Of Mice and Men has been adapted into film multiple times, which makes it well suited to a comparative adaptation essay assignment. This kind of assignment asks students to analyze specific choices a filmmaker made when translating the text to screen, offering a concrete, visual way to discuss authorial and directorial decisions side by side.

A common weakness in these essays is simply cataloging differences between the book and the film without analyzing why those differences matter. Listing that a scene was cut or a line was changed is only the starting point; the analytical work is explaining the effect of that change on the story's meaning or tone.

A well designed prompt narrows the comparison to a specific scene or element rather than asking students to compare the entire novella to the entire film, which tends to produce shallow, surface-level essays that skim across too much material to analyze anything in real depth.

Requiring students to consider the medium-specific constraints and possibilities of film, such as how visual staging can convey something a novella must describe through narration, also pushes the analysis toward genuine comparative thinking rather than simple preference statements about which version is better.

Rubric Criteria for Adaptation Analysis

This assignment should be graded on the depth of comparative reasoning, not simply on accurate recall of what appears in each version. A rubric that explicitly separates description from analysis helps prevent essays that stay at the surface level throughout.

• Identifies a specific, meaningful difference between the text and the film adaptation
• Explains the effect of that difference rather than only describing it
• Considers medium-specific constraints, such as what film can show versus what prose must describe
• Uses specific evidence from both the novella and the film to support claims
• Avoids simple preference statements without underlying analytical reasoning

Choosing Which Adaptation to Assign

Several film versions of the novella exist, each making somewhat different adaptation choices. Selecting a specific version for the whole class, rather than letting students choose their own, keeps the grading process more consistent since the teacher can anticipate the specific scenes and choices students are likely to analyze.

Previewing the chosen adaptation in advance also allows the teacher to identify particularly rich comparative moments to highlight during class discussion before the essay assignment, giving students a stronger starting point for their own analysis.

Handling Essays That Favor the Film Over Close Reading

A risk with adaptation assignments is that students may lean more heavily on their memory of the film, which is often more recently and vividly experienced, than on careful rereading of the actual text passages being compared. Requiring specific textual citations from the novella, not just the film, keeps the assignment grounded in close reading of both source materials.

This requirement also prevents the assignment from becoming primarily a film response paper with only superficial references back to the original novella.

Why This Assignment Builds Valuable Analytical Skills

Adaptation analysis teaches students to think about how meaning is constructed differently across different mediums, a skill that has broad application well beyond this specific novella and even beyond literature courses generally, into media literacy more broadly.

Framing the assignment this way for students, as building a transferable skill in comparative media analysis, tends to increase engagement with an assignment that might otherwise feel like a lower-stakes break from more traditional literary analysis writing.