Me, in class: "This sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay is about the art of writing poetry." My students, in their essays: "The speaker writes about her husband."
Me, in class: "Shakespeare is pointing out the falseness of poetic language. If a person really had snow-white skin, eyes that glowed like the sun, and hovered above the earth, they wouldn't be a person; they'd be a supernatural being and probably terrify the viewer."
Me, in class: This is how you should create a works cited entry. Here's what it should look like. Here are examples of what cites from the book look like. You can copy and paste my examples and just change the author's name, titles, and page numbers to be yours.
Me in class: "Here is my example essay. Let's go through it to discuss how I crafted an argument. Remember, an argument has to be arguable. You can't just point out that something exists. You have to make a claim about it."
Sometimes this is very pronounced, sometimes it's not. The example I always turn to are the first lines of The Wasteland when I need to define enjambment.
breeding, mixing, stirring -- these words are all enjambed as they're beginning new thoughts at the end of a line, which really places a lot of strange emphasis on them.
My students, in their essays: "The speaker writes about her husband."
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.