For the first time in PLP, we had to write an essay. This was the first essay that most of us had ever written, so we were a little bit worried about it. We worked for over three weeks in class to learn how to properly format and write a formal essay. The topic for this essay was our inquiry question for the unit: How do authors use text to teach us more about ourselves? We then had to create a thesis from that to talk about. My thesis was Authors help readers relate to characters in order to better understand different perspectives of the world.
I then came up with three topic points. First, I wanted to talk about how it is up to each reader to find meaning in a piece of text. I referenced our choice book that I read (all of which you can read about here and here), Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli in this part. I also mentioned the book Persepolis by Marjane Santrapi. Next, I chose to talk about how strong characters influence the reader. In this, I talked about the movie The Breakfast Club, written by John Hughes and how the viewer was able to relate strongly to the characters. The last topic point I wrote about was the roles of the author in creating relatable characters.
We write these essays in class and were given an hour and twenty minutes. We were allowed to have one piece of paper with quotes and statistics on it to look at during the essay write, but we could not write down our thesis or our outline. I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to remember my points, but I memorized them and was able to write them out as soon as I started. I worked very hard on my essay and it is one of the pieces of work that I am most proud of.
If I could do this again, I would focus more on talking about the texts I was synthesizing instead of mentioning them just once or twice. I also would have made my points a little bit different from each other, because they were all fairly similar.
Check out my essay here!