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Text Complexity Analysis
Grade 8, Unit 4, Activity 4.5
Text: “I’ve got a few pet peeves about sea creatures,” by Dave Barry
Text Description: Dave Barry, American humorist and Pulitzer Prize–winning author, wrote a nationally syndicated humor column for The Miami Herald for over twenty years. In this essay, Barry cleverly exposes the lengths to which parents will go to make their children happy by having a pet.
Context
In Activity 4.5, students learn why comedy is used to discuss serious topics. They read this text, develop Levels of Questions based on the text, engage in a Socratic Seminar, and write an expository response analyzing how humor conveys truth about life.
Students’ work in this activity scaffolds to Embedded Assessment 1: Writing an Analysis of a Humorous Text because students learn about high comedy, analyze a text for its truth about life, and write a text-based response with a clear controlling idea and specific textual examples for support.
Quantitative/Complexity Measures
Genre: Essay
Overall: Complex
Quantitative: 1210L
Qualitative: Moderate Difficulty
The text contains both familiar and abstract language.
Task Demands: Moderate (Analyze) Students analyze details and language techniques to explain how humor is used to convey theme.
Qualitative Considerations
Purpose/Levels of Meaning: Barry presents ideas based on his own experiences as a child owning a pet and as a parent providing a pet for his child by combining both conventional and abstract details. This combination of perspective and use of irony may make the meaning of the text complex for some readers.
Structure: This text is written from the first-person point of view and conforms largely to the expectations of the narrative genre. Occasional shifts in time show Barry’s different perspectives on pet ownership, yet these shifts are mostly explicit, signaled with transitions such as “when I was a boy,” “I say all this to explain,” and “getting back to my daughter’s fish.”
Language: The text utilizes a blend of familiar and conversational language with abstract and figurative language. Examples of abstract and figurative language include “life kicks the bucket,” “expiring like a little six-legged parking meter,” and “an aquarium is like a powder keg.” While words such as “unbeknownst” and “pacifist” may be unfamiliar to some readers, the meaning of these words should be easily determined in the context.
Knowledge Demands: An understanding of this text requires some familiarity with the narrative genre as well as everyday knowledge of pet ownership, children, and parents. It also requires some understanding of cultural references to the song “Who Let the Dogs Out” and the TV character “Barney Fife.”