1. Casa: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood
Judith Ortiz Cofer

2. Do Now:
Write down your impressions of the personal essay by Judith Ortiz Cofer. What did you like about it, what didn’t you like about it, what did you think of her writing style?

3. Look through your annotations, and see if you can come up with some conceptual words that relate to the main ideas of the essay.

4. CONCEPTS
CONCEPTS

5. Formalist Analysis of the Essay
Every essay communicates a thesis statement. Even though you are told to write your thesis statement in your introduction, many writers do not reveal their thesis until later on in the text.
Formalist Analysis of the Essay

6. Find the passage in which you believe the author reveals her thesis statement.

7. How she supports her thesis:
Examples Diction Imagery
How she supports her thesis:

8. Identify the significance of her examples, and explain the significance of other examples Cofer includes
Examples

9. Cofer uses Spanish words and phrases some of which she translates and others which she leaves untranslated. What is the effect of these Spanish words or phrases?
Diction

10. She uses very descriptive writing. Why? What do her images represent?

11. Understand how the various parts of her personal essay relate to her thesis statement.
Your TASK:

12. THESIS: In your own words, explain what the thesis of her essay is:
Outline the parts:
Example
Diction
Imagery (symbols)
Another of the above

13. Do Now:
Use the following as a springboard to write about your own identity:
“It was on these rockers that my mother, her sisters, and my grandmother sat on these afternoons of my childhood to tell their stories, teaching each other, and my cousin and me, what it was like to be a woman, more specifically, a Puerto Rican woman”