What Do We Need to Remember?
1. When you are analyzing a text to make a conclusion, you must make inferences from incomplete information
2. When an artwork is vague about anything on purpose, it is called ambiguity, and it's an art technique. The writer is trying to do two things.
- On a basic level, people remember things that aren't fully explained better than ones that they do, so if you leave something ambiguous, your story can be more memorable.
- Secondly, the author can use ambiguity to force the reader to focus on the theme by denying them information about the plot. By refusing to tell you whether Jonas dies at the end of The Giver, Lois Lowry forces you to think about how it doesn't really matter, that Jonas's decision to leave the community was what mattered, which is thematically more important that if he survived physically.
3. When you are unclear for no reason, it's called "vagueness." That's not art -- you messed up.
4. Use ellipses to remove words that you don't need for your example.
5. When you are drawing a conclusion about something, it's because it's NOT explicitly stated. Use the sentence stem, It should be concluded from the text that . . ., then state your claim and give your quoted evidence.
The Text - "Ode to Billie Joe," Bobbi Gentry
(I am going to play the song in class, so if you are absent and doing this as make-up work, I would find the song on Youtube or Spotify and listen to it -- it's creepy and really good.)
It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day
I was out choppin' cotton and my brother was balin' hay
And at dinner time we stopped and walked back to the house to eat
And Mama hollered out the back door "y'all remember to wipe your feet"
And then she said "I got some news this mornin' from Choctaw Ridge"
"Today Billie Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"
And Papa said to Mama as he passed around the blackeyed peas
"Well, Billie Joe never had a lick of sense, pass the biscuits, please"
"There's five more acres in the lower forty I've got to plow"
And Mama said it was shame about Billie Joe, anyhow
Seems like nothin' ever comes to no good up on Choctaw Ridge
And now Billie Joe MacAllister's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge
And Brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billie Joe
Put a frog down my back at the Carroll County picture show
And wasn't I talkin' to him after church last Sunday night?
"I'll have another piece of apple pie, you know it don't seem right"
"I saw him at the sawmill yesterday on Choctaw Ridge"
"And now you tell me Billie Joe's jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge"
And Mama said to me "Child, what's happened to your appetite?"
"I've been cookin' all morning and you haven't touched a single bite"
"That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today"
"Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way"
"He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge"
"And she and Billie Joe was throwing somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge"
A year has come 'n' gone since we heard the news 'bout Billie Joe
And Brother married Becky Thompson, they bought a store in Tupelo
There was a virus going 'round, Papa caught it and he died last Spring
And now Mama doesn't seem to wanna do much of anything
And me, I spend a lot of time pickin' flowers up on Choctaw Ridge
And drop them into the muddy water off the Tallahatchie Bridge
The Product
When asked about her song, Bobbie Gentry has said that she became frustrated because so many people asked her about what the narrator and Billie Joe threw off the Tallahatchie Bridge, when she felt that the parents behavior was the most important part of the song.
- From the clues in the text, what do you think the two teens threw off the bridge?
- What is surprising about the parents' response to Billie Joe's death?
How Will We Know That We're Good at This?
We'll have shown for the last time that we can use an ellipsis to indicate an omission. The ellipsis solves our dilemma: we need to copy out quotations word for word, but we cannot include anything in a paragraph that doesn't support the main idea.
More importantly, of course, is the ideas that we are exploring about literature and life. We'll know that we have a great answer to this question when we have clear statements; logical, valid explanations; and sufficient, specific evidence for what we think.*
*Note on writing: It might seem weird here that I have written this list with semicolons instead of commas. I did this because there were commas inside list items ("logical, valid explanations"); if I'd used all comma, the reader would have thought that my list had six items and it would have been more difficult to understand.
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