This story has a genuinely eventful plot, moving from a family road trip through a car accident to a tense encounter with an escaped convict, and that eventfulness is exactly what makes it tempting for students to write essays that narrate rather than argue. A student retelling the story chronologically, from the grandmother's decision to bring the cat along through the final confrontation with the Misfit, can produce several confident, well-written paragraphs without ever actually stating a claim the essay is trying to prove.

This pattern is often mistaken by students, and sometimes even by less experienced graders, for a genuinely complete essay, since the writing itself can be technically competent, grammatically correct, and organized in clear paragraphs. The actual missing ingredient is not writing skill but argumentative purpose: every paragraph needs to be doing work toward proving something specific, and a chronological retelling, however well written, simply is not built to do that work no matter how polished the individual sentences are.

Catching this pattern early in grading matters because it is fixable with the right feedback, but only if a teacher names the actual problem precisely rather than giving vague feedback like "needs more analysis," which does not tell a student what specifically to change. Students who summarize instead of argue usually know the plot extremely well; what they need is a clear demonstration of how to convert that plot knowledge into a claim worth defending across an entire essay.

How to Spot the Pattern Quickly While Grading

The fastest diagnostic while grading is to check whether the essay's paragraphs could be reordered to follow the story's plot sequence without disrupting the essay's logic at all. If the answer is yes, the essay is very likely organized around summary rather than argument, since a genuinely argumentative essay's paragraph order should be driven by the logic of the claim being built, not by the chronological order events happen to occur in within the source text.

• Check whether paragraphs follow plot order rather than argument order
• Look for a thesis sentence that states a claim, not just a topic
• Watch for topic sentences that describe events rather than make points
• Note whether textual evidence supports a claim or simply illustrates plot
• Confirm the conclusion proves something rather than just restating the ending

Feedback That Actually Fixes the Problem

Rather than simply flagging the essay as summary and asking for more analysis, the most effective feedback asks a student to write a single sentence answering the question: what is this essay trying to prove that a reader would not already know just from reading the story once. Forcing that sentence into existence, even as a rough, imperfect draft, usually reveals a genuine claim hiding underneath the summary that the student has just not yet learned to lead with and organize around.

Once a student has identified that underlying claim, the useful next step is showing them how to reorganize existing paragraphs around it rather than starting the whole essay over from scratch, since most of the textual evidence they have already gathered can usually be repurposed to support the newly identified argument. This reframing, rather than a full rewrite, respects the real work students have already done while still pushing them toward a fundamentally stronger essay structure.

Preventing the Pattern at the Assignment Stage

Assignment prompts that explicitly forbid chronological organization, or that require a thesis statement submitted and briefly checked before full drafting begins, catch a significant share of this pattern before it ever reaches final grading. A prompt that asks students to choose one specific claim about the grandmother's character and organize the entire essay around defending that single claim structurally discourages chronological retelling far more effectively than a general instruction to "analyze the story" ever does.

Modeling the difference directly, using a short example paragraph that summarizes an event side by side with a paragraph that analyzes the same event in service of a claim, helps students see the distinction concretely rather than abstractly. Many students genuinely do not recognize the difference between the two modes of writing until they see them contrasted directly on the page, since both can look similarly confident and well constructed at a surface glance.

Why This Fix Matters Beyond a Single Essay

The summary-instead-of-thesis pattern is one of the most common weaknesses across literary analysis writing generally, not specific to this story alone, which means time invested in correcting it here pays off across every future essay assignment a student writes for the rest of the year. A student who genuinely internalizes the difference between summarizing and arguing on this relatively accessible, plot-driven story is far better equipped to make that same distinction on denser, less eventful texts later in the curriculum.

Because this pattern is so common and so consistently teachable, it is worth building a permanent place in a unit's early instruction specifically dedicated to the distinction, rather than treating it as an individual correction given only to the students who happen to fall into the pattern on a given assignment. A short, direct lesson on summary versus argument, taught before the first essay is even assigned, prevents a meaningful share of these essays from needing this correction in the first place.