Short Stories for High School: Focus on Plot Structure
We’re starting a new series featuring our favorite short stories for high school students. Short stories are a great way to help your students be able to quickly dive deeply into a piece of literature: they allow for close reads and re-reads that aren’t always possible with longer texts, and because they are short, they allow for repeated practice identifying themes and discussing the techniques authors use to convey those themes, essential skills that take time and experience to master.
But it can be hard to find short stories for high school students that capture their interest and merit multiple days of analysis, so we’re sharing the stories we found most effective and engaging in our high school ELA classrooms over the years.
It can be tempting to let students run loose on a text and see what it is they can find, especially in terms of literary devices, and there are occasions when this scavenger hunt type approach is effective, but we’ve found that more often it is better to focus students’ attention on one or two literary devices at a time, especially when analyzing short stories. Not only did this help our novice literary scholars come to better understand each device, but most authors don’t use all the literary devices to convey their theme in every story.
We found that going too broad and open-ended tended to result in students focusing on what they were most familiar or comfortable with, even if it played a minimal role in conveying a text’s theme, a habit that made it hard for them to write effective prose analysis essays on the AP English Literature and Composition exam.
Plot devices tend to be the first covered in most short story units for high school classes, but we’ve found they also tend to be the least important in an analysis of a work’s theme. Most students spend quite a bit of time on plot diagrams before high school, and while it’s helpful to be familiar with this terminology and structure, plot devices don’t tend to be the most useful in constructing a meaningful prose analysis. And if plot devices are the most significant devices in a text, there’s a good chance you’re working with a commercial, rather than literary, text: fun, but perhaps not particularly rich in its themes and artistry.
We tended to do a quick review, as it’s a good way to check to see that we all have the same basic understanding of the story and, to be honest, it’s helpful for uncovering who didn’t read the text. One thing a plot diagram can be especially useful for with PreAP/AP students is the identification of the work’s climax. Students get this wrong with alarming frequency, so we always include a plot diagram in our novel review activities.
In terms of literary analysis, probably the most important devices related to plot diagramming are suspense and foreshadowing. Rather than selecting texts that confirm students’ understanding of plot structure, suspense, and foreshadowing, we found it most effective to challenge students’ assumptions with short stories in which an author’s use of an unusual plot structure directly contributes to our understanding of the work’s theme, as it leads to meaningful discussions and revelations.
Stories to Focus on Plot Structure

One story that works well in this category is William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (1930), an example of a text with an unusual plot structure.
The story begins with the news of Miss Emily Grierson’s death, and then her life story is told in bits and pieces as the townspeople remember her.
Students have to use clues in the text to piece together the storyline of Miss Emily’s life, a challenging task, and the story is rife with details that foreshadow the text’s gruesome ending. Inviting students to go back and find those clues once they’ve discovered the story’s end is a productive exercise and one of the few times students are eager to read the text again.
The challenging nature of the text motivates students to work through the parts they don’t understand, and Miss Grierson’s eccentric (read: creepy) behavior keeps them engaged.
While you’re here, it’s a natural extension of a discussion of the plot structure to focus on the use of the first-person plural narrator and the limitations of this choice of narrator, and students easily recognize that Miss Emily’s actions function as a symbolic refusal to let go of the past, elevating the story beyond the grotesque.
Another option (and probably one of our favorite short stories to discuss with opinionated high schoolers) is Alice Munro’s “How I Met My Husband” (1974). It’s a sweet story about how Edie, a naive farm girl, you’ll never guess . . . meets her husband.
The surprise, however, is that the bulk of the story is about Edie’s interactions with a young pilot named Chris, and it’s not until she lets go of her foolish hope he will return for her that she meets her actual husband, Carmichael (in the story’s last few paragraphs).
Like “A Rose for Emily,” the story begins en media res, and there are plenty of examples of suspense and foreshadowing. More important, however, is the discussion with students about whether or not the surprise ending is achieved fairly. Students want to evaluate the ending based on how satisfied they are with it, and it pushes their critical thinking skills to help them see that, regardless of whether they like the ending (or saw it coming from the beginning), Carmichael is a far more appropriate choice for Edie.
It’s often an entertaining discussion because students have strong feelings about how much they dislike Edie. From their perspective, she’s foolish and settles for a man she doesn’t even like because Chris doesn’t return, but as adults who have, perhaps, been in Edie’s shoes, crushing on a man who was never going to commit to us, we feel the realness of Edie’s experience. It’s fun to have those “real life” discussions, and there are always a couple wise-beyond-their-years students who already get it.
Looking for something a little lighter or something to use for a quick review of plot structure? With our standard-level students, we moved away from teaching plot as its own unit, instead combining it with characterization, largely because the stories our curriculum includes for focusing on plot structure are excessively long and wildly unrelatable (it turns out 15-year-olds aren’t particularly interested in 19 pages of a middle-aged man’s crisis concerning work-life balance).
We did, however, find two texts useful in terms of reviewing the plot diagram and related devices: Chris Van Allsburg’s Jumanji (1981) and the “Fizbo” episode of Modern Family (Season 1, Episode 9).
High school students love revisiting their childhood favorites, so Jumanji is an engaging way to review plot diagrams (and very accessible: it’s pretty clear what those complications are!).
The “Fizbo” episode of Modern Family works well because it is told largely in flashback, which allows for a bit of critical thinking in putting a plot diagram together and, more importantly, allows for a review of other plot-related words like flashback, en media res, suspense, and foreshadowing. Students also enjoy the episode, which helps, and it can be used as an opportunity to add in a quick review of characterization (static and dynamic character; flat, round, stock character, etc.) as well.
What short stories (or alternate texts) have you used to focus on plot structure? Much of what we choose to teach is based on the resources available to us, so we’re confident there are some of you teaching fantastic short stories for high school students that we’ve never heard of. Where do you land when it comes to plot devices—essential part of any literature curriculum or less important at the high school level? We’re always up for a healthy debate! Reach out to us through email at [email protected] or on Instagram @threeheads.works. We look forward to hearing from you!