Theme and Textual Evidence
Develop theme statements that express an insight rather than a topic. Support interpretations with precise, embedded textual evidence.
A lesson of English 9, in Close Reading and Literary Foundations, about 20 minutes.
Theme and Evidence
By the end of this lesson, you will be able to tell a theme from a topic, state one as a full sentence, and support it with evidence quoted from the text rather than from memory.
A Topic Is a Word. A Theme Is a Claim.
Ask what a story is about and most answers name a topic.
Power. Pride. Time.
Those are subjects, not ideas. A theme is what the text says ABOUT the topic, and it has to be a full sentence because a claim needs a verb.
Topic: power Theme: power outlasts nobody, however permanent it looks at the time
You can disagree with the second one. That is the test. If nobody could possibly disagree with your theme, you have written a topic with extra words.
Two more rules that save marks:
- A theme is about people, not about the characters. "Ozymandias was arrogant" is a plot detail. "Arrogance looks ridiculous once time has passed" is a theme.
- A theme is never a moral. You are saying what the text argues, not what the reader should do.
Evidence Is Quoted, Not Remembered
A claim without evidence is an opinion. The evidence has to be the writer's words, quoted exactly, and short: the phrase that does the work, not half a page.
Then, and this is the part that gets skipped, you say HOW it does the work. A quotation dropped in and left alone proves nothing on its own.
Claim. The poem argues that power does not last. Evidence. The statue is a "colossal wreck". Reasoning. "Colossal" keeps the scale of his power in the line, and "wreck" destroys it in the same breath, so the poem sets his ambition beside its ruin in two words.
Claim, evidence, reasoning. Miss the third and you have decorated an assertion.
Passage: Ozymandias
Read it, then answer using the text. It stays on screen while you work.
<!-- SLATE_IF_STRONG: english.reading.theme-evidence --> <!-- END_SLATE_IF_STRONG -->I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; And on the pedestal these words appear: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818