CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.9-10.5

ELAGrades 9–10Craft and Structure

The Standard

Analyze how an author's choices concerning how to structure a text, order events within it (e.g., parallel plots), and manipulate time (e.g., pacing, flashbacks) create such effects as mystery, tension, or surprise.

Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts · Reading Standards for Literature

What This Standard Means

Students need to explain how structure shapes a reader’s experience. They should track choices like flashbacks, parallel plots, scene breaks, slow pacing, withheld information, or sudden shifts in time. Then they connect those choices to effects such as tension, mystery, surprise, confusion, or suspense.

Mastery looks like using specific moments from the text and naming both the structural move and its effect. Students often get stuck retelling events instead of analyzing how the order changes impact. They may also say “it builds suspense” without explaining what information the reader has, lacks, or learns later.

Ways to Teach It

Give students a short story cut into scene strips, have them reorder it, then compare how each order changes suspense or surprise.
Ask students to write: What does the reader know before the character knows it, and how does that change the scene?
Use an exit ticket asking students to name one flashback, time jump, or delay, then explain its effect in one sentence.
Show a movie trailer with quick cuts and delayed reveals, then connect its structure to pacing in the class text.