Grade 11 · secular · Common Core-aligned
This is an 11th-grade year of American literature and writing that runs from the Puritans to today, and it treats writers as people making arguments, not just telling stories. Your child will read Winthrop and Edwards, then Jefferson and Paine, then Douglass and Emerson, then a 20th-century novel or play, then contemporary poetry, and finally spend six weeks building their own research paper out of texts read across the whole year. The through-line is rhetoric, how writers try to move an audience, not just what they say, and by June your child should be able to pick apart an argument they've never seen before and build one of their own with real sources behind it. It's reading-heavy and writing-heavy, and it's meant to get them ready for AP-level or college-level work next year.
The whole year, in plain English. Tap any unit to see every skill inside, nothing is hidden.
This is where the year's vocabulary gets planted: covenant, typology, jeremiad, plain style, the 'errand into the wilderness.' Your child reads Bradford, Winthrop, and Edwards and learns that these writers weren't just describing their faith, they were making an argument for why the community existed and what it owed. The metaphors here (city on a hill, errand) outlive the religious argument and get reused by every later unit.
Given a glossed excerpt of Winthrop's 'A Model of Christian Charity,' state the literal meaning of at least 8 of 10 archaic or theological terms (e.g., 'providence,' 'covenant,' 'affections') using context and provided glosses.
Identify the three structural components of a jeremiad (diagnosis of decline, warning of consequence, call to covenant renewal) in a teacher-provided excerpt of Edwards's 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,' using a structure map.
Explain how Winthrop's use of the 'city upon a hill' image functions as an argumentative device (creating public accountability and communal stakes) rather than as decorative language, citing specific textual evidence.
Compare Bradford's plain style prose to a contrasting ornate 17th-century English prose excerpt, inferring the theological belief that motivates the stylistic choice in each.
Apply the jeremiad's three-part structure to identify whether a contemporary political speech excerpt (not Puritan, not previously seen) follows, partially follows, or departs from the form, and justify the classification with textual evidence.
Construct a written analysis explaining how a chosen Puritan text's rhetorical structure (typology, plain style, or jeremiad form) serves its specific persuasive purpose for its original audience, using at least two pieces of textual evidence.
Given a never-before-seen short passage using founding-myth language (e.g., a modern political speech invoking 'city on a hill' or 'errand'), infer whether the writer is extending, ironizing, or rejecting the original Puritan argument, and justify the inference using knowledge of the metaphor's original rhetorical function.
Distinguish between summarizing what a Puritan text is about and identifying what the text's rhetorical purpose is trying to do to its audience, when given a text excerpt and two sample responses (one summary, one purpose-statement).
Jefferson and Paine take the covenant language and plain style from Unit 1 and repurpose them for a political argument instead of a religious one. This unit also introduces ethos, pathos, and logos by name, these three words become the standard toolkit for analyzing every nonfiction text for the rest of the year.
Given a short excerpt, correctly label a specific appeal as ethos, pathos, or logos and identify the textual feature (word choice, claimed credential, statistic, emotional image) that signals it.
Explain how a specific phrase in the Declaration of Independence (e.g., 'we hold these truths to be self-evident') functions to establish shared ethos between the writers and the reading public of 1776.
Diagram the logical structure of the Declaration's grievance list, showing how individual grievances function as premises supporting the concluding claim of a right to separate.
Identify where Paine anticipates a specific counterargument in Common Sense and evaluate whether his rebuttal actually addresses the counterargument's strongest form or a weaker version of it.
Compare the rhetorical strategies of the Declaration of Independence and Common Sense, explaining why a document aimed at international/elite audiences (Declaration) and one aimed at ordinary undecided colonists (Common Sense) differ in their balance of ethos, pathos, and logos.
Analyze an unfamiliar Revolutionary-era primary source (not covered in class) to identify its dominant rhetorical appeals and evaluate how effectively it anticipates and rebuts likely counterclaims, in a timed essay.
Recall the definitions of typology and the jeremiad from Unit 1 and identify an instance of covenant language being repurposed for a political rather than religious argument in a Revolutionary text.
Given two unfamiliar short persuasive texts from different eras (e.g., a Revolutionary pamphlet and a modern op-ed), generalize a claim about how the same three appeals can be deployed differently depending on the persuadability and prior belief of the target audience.
This unit puts Emerson and Thoreau's self-reliance arguments next to Douglass's and Jacobs's narratives, and asks a pointed question: who was actually allowed to claim authority over their own life story? It uses the ethos/pathos/logos tools from Unit 2 on first-person testimony instead of speeches.
Given a passage from Emerson's 'Self-Reliance,' state its central claim about the individual's relationship to society in one sentence.
Identify which rhetorical appeal (ethos, pathos, or logos) dominates in a given short excerpt from Douglass's Narrative, using the definitions established in Unit 2.
Explain how Douglass's narrative voice constructs credibility (ethos) differently than Emerson's essayistic voice, given that one writes as embodied testimony and the other as philosophical assertion.
Explain why Jacobs frames her narrative as an appeal to Northern white women readers specifically, connecting her stated purpose to her choices about what to disclose and withhold.
Analyze how an unnamed or constrained first-person narrator's limitations on what they can safely say function as evidence of their situation rather than as a flaw in the text.
Compare Emerson's and Thoreau's versions of self-reliance to determine where they diverge on whether withdrawal from society is necessary for individual authority.
Given an unfamiliar 19th-century first-person narrative excerpt (not read in class) written by a narrator whose social position constrains their speech, infer what the narrator cannot say directly and what rhetorical purpose that silence serves.
Construct an original argument, using two paired 19th-century texts never explicitly paired in class instruction, about whether the rhetorical authority one writer claims depends on the labor or constraint of a figure like the other writer's narrator.
Plan a comparative essay that draws specific textual evidence from one slave narrative and one Transcendentalist text to support a thesis about constructed authority, before drafting.
Check a peer's draft paragraph for whether cited evidence actually supports the claim made about that writer's rhetorical authority, or merely appears in the same paragraph.
This unit slows down and teaches a full method for taking apart one nonfiction piece: who it's for, why, when, how it's arranged, what its word choices are doing, and what unstated assumption (the 'warrant') has to be true for its evidence to actually support its claim. It leans hard on ethos/pathos/logos from Unit 2, brought back after about a month away on purpose.
Given a short nonfiction passage, identify the specific audience, purpose, and occasion the text was written for, using textual evidence rather than the topic alone.
Given the sentence frame 'The writer assumes that ___, which is why ___ counts as evidence for ___,' state the warrant of a passage that was directly modeled in class, filling the frame accurately without needing to locate claim/evidence/warrant unassisted.
Explain how a writer's use of ethos, pathos, or logos functions to move a specific named audience toward the writer's claim, not merely label which appeal is present.
Analyze how a writer's structural arrangement (order of ideas, placement of concession, sequencing of evidence) shapes how an audience receives the argument.
Explain how specific diction and syntax choices in a passage advance or intensify the writer's argument, citing the exact words or sentence structures responsible.
Distinguish a text's claim from its warrant by identifying the unstated assumption that must be true for the cited evidence to support the claim.
Given two passages arguing the same issue with different warrants, compare how each writer's unstated assumption leads to a different claim from similar evidence.
Write a full rhetorical analysis paragraph integrating audience, arrangement, diction/syntax, and warrant into a single coherent account of how a passage persuades, without a sentence frame.
Given a nonfiction speech or essay never encountered in class, on an unfamiliar occasion and issue, produce a complete rhetorical analysis identifying claim, warrant, and at least two rhetorical choices that function to persuade a specified audience.
Evaluate whether a passage's stated or implied warrant is actually plausible, rather than merely present, by testing whether the cited evidence would still support the claim if the assumption were false, including for passages where the 'obvious' warrant does not actually hold.
Evaluate whether a text can be simultaneously rhetorically skillful and factually misleading, using a specific passage as the test case for that distinction.
Here the move shifts from analyzing one text carefully to building an original claim out of three to five texts that agree, disagree, or simply aren't talking about the same thing. It reuses the Emerson/Douglass/Jacobs material from Unit 3 as the actual sources students synthesize.
Given two source excerpts that make conflicting claims about individual authority (one Transcendentalist, one slave-narrative), state in one sentence what each source would say to the other.
Define synthesis, distinguishing it in writing from summary, by naming what a synthesis must DO that a sequence of summaries does not.
Given the exact source pair and column structure demonstrated in the Day 3 worked example, reproduce a completed source-conflict map for that same pair, correctly locating one agreement, one disagreement, and one talking-past entry in the text.
Given a set of 3 sources on a shared contested question, complete a source-conflict map identifying each source's position, one point of agreement, one point of disagreement, and one place where sources address different sub-questions entirely (talk past each other).
Write a paragraph that concedes the validity of a conflicting source's evidence while explaining why the writer's own claim still stands.
Given a claim supported by a chart or social-media-style post presented as a fourth source, evaluate whether the visual is being offered as evidence or as illustration, and justify the distinction.
Given four sources on a contested question none of which the student has synthesized before, generate an original claim that accounts for points of agreement and disagreement among all four, unprompted as to which sources conflict.
Explain why a synthesis essay that only describes source conflict, without resolving it into a claim, fails to meet the assignment's demand.
Organize a five-paragraph synthesis essay outline that groups sources by point of argument rather than by source-by-source sequence.
Participate in a Socratic-style discussion building on peers' claims about a source conflict, citing specific textual evidence to extend or challenge another student's point.
This is the unit where a novel or play gets treated as an argument, not just a story, and where the specific way it's built (whose voice you get, what's staged versus said, what's left unresolved) is treated as making a claim in itself. It calls back Unit 1's founding-mythology language and Unit 3's questions about who gets individual authority, now applied to modern, multi-voiced texts.
Given a short excerpt, students correctly identify whether the narrator explicitly states a claim about identity/authority and distinguish that stated claim from what the surrounding plot confirms or undercuts.
Students explain how a specific formal choice (narrative structure, withheld information, or dramatic staging convention) in the core text makes a claim about who is allowed individual authority, using textual evidence.
Students compare two moments (within or across texts) that both invoke founding mythology (American Dream or self-reliance) and determine whether each invocation strengthens a character's claim to belonging or exposes a limit in the mythology.
Given two conflicting first-person accounts of the same scene from a multi-narrator text, students identify what each account requires the reader to overlook and argue why the author leaves the conflict structurally unresolved.
Students recall the definitions of persona, dramatic irony, and revision/inversion of mythology as introduced in this unit.
Students construct an original thesis arguing how a specific formal choice in the core text (not merely its content or a character's statement) makes a claim about American identity, and defend it with textual evidence in an extended essay.
Given a novel excerpt and a play excerpt neither read in class, students determine which formal device (narrative interiority vs. staging/silence) each uses to make an implicit claim about identity, without being told which device to look for.
Students classify a given passage as primarily invoking founding mythology to affirm belonging versus primarily invoking it to expose exclusion, when the passage's stance is ambiguous or mixed.
Poetry gets treated the same way the play and novel did, as argument, just compressed into line breaks, white space, and what's left unsaid. It builds straight off Unit 6's persona and voice ideas, now applied to much shorter texts where every choice carries more weight.
Given a single sentence lineated three different ways, students identify which line-break placement best supports a stated interpretive claim and name the specific word placed at the line's end that creates that effect.
Students distinguish the persona's stated position from the poet's biographically plausible position in a dramatic monologue, citing at least one specific line where the two diverge.
Given two persona poems addressing a related theme (e.g., inherited identity, displacement), students compare how each poem's persona choice changes the argument's rhetorical distance from the reader, and generalize this into a stated principle about persona as an argumentative tool.
Students state, as an original sentence the poem itself never states, the implicit claim created by a poem's deliberate omission of a specific detail (e.g., an unnamed cause, an absent apology, an unstated cause of loss).
Given an unfamiliar contemporary poem never discussed in class, students identify at least one allusion and explain what claim the poem borrows or argues against by invoking that referenced text or event.
Students plan and deliver at least two evidence-based contributions in a Socratic seminar on assigned poems, each contribution citing a specific line and stating how a form choice (persona, line break, cadence, or omission) supports or complicates a claim about identity.
Given two contemporary poems, one persona-driven, that neither poem was discussed in class, students construct a written comparative claim about how each poem's form choices argue a position on identity, and defend that claim using cited textual evidence from both poems.
Students recall the definitions of persona, dramatic monologue, cadence, and enjambment introduced or reintroduced in this unit when given the term without context.
The year's final project: your child picks a research question, finds and evaluates at least six sources spanning two or more units from this year, and writes a documented argument that actually synthesizes across periods rather than cherry-picking whatever agrees with them. No new literary content, this is Unit 2/4's appeals vocabulary and Unit 5's synthesis definition, scaled up with real citations.
Given a course-EQ-adjacent topic, formulate a research question that is arguable, not a yes/no fact question, and narrow it to a scope answerable in 6-8 pages.
Evaluate a given source's credibility by checking who is behind it, its purpose, and corroboration elsewhere, rather than judging it by appearance or professionalism.
Recall the MLA in-text citation format and works-cited entry structure for common source types (book, article, website).
Execute correct MLA in-text citations and a correctly formatted works-cited entry for a source provided by the teacher.
Compare two or more sources from different units/periods on the same research question to identify where they agree, disagree, or address different aspects of the question -- applying Unit 5's synthesis definition at research scale.
Generate an original claim (thesis) that accounts for the tension among sources rather than merely averaging or picking a side already agreed upon by one source.
Plan the organizational structure of a multi-source research argument, sequencing evidence and counterargument rather than summarizing sources one after another.
Produce a full draft of the research argument integrating evidence from at least six sources across at least two units' texts, with correct in-text citation.
Explain and defend, in response to unscripted questions, why particular sources were selected and how a counterargument was addressed in the paper.
Critique a peer's draft by identifying where a paragraph lists source claims without connecting them versus where it constructs a synthesized point.
Given an unfamiliar controversial topic outside the course's American-literature content, apply the source-credibility and synthesis criteria learned in this unit to evaluate a new set of sources.
From the parent guide
This is an 11th-grade year of American literature and writing that runs from the Puritans to today, and it treats writers as people making arguments, not just telling stories. Your child will read Winthrop and Edwards, then Jefferson and Paine, then Douglass and Emerson, then a 20th-century novel or play, then contemporary poetry, and finally spend six weeks building their own research paper out of texts read across the whole year. The through-line is rhetoric, how writers try to move an audience, not just what they say, and by June your child should be able to pick apart an argument they've never seen before and build one of their own with real sources behind it. It's reading-heavy and writing-heavy, and it's meant to get them ready for AP-level or college-level work next year.
Unit 1 · what to expect
This is where the year's vocabulary gets planted: covenant, typology, jeremiad, plain style, the 'errand into the wilderness.' Your child reads Bradford, Winthrop, and Edwards and learns that these writers weren't just describing their faith, they were making an argument for why the community existed and what it owed. The metaphors here (city on a hill, errand) outlive the religious argument and get reused by every later unit.
The full guide covers all 8 units: where kids get stuck, what to say, and how to tell it's working. Included with the course.
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