Reading and Writing Poetry » TPCASTT

TPCASTT
tpcastt.doc

Overview of strategy for analyzing poetry

3 Comments

3 Comments

  • Susan Marino
    February 22, 2009 at 3:47 am

    Hello,
    I enjoy your blog. I’ve just read your TPCASTT doc, and I think you have a typo in it. For “paraphrase” you have: “What does it mean beyond the literal.” I think it should read, “What does it mean, literally.” My understanding of this step is to simply restate what is actually happening in the poem in your own words. When my students try to interpret and paraphrase at the same time, they can get confused and misread the poem.
    I use a slightly different heuristic than your version (after looking at the title and scanning the page for obvious visual patterns, I have students find the punctuation, particularly end marks. Then it is easier to paraphrase because they can see where the sentences are within the poem–or they can see that the entire poem is all one idea). I think we should all be teaching our students how to explicate a poem. We expect them to understand them–we should then help them by teaching them how.

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  • Kari Johnson
    February 22, 2009 at 9:56 am

    Where did the TPCASTT form originate?

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  • lhuff
    February 23, 2009 at 9:28 am

    @Kari: I first encountered TPCASTT at an Advanced Placement (AP) English conference. It’s been widely circulated among AP English teachers.

    @Susan: Thanks for pointing out the typo. I love your idea of having students scan for punctuation. You’re exactly right: the poetic structure often throws students, and they don’t realize that to understand the meaning they should read the poem as they would prose, attending to punctuation. I’m going to try your strategy with my students. Thanks for sharing.

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