How To Help Students Write About Theme

In high school ELA class, the theme essay remains one of the great staples of the field. And yet, students are too often so bad at it. They're supposed to be exercises in analysis and critical thinking, and yet they often turn out to be mind-numbingly dull. Let me share one simple shift in approach that helped me help students be better.

Tell them that a theme is a statement, not a word. 

Here's the problem with one-word "themes." Let's say Pat decides to write about the theme of death in Hamlet. Pat then collects a list of quotes that mention or allude to death. Then Pat turns that list into an essay, but it's an essay that is a walking tour of the play. "Over here, we see the word 'death,' and on your left, you'll see 'shuffle off this mortal coil' which is also a reference to death."

The one word theme essay too easily descends into a sentence-ified list, a catalog of references that does not actually say anything other than "here's that word." 

This kind of essay can pretend to be about something by offering some analysis in the listing, such as pointing out that when Hamlet accuses his friends of trying to play him like a pipe, he is really talking about death, a point that would require enough pretzel logic that it would give the appearance of the student author really Doing Something. 

But a list is not an analysis of a theme in a literary work. And, "In Hamlet, William Shakespeare talks a whole lot about death" is not a useful thesis statement for a student essay. In other words, do not mistake a topic for a theme.

In my class, a theme requires a sentence. Lord knows, there's a still a wide range of possible quality. A Hamlet theme paper could be built around "In the course of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the main character moves from anger and fear of death to acceptance" or "Death sucks." A legit theme can talk about the writer's technique or it can talk about the idea embedded in the work or it can wrestle with an observation about how the world works.

But what a theme gives the writer that a topic does not is something to prove, an idea for which one must marshal evidence beyond simply "proving" that the topic is included in the work. So many "theme" papers turn into aimless slogs because the student has centered on a topic rather than a theme. While my explanation of theme is very reductive, it also was a big help in giving my students a quick, simple way to determine whether or not they were on the right track or to diagnose why their essay felt boring and pointless to write.