Commentary Writing: Commentary Writing: An Approach to the An Approach to the

ThesisThesis

Commentary Writing: Commentary Writing: An Approach to the An Approach to the

ThesisThesis

Commentary Writing as Commentary Writing as Sport(swriting)Sport(swriting)

Consider the analogy…

what you're trying to do in writing literary commentaries is quite similar to what a very goodgood, knowledgeableknowledgeable, articulatearticulate sports journalist does in reporting the results of an athletic event.

• A poor writer of (unseen) text commentary writes this sort of thesis:

In the poem, the poet writes about nature in a really interesting way, and it seems truly beautiful.

• An equally poor sportswriter writes of a local team's basketball game:

The winning team won the game 72-46, which was a pretty big margin.

The point is that the sportswriter, like the commentary writer, sounds as though he didn't actually "attend" (or attend to) the subject.

• Both writers sound as though they were going to write that sentence, no matter what. The sportswriter might have received a call from a friend or seen the score on tv. It also appears the commentary writer might have actually skipped the reading of the poem. He has only noticed the most obvious of characteristics.

The winning team won the game 72-46, which was a pretty big margin.

• The ISB girls’ varsity basketball team demolished the WAB Tigers last night 72-46, deftly managing to pick apart a disorganized press through crisp, sharp passing and then building on an early lead through both balanced fast breaks and expert shooting from beyond the three-point line.

In the poem, the poet writes about nature in a really interesting way, and it seems truly beautiful.

• In “Nature’s Leap,” poet Phyllis Lo captures the beautiful essence of a single moment in the seemingly eternal flow of a hidden waterfall; Lo’s fresh, original figures and symbols vividly convey the gloriously effervescent tumbling water while her poem’s complex rhyme and stanza structure imply the paradoxically “frozen” state of the larger scene.