Tracing Action & Argument Resource Pages

Pages in this section: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
Resource Pages for This Skill
Tracing What?
Plot, Its Elements & Gaps
Tracing the Action of a Story
Two Minutes on Classical Rhetoric
Steps for Following an Argument
Following an Argument Workshop
Resource Review Quiz

Tracing What?

This skill could almost be taught as two: (1) tracing action in stories and (2) tracing the flow of an argument in texts that are speeches, debates, discussions —anything that is not primarily a story. I've put these two types of exegesis together as "Tracing Action and Argument" because in both, your focus is on the way smaller pieces of a text work together to form a coherent whole. You will learn how plot as well as various rhetorical devices work in both narrative and non-narrative texts.

Desired Results

Each Into the New Testament unit has been designed to foster enduring understandings as well as key knowledge and key skills. Here are the learning goals for Tracing Action and Argument.

Enduring Understandings

  1. Plot helps the reader answer why things happen, not just in what order they happen.
  2. Plot comprises several interlocking elements (a story's details, conflict, complication, climax, resolution).
  3. Both narrative and non-narrative texts us a variety of strategies to change a reader's mind.

Key Knowledge

  1. Aristotle's rhetorical categories of logos, ethos and pathos and their role in persuasion.
  2. The elements of plot.
  3. That repetition, whether of types of word forms or words themselves, offers important clues to the flow of action and argument.

Key Skills

  1. Identify conflict and other plot elements in a text.
  2. Recognize gaps in a plot.
  3. Produce a grammatical diagram of a text.
  4. Outline a story or argument.
  5. Identify repetition of grammatical forms (if using Greek) when it is a plot-shaping or argument-shaping feature.

Resource Pages

To introduce you to Tracing Action & Argument, Into the New Testament includes the web pages listed here.  You can click the "next" button at the bottom of this and succeeding pages and eventually read them all, or you can choose the ones that interest you most and link to them from this list.

Tracing What? | You are reading this introductory page right now! Here you have found learning goals for the lesson and a list of resource pages related to it.

Plot, Its Elements & Gaps | Learn about the different things that make up a story's plot and how what is not there is sometimes as important for readers as what is.

Tracing the Action of a Story | Answer some questions and trace the action of a sample narrative text, the Stilling of the Storm in Matthew 8:23-27.

Two-Minute Tutorial on Classical Rhetoric | OK, this page will take a little longer than two minutes to read, but it's still a brief introduction to the topic.

Steps for Following an Argument | Much of the New Testament is not in the form of narrative, but is rather speech material or the discussions that are part of letters. On this page, you will find four steps for following a discussion in scripture.

Following an Argument Workshop | Read Romans 8:31-39 closely to discern what is going on there.

Review Quiz on Tracing Action & Argument | This self-test will help you measure how well your work through the resource pages has gone.