hey guys welcome back to coach hall writes in today's video we're going to be talking about how to develop the commentary in your ap lang synthesis essay before we can talk about how to develop your commentary we need to understand what commentary actually is so commentary is your analysis you're going to use commentary to explain the significance of the evidence in your body paragraphs now generally speaking you actually want to have more commentary than evidence and you want to have layers of evidence and commentary in your body paragraphs because the commentary is going to be your own original thoughts and interpretations and so you want to rely on your commentary as opposed to overly citing the sources one of the ways that i help my own students develop their commentary is by giving them a list of power verbs and so basically when they first start writing synthesis essays i give them about four of these verbs usually it's highlights illustrates suggests and maybe conveys but after that our list grows a little bit once they become more comfortable with these verbs so the key is to be able to use these verbs in a sentence effectively so here are some examples of how you could use some of these verbs but these verbs help you to figure out the significance of your evidence you're welcome to pause the screen now if you would like to read these another trick that has helped my students develop their commentary is a list of questions to ask yourself as you are either reading planning or writing so i've broken it up into who what when where why and how so these are the who questions now keep in mind that this is not an inclusive list i'm sure there are other questions that you could ask regarding who and these might not pertain to every single synthesis prompt out there but they are a good starting point so for instance who benefits from this particular issue and who's disadvantaged from this issue that's one that would apply to several synthesis prompts now let's talk about the what questions so one of the things that you could ask yourself is what can be done about this issue or what needs to be done about this issue i also love these next two questions because i like to incorporate them in my conclusion paragraph though i think you could incorporate them elsewhere in your essay as well and those questions are what will happen if the problem continues and what will happen if the problem ceases you could also ask yourself what are the pros and cons of this situation or this concept that's going to be a good one especially if you're trying to brainstorm before you actually write your essay also the last question on this slide what are the different perspectives of the issue is an incredibly important question to ask yourself in fact and a lot of prompts they actually give you the different perspectives on the issue in the prompt itself but you want to be really thinking about this as you're trying to construct your argument because this can help you set up a concession and refutation or a counter claim in rebuttal so here are the when questions so you might ask yourself when is the situation acceptable beneficial or harmful you also might ask yourself when is it time to act to solve this problem or when has the situation happened previously in history because that could help you situate it in a broader context next are the where questions so you could ask yourself where is this issue most prevalent or where is there the most need for this solution where would this situation be problematic this can help you expand your analysis even further personally when i think of writing an essay i think of the evidence as the what and i think of the commentary as either the why or the how and so asking yourself why can be really beneficial in terms of developing your commentary so you could ask yourself things like why is this issue being discussed why is this issue significant in the present and in the future you can also ask yourself why is this issue important why is it a problem why is it worth discussing so the why questions can really help you dig into the deeper meaning of the topic that you're supposed to be talking about so now let's look at the how questions so you could ask yourself how can we effectively make change or how has this impacted society today and throughout history how does this benefit or harm others you could also ask yourself how does this impact people like me so the how questions can also be a great way to develop your commentary as well and there is a little bit of overlap here between these questions and some of the other ones but sometimes seeing it phrased differently actually helps students develop their commentary remember that commentary is your own interpretation your own analysis it's you digging deep and going beyond the sources and so there are some other ways to develop commentary and one is to ask yourself if you have any outside knowledge about the topic now depending on the topic you may or may not know background information sometimes the prompts in the past have been relevant to high school students in education so presumably for that type of prompt you might have some personal experience or background knowledge but other times the prompts have been a bit more obscure things like locavores and eminent domain and wind farms and so depending on the classes you've taken like maybe you took a government class or a science class maybe you do have background knowledge and if so you can actually incorporate that in perhaps in your introductory paragraph or maybe in your commentary so if you have background knowledge use that to your advantage in a meaningful way the other thing you can think about is personal experience now when i first started teaching several years ago i was really leery of students putting personal experience into their essays because i had always been told as a student that you really shouldn't do that and there's a way to do it well and there's a way to do it where it's very ineffective so you need to make sure that it's relevant personal experience but sometimes including personal experience can actually help you because it builds your credibility you could offer a meaningful anecdote but it really depends on if it's going to help you further your argument and let's say you don't have any personal experience with it maybe you could actually infer what people who are going through that issue would deal with so let me give you an example a couple years ago i gave my students the locavore prompt so basically this is a prompt about whether or not you should eat locally grown foods and i teach in a very rural district so a couple of my students are either farmers themselves or they're related to farmers and they know a lot about agriculture and so for those students they were able to talk about the benefits of eating locally grown food because it was something that they were very familiar with but i had other students who didn't really have experience with that so instead they had experience with going to the supermarket and they were able to incorporate that as some commentary they took the position that while it is nice to eat locally grown food not everybody has time for that and one of my students started talking about how she is the middle child of three kids her mom works all day and barely has time to get to walmart before going to the kids different baseball and basketball and softball practices and farmers markets are just not open they're not accessible during that time so her solution was to have supermarkets have locally grown food in them and so that's the way to take your personal experience and actually incorporate it into the argument within your essay teachers if you guys like the questions in this video and you're interested in additional resources to help your students write more effective synthesis essays i would love it if you would check out some of my resources in the description box below also if you guys like this video please do me a favor and give it a thumbs up make sure you're subscribed and until next time guys happy writing