FREE WRITE : WHAT INFERENCES CAN YOU
MAKE OF THIS PASSAGE?
I came home yesterday afternoon
exhausted. This one student, brilliant yet
perplexed, challenged every fiber of my
intellect. The conversation, like a
marathon, just kept going. At home I
collapsed into a coma. What felt like five
minutes later, my wife woke me and said,
“It’s dinner time.”
THEME (NOUN)
Main ideas:
• Lesson/moral
• Usually implicit/inferred
• Can be expressed in at least one complete sentence
• Different from subject
• Thematic (adjective)
INFERENCE (NOUN)
Main ideas:
• Make a guess
• Make an observation
• Use evidence to support guess
• To infer (verb)
LITERARY INFERENCE (NOUN)
Main ideas:
• Make a guess
• Make an observation
• Use evidence to support guess
• From the text
• From character’s speech, actions, thoughts, and appearance
• From the tone
• Word choice/diction and details
• From the theme
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE (NOUN)
Main ideas:
• Word or phrase
• Describes one thing in terms of another
• Not to be taken literally
• Usually involves imaginative comparison of two unlike
things
• Simile, metaphor, personification
• Also called “figure(s) of speech”
• Simile: Figurative Language is like _____________
READING “GERALDO NO LAST NAME” (559)
Keep interactive reading notes (before, during, after)
1. What inferences can you make about Geraldo?
2. How would you describe Cisneros’s word
choice/diction? (Look at specific vocabulary. Slang?
Contractions? Like Shakespeare (archaic)? Need a
dictionary to read (difficult language/elevated)?)
3. What is Cisneros’s tone? (Not Marin’s tone, the
author’s…what is her attitude toward this subject?)
4. Infer as to what you believe is the theme of this short
story.
ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS: HOW DOES GERARDO, NO LAST NAME
CONNECT TO OUR ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS?
1. What is identity?
2. Do individuals create culture or does culture
create individuals?
3. How is our sense of who we are determined by
who came before us? How does knowledge of
history limit or broaden our potential?
4. What factors could cause individual or group
identity to change or remain the same? (for
example, from generation to generation?)