In this workshop, I will present a heuristic for analysis known as "The Method," that has become a cornerstone of my teaching. "The Method" comes from the book Writing Analytically by David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen, so it does already exist in the literature, but I would like to present how I've used it in the classroom as a tool for helping students determine the central ideas of a text more effectively. "The Method" asks students to look for repetitions, strands, and binaries in a text, which allows the significant ideas of a text to emerge for them more clearly. I would like to pair my presentation of this with the concept of asking students to present their findings of a text's main idea using the "although/I claim/ because" format, and also how students can write their own argumentative thesis statements using this format.
Outcomes: Teachers will come away with a heuristic for analysis and materials to help them introduce the heuristic to students.
