Here’s a colorkey that I often insist students use to show me that they know what they’re putting on the page. When using it, it becomes clear quickly to everyone if they’re missing commentary or if their ideas just don’t make sense:

• For rhetorical analysis terminology, I use this one-pager of the SPACE-CAT acronym for the rhetorical situation and a speaker’s choices: https://bentonenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/rhet-space-cat-2425.pdf
• Here is the RA thesis frame that I’ve used: https://notability.com/n/0SSm87_28Ca7WrUe42Ue0S
• And a prettied-up version of College Board’s rubric for RA is here: https://bentonenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/RA-rubric-1pager.pdf
• Below is a steps-of-mastery breakdown specifically for Row B of that rubric:
• This is a version of my blank outline that’s annotated for RA: https://bentonenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/rhetorical-analysis-outline.pdf
• This is an eyesore, but I’ve used this display of RA body paragraph guidelines to center kids on what has to be present there: https://bentonenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/5090B1A7-09A0-4BEB-9059-43F9199AECAA.jpeg
• And here’s a similarly customized rubric for literary analysis: https://bentonenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/outline-rubric-24.pdf
• And my go-to thesis frame for whole-work LA to help students support a syntactically complex theme claim: https://bentonenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/open-literary-analysis-essay-thesis-frame.pdf
• “Grammar Bytes!” has a solid breakdown of what a complex sentence is; I think this is essential before students create high-school-level theme claims: https://www.chompchomp.com/terms/subordinateconjunction.pdf
• This one is weird, but I use this granular LA rubric with freshmen to measure their understanding of the core concepts of LA. It’s geared to reward mastery of discrete skills, and I’ve found it’s clear enough that kids actually revise to meet its various big asks: https://bentonenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Literary-analysis-essay-rubric-2023.pdf
• Worth mentioning also is the College Board’s rubric for the Open Essay: https://bentonenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/open-essay-rubric.pdf
• And here’s an adaptation of the IB’s rubric for the HL Essay that can be used for any type of literary analysis (e.g. journal assignments): https://bentonenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/HL-essay-and-Journal-rubric.pdf
• To help the kids with finding solid analytical verbs to use when describing speakers’/authors’ choices, I use this handout/poster: https://bentonenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/analysisverbs.pdf
• This has proven helpful in getting students to use more evaluative language when discussing an author’s choices: https://bentonenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Evaluative-language.pdf
• If students struggle with writing effective commentary, here are some elaboration sentence starters and language to help with transitions: https://bentonenglish.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/transitionsANDelaboration.pdf

I’ll also include here the Wheel of Feels and some other classifications of words to describe tone and mood as well as some broad guidelines on colormarking a passage to identify an author’s choices. And here are some collected sets of terminology: for general fiction, poetry, and graphic novels.

I intend to add some resources here to help teachers with passage-analysis tasks that don’t necessarily deal with whole-work theme/purpose, specifically choice(s)-effect(s) prompts and some thesis frames.

For now, here are some official documents on the relevant AP and IB assessments.