Study Guide for Great Expectations

Study Guide for Great Expectations

So your teacher assigned you Great Expectations by Charles Dickens and your only option is to read the book and find a study guide to help you understand it, or, I suppose you could not read the book, read the Great Expectations Study Guide and pretend you read it.  Of course, if your teacher wrote the study guide, you may have problems fooling him.

Feel free to check out the following topics of this study guide for Great Expectations:

  1. Chapter by chapter summary of Great Expectations.
  2. Important Quotations from Great Expectations.
  3. Themes in Great Expectations.
  4. Characters in Great Expectations.
  5. Charles Dickens’ Writing Style.

Why in the heck did my teacher assign this!?!

Students need to be challenged, especially those enrolled in college preparation courses. National standards, called the common core standards, expect students to demonstrate certain skills.  Chances are your teacher assigned this novel not to torture you–although, that is certainly a positive side effect–but to help you develop necessary skills contained in the ELA common core.  These skills involve critical thinking, so although nobody will ever care if you know who Pip’s benefactor is, someone may want you to be able to think critically and analyze.

Here are some things you should be doing while reading the novel:

  • Use specific evidence from the novel to support arguments and ideas.
  • Determine the theme or main idea of the novel and analyze how the author develops it.
  • Analyze how complex characters develop.
  • Analyze author’s style and its effect on the novel.
  • Write about complex ideas clearly.
  • Demonstrate an understanding of figurative language and word choice.
  • Suffer (Truth be told, we teachers do want to torture you. Ha! Ha! Ha!)

The Real Reason Your Teacher Assigned It

There were a lot of copies of the book in the English department book room and not enough money left in the school budget to order additional titles.

Last Updated on March 7, 2014 by ELAAdmin

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