23.2. Colonel Shaw's Drummer Doy RL5. (Comparing Structure)

Objective: A good reader understands how the author will structure or arrange a text in order to try and accomplish different purposes. The form a story takes should follow its intended function.

Instruction: Five things it will really help to know:

1. Any thing is well-made if every part of that art helps the designer do what they want to do.
2. You should generally make the most important things the things that you write about most. The kind-of important things get less writing. The unimportant things should be removed.
3. A nonfiction narrative is just a fancy way of saying "true story." Like an article, it is true, but like a story, it is arranged chronologically in time order.
4. It's easier to compare two things are talk about the way that they are different that it is to just analyze one thing.
5. The structure (the size of the parts, the number of parts, and the order of the parts) should help the writer accomplish their purpose.

Independent Practice/Materials: Here is a nonfiction narrative on the same topic as "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh."

Even though the two stories, "The Drummer Boy of Shiloh" and "Colonel Shaw's Drummer Boy" are both about Civil War drummer boys, the two writers choose to begin and end their stories at very different points, creating two different structures. The short story takes place over the course of an hour, but the nonfiction narrative covers decades of a man's life.

Assessment: Write a logical SEE paragraph that answers, explains, and proves the following question: The two stories are different in structure because they have to be; they cover different amounts of time. Why did one writer choose to tell a story that takes under an hour and one tell a story that runs over forty years?
Hint: An author is going to choose a structure that suits his or her purpose, so if you ask yourself the authors' differing purposes, it might help you understand why they choose to write more or less about the same length of time.