English 9A was built on prose fiction and nineteenth-century oratory. English 9B is built on a verse tragedy, a poetry anthology and a nineteenth-century autobiography, and the first of those three is where teachers most often lose credibility in front of a class — not through any failure of reading, but through the conventions.

Quoting verse. Shakespeare wrote in lines and the line breaks carry meaning, so they are preserved. Fewer than four lines run into your sentence with the breaks marked by a spaced slash: Macbeth admits he has “no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition” (1.7.25-27). Four or more lines are set as a block, indented, breaks as written, no quotation marks.

Citing drama. Act, scene and line in arabic numerals separated by full stops — (1.7.25-27) — never page numbers, because editions differ and a page reference is unusable by anyone holding a different one. Name the edition once in the Works Cited entry. If your edition lacks line numbers, say so in a note rather than inventing them, and consider changing edition: the Folger and the MIT online texts are both free and both numbered.

Attributing speech. “Shakespeare says life is a walking shadow” is wrong and it is the single most common error in the Unit 1 essays. Macbeth says it, in Act V, after his wife’s death, in a state the play has spent five acts producing. Attributing a character’s despair to the playwright erases the structure that gives the line its meaning — which is the thing the essay is supposed to analyze. This is the same correction as the Homer move in 9A Unit 1, one level harder, because a play has no narrator to make the distinction obvious.

The habit of mind underneath all three. Ninth-graders write about characters as though they were people whose motives could be investigated: Macbeth was probably traumatised by the battle. There is no evidence about the character outside the words on the page, because the character is made of those words. The fix is grammatical and quick: make Shakespeare the subject of the analytical sentence. Teach it in Unit 1 and the whole semester is easier.

The reading load is heavier than it looks. Macbeth is short — about 2,100 lines — and students read verse at perhaps half their prose rate on first encounter. Budget accordingly, read aloud in class more than you think necessary, and use a recorded performance for at least one full act. The Douglass Narrative is around 120 pages and reads fast; the poetry unit’s total page count is trivial and its time cost is not, because a poem read once has not been read.