Generating Ideas

My senior year in High school I wrote a paper on the book The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien which is my favorite book of all time. In my essay I argued that the fact that the Vietnam soldiers carried pictures of their loved ones signified the only thing that made them humane in times of war, also that the pictures the soldiers carried signified the love they carried for their family and friends. I also wrote about the frustrations that the soldiers encountered in the war; not knowing whom the enemy was and not fully understanding their purpose there as well as not being able to adapt to the climate and the environment they were fighting in.                                

I feel confident in  my ability to write a well organized essay on this subject because writing this essay helped me develop critical thinking and analytical skills. Writing this essay also made me feel  sympathetic towards the soldiers as I came to the conclusion that soldiers were unable to immerse back into American society due to lack of government aid programs or support. I can really talk about the Vietnam War because I like History and it is a subject I am familiar with however, I am unable to relate to these men because I didn’t fight in that war or any war for that matter. 

I would definitely want to write about the first time I was introduced to Shakespeare, I was in seventh grade and we read Romeo and Juliet. This is significant because it was the first time I had ever read anything so complex, after being able to read for so many years I came across something that I could understand. The language was barely able to paint a picture in my head,  I realized that there was way more out there that I had to be exposed to. Shakespeare laid the foundation that lead to enjoy many more works of classic literature by other great authors.

 In writing about Romeo & Juliet I would definitely have a problem processing the language, because it is written in an older version of English it is not an easy book  to understand. However I have had practice analyzing not only this text by Shakespeare but also Macbeth and A Midnight Summer's Dream. By writing about Romeo& Juliet I will have to do my best to make sure my audience understands what I am writing about without assuming that they have read and understood the text as I did. This story is too familiar to write about, however I have no expertise in understanding it and someone who reads what I write about might be more familiar with the story, catching a certain mistake that I make interpreting the text is a possibility I want to avoid.



My senior year in high school I wrote an essay on Maus, a Graphic Novel by Art Spiegelman. In my essay I argued that the main Character Vladek survived the holocaust not only because of his resilience and strong will but also because of his resourcefulness and  intelligence. Writing this essay as a final for my Modern Literature class was significant because it required me to make an argument and back it up with evidence from the text. This was always my weakness because my evidence sometimes contradicted my argument, and I believe that writing this essay helped me develop the skill of writing an essay arguing with facts and not just opinion.

 This book is possibly my favorite graphic novel of all time, It was the first one I ever read, I picked it up my Freshman year in high school and then again my senior year. Writing about this book lead me to have a better insight of what was  going on on in Europe before and during World War II, it also opened my eyes to the way the victim's lives were changed forever and how we see humanity today. I had to have a foundation of understanding of what was going on in the book that not everybody has, not everyone in my audience has a deep in depth understanding of why the Jews were being prosecuted in Europe, and in order for the readers to enjoy my paper I would have to clarify that first.