Literary analysis and argument are close cousins, but many novel essays never quite become arguments. Students explain what a character is like and stop. Prompts that ask them to take a side, defend it, and consider objections push them into real argument writing.

Francie Nolan is a good subject for this because readers can disagree about her. Is she shaped more by her family or by her own choices? Does her ambition help her or cost her something? Prompts like these have more than one defensible answer.

The key for grading is to reward the quality of the argument, not the side the student picks. That has to be clear in the prompt and the rubric.

Below are five prompts and the features that make responses to each one strong.

Five prompts worth assigning

Each prompt asks students to take a position and support it with evidence from across the novel. They are written so that a student could argue either side, which makes it easier to see reasoning and harder to fall back on a stock answer.

• Is Francie's success mostly the result of her own effort or of the people around her?
• Does the novel present education as a real path out of poverty, or as only part of the answer?
• Is Katie Nolan a strong mother, a harsh one, or both?
• Does Johnny's charm outweigh the harm his choices cause the family?
• Is the ending of the novel hopeful, or does it leave important questions open?

What a strong response includes

The essay takes a clear position in the first paragraph and defends it with evidence from different parts of the book. It considers at least one reasonable objection and responds to it, instead of pretending none exists. The conclusion says why the question matters, not just which side won.

Look for essays that use the counterargument to sharpen their own claim. A student who writes that the opposing view has a point, but overlooks a particular scene, is doing real argument work.

Adjust your rubric for argument

Add a category for counterargument and one for reasoning. Reasoning asks whether the evidence actually supports the claim, and whether the logic holds. Together these two make it harder for a confident but weak essay to score well.

Tell students up front that either side can earn full credit. That takes some of the pressure off and lets them pick the position they can defend best.

Feedback for argument essays

The most useful comments ask the student to test their own claim. What would someone who disagrees say, and what in the book supports them? GraideMind can draft comments like these against a rubric with argument categories, and you can tailor them to each essay's actual claim before they go back.

Watch for essays that name a counterargument and dismiss it in a sentence. That is a common shortcut, and a short comment asking for a fuller response will usually produce a real improvement.