literary and Rhetorical Device Analysisworksheet.  Go through the first function of the accost with the students and discuss the case.
  10. Students end analyzing the text and the devices used so compare it to their offset reading of the accost.

Notes:

  • Encourage students to use Wordle when they are writing their own essays. They tin paste in an entire essay and wordle volition place their ain repeating words. Students can use the feedback it provides to analyze the extent to which they focused on a detail thought in their own writing.
  • The listing of rhetorical and literary devices can be used on nigh speeches, political cartoons, some letters, and other nonfiction texts. Encourage students to identify them and utilise them throughout the twelvemonth.