In any compositional pursuit, nailing the thesis is half the battle.
This is especially true of literary analysis.
If the wheels get derailed in the introductory paragraph, the whole essay is gonna drift into the wayward weeds of confusion and wonkiness.
This is why I skill-n-drill thesis construction with a lot of my bell ringers.
In this particular exercise, I have students viewing a motion picture poem (an Oscar Nominated Short Film entitled Barber Shop by Isaac Carlton).
From here, they crank an introductory paragraph while pulling the strings of the inverted thesis heuristic.
My writing workshop is super short, so give it a quick perusal to see how this simple bell ringer can help your students get to cranking some stellar theses.
All the slides and student exemplars are available for free in the video's description.
As a total aside, my students love analyzing these short films. They are all under 7-minutes long and YouTube has a slew of them. Some of them are fantastically rich and complex ... rife for analysis ... and often a necessary break from exclusively exploring written texts.
Happy teaching and happy writing!
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