Overview
This is a self-contained, no-technology substitute packet in which students read an
original reflective nonfiction essay, "The Long Shift," and analyze how the writer's craft
creates its tone. Working alone with a pencil, students predict the writer's attitude, warm up
on craft terms, read the passage closely, name the tone, identify the diction
(word choices) that creates it, analyze one rhetorical device (imagery, metaphor, or
parallelism) and its effect, track a shift in tone, and choose the word choice that best
signals the tone. They finish with a short close-reading response explaining how specific
diction and a device build the tone, using a Claim–Evidence–Reasoning frame. On a block period,
they also analyze how syntax and structure reinforce the tone. Every text-dependent
question can be answered directly from the printed passage.
Accessible version of the student activity
The full student activity, including the complete passage, is reproduced below in plain,
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printed packet.
Start (5 minutes) — Predict & warm up
- The passage is titled "The Long Shift," and its first sentence is: "My grandmother's hands
were a map I read every summer without knowing it." From the title and this line alone, predict
the writer's attitude toward the grandmother — cold, admiring, angry, indifferent? What in the
wording makes you say so?
- Craft-term warm-up. Match each term to what it describes: A. tone (the writer's attitude,
shown through word choice), B. diction (the specific words chosen), C. imagery (language that
appeals to the senses). Which term is each of these?
- Choosing "weathered" instead of "old" to describe a pair of hands. (diction)
- The overall feeling of quiet respect that runs through a piece of writing. (tone)
- "The kitchen smelled of scorched coffee and lemon soap." (imagery)
Build (12 minutes) — Read closely
Words to know (for close reading of craft)
- tone
- the writer's attitude toward the subject or audience, revealed through word choice and detail.
- diction
- the writer's specific choice of words (formal or casual, harsh or gentle, plain or ornate).
- connotation
- the feelings or associations a word carries beyond its dictionary meaning (e.g., "thrifty" vs. "cheap").
- imagery
- descriptive language that appeals to the senses — sight, sound, smell, taste, touch.
- syntax
- the way words and phrases are arranged into sentences (short and clipped, or long and flowing).
"The Long Shift" — an original reflective essay
Paragraph 1. My grandmother's hands were a map I read every summer without knowing it.
The knuckles rose like worn hills; thin rivers of vein ran beneath skin gone soft and pale as
old paper. She had pressed dough, wrung mops, and buttoned forty years of other people's coats
with those hands, and by the time I was old enough to notice, they had settled into a permanent,
patient curve, as if still holding something I could not see.
Paragraph 2. She worked the long shift at the hospital laundry, from four in the
afternoon until midnight. I remember the smell of her when she came home: bleach and steam and,
under it, the faint sweetness of the peppermints she kept in her coat pocket for the walk. She
did not complain. She did not sigh. She hung her coat on the same nail, set the kettle on the
same burner, and asked me, every single night, what I had learned that day.
Paragraph 3. I did not understand then what those hours cost her. I understood only
that the light in the kitchen was warm, that the tea was strong, and that she listened to my
small reports of fractions and spelling words as though they were the news of the world. She
made my ordinary day feel important. She made me feel important. That, I see now, was its own
kind of work — quieter than the laundry, and harder.
Paragraph 4. There was a dignity in how she moved through her tiredness. She did not
perform her exhaustion for sympathy, and she did not hide it to seem strong. She simply carried
it, the way she carried the heavy laundry carts, the way she carried me when I was small: without
announcement, without asking whether the load was fair. To carry a thing without complaint is not
the same as not feeling its weight. I know that now.
Paragraph 5. On the last night before I left for school, she pressed a folded
twenty-dollar bill into my palm and closed my fingers over it with both of her hands. "For
books," she said, though we both knew it was for far more than books. Her hands were warm and dry
and certain. I have spent years trying to earn the confidence she placed in that small, deliberate
gesture — the trust that I would go, and learn, and become someone worth the long shift.
Paragraph 6. She is gone now, and the map of her hands is gone with her. But I find that
I have learned it by heart. When I am tired, when the work is dull and the hour is late, I think
of the same nail, the same kettle, the same steady question about what I have learned. And I set
my own shoulders and go on. Some inheritances are not money; they are a way of standing in the
world. Hers was the quiet, unhurried courage of the long shift, and it is the richest thing I own.
- In paragraph 2, the writer lists three things the grandmother did each night. Copy one specific
detail from that paragraph that shows her steady, uncomplaining routine.
Apply (20 minutes) — Analyze the craft
- Name the tone: in one word or a short phrase, name the writer's overall attitude toward the
grandmother. (How does the writer seem to feel about her?)
- Find the diction that creates it: copy two specific words or phrases whose word choice helps
create the tone you named, name the paragraph for each, and explain in a few words the feeling
(connotation) each carries.
- Analyze one rhetorical device: the passage uses imagery ("bleach and steam"), an extended
metaphor (hands as "a map"), and parallelism ("the same nail, the same kettle, the same steady
question"). Choose one, name it, quote it with the paragraph number, and explain its effect and
how it supports the tone.
- Track a shift in tone: paragraphs 1–4 mostly remember and describe; paragraph 6 turns toward
the present. Describe how the tone shifts by the final paragraph, and quote one word or phrase from
paragraph 6 that signals the change.
- Which word choice best signals the tone of quiet admiration? Choose one.
- A. "the long shift at the hospital laundry, from four in the afternoon until midnight"
- B. "the quiet, unhurried courage of the long shift, and it is the richest thing I own"
- C. "She hung her coat on the same nail, set the kettle on the same burner"
- D. "a folded twenty-dollar bill into my palm"
Then (8b) explain in one sentence why the word choice you chose signals the tone more strongly than the others.
Explain (10–15 minutes) — Close-reading response
Question 9. Write a close-reading response (not a summary) explaining how the writer creates
the tone of "The Long Shift." State the tone and what the passage means, then support your claim by
discussing specific diction and one rhetorical device, explaining how each builds the tone. Use the
Claim–Evidence–Reasoning frame and name the paragraph for each piece you cite.
Sentence stems you may use: "The tone of the passage is ___, and it suggests that…"; "The writer's
word choice — for example, ___ in paragraph ___ — creates this tone because it carries a feeling of…";
"The writer also uses ___ (a device) in paragraph ___; its effect is to ___, which deepens the ___ tone."
Question 10 (block period only). Explain how the syntax — the length and arrangement of the
sentences (for example, the short, repeated sentences in paragraph 2 versus the long, flowing sentence
in paragraph 1) — and the overall structure (moving from the remembered past to the present in
paragraph 6) reinforce the passage's tone. Quote at least one example and name the paragraph.
Close (5 minutes) — ACE
- Articulate: name the passage's tone in your own words, in one sentence.
- Connect: name the one word choice or device that does the most to create that tone, and point to the paragraph.
- Extend: if the writer changed the tone to bitter or resentful, name one word they would have to swap out, and what they might replace it with.
Continue (optional) — Early finisher
Rewrite a paragraph in a new tone: take paragraph 2 and rewrite it so the tone becomes cold and
resentful instead of warm and admiring. Change only the word choices — keep the same events — then
underline the three words you changed that did the most to shift the tone.
Turn in
Hand in the whole packet with your name, class period, and date, with questions 1–9 and the ACE box
answered. Question 10 is for block periods; include the optional rewrite if you did it.