Summer Reading Required Assignment

10th Grade Literature and Composition - Honors

Welcome to 10th Grade Honors Literature and Composition! Throughout this course, you will be required to annotate, criticize, and analyze various texts in a professional and scholarly fashion. As such, it is imperative that you enter this course with an understanding of annotation and of thinking critically about what you read.

Your summer reading assignment is to read and collect 10 articles from that have some commonality and a specific motif. You should choose a topic that interests you and a topic that is relevant and important to a high school audience. After you turn your articles in on Monday, August 14th, we will use them to create a magazine that you will present and persuade the school board to purchase.

Use the following annotation guidelines to analyze each article. Follow these instructions carefully. This is your way of demonstrating your analytical abilities before we delve deeper into our own texts, and even more, your own writing.

Annotations Assignment Expectations

Due: Monday, August 14th

Annotations: As you read your selected 10 articles, use the following system for keeping track of your analysis.

  1. Identify the author’s purpose in writing the article. Keep in mind that this is usually implied, meaning you will need to write a sentence or two describing the author’s purpose in the margin of the article. Highlight the identified purpose in blue highlighter.
  2. Identify three quotes that contribute to the significance of the author’s overall argument. Highlight these quotes with a pink highlighter.
  3. Identify the author’s tone and 3-5 words or phrases that contribute to the overall tone. Highlight these words/phrases with a green highlighter.
  4. The following categories represent the principals of rhetorical analysis. As you analyze each article, purposefully look for examples of where the author has used these principals to reach his or her overall purpose. These are terms that we expect you to know and understand as we delve further into the art of rhetorical analysis and building sound arguments. Highlight these examples in yellow.
  5. Pathos
  6. Ethos
  7. Logos
  8. Repetition
  9. Description
  10. Compile your articles to turn in on Monday, August 14th. This assignment will count as a formative grade. You can earn up to 10 points for each article based on your annotations for a possible 100 on this assignment. This assignment will also lead to your first summative assignment of the year: the magazine and persuasive presentation.

If you have any questions, please email , or