Week 1

This week in my English class, we worked on our essay for the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee. 

The essay prompt instructs us to write about how the author develops one of the following themes: racial relations, childhood innocence, and rural poverty.  I chose to write my essay about racism, or race relations.  A theme that is significant and controversial even in today’s society.  The following extraneous video clip is an example of racism used in an everyday situation:

Another requirement is the essay must contain six pieces of evidence from the novel.  Evidence is a specific quote or scene that connects to the topic in which you are writing about.  The six pieces of evidence in which I intend to use in my essay include quotes from the scenes: the colored church, the jail, the trial, the conviction, the reactions to the conviction, and Tom’s death.

Furthermore, my teacher taught my class how to write a well-written; not insipid introduction to an essay.  He separated it into three different sections: hook sentences, story background, and thesis sentence.  The hook sentences should be about one to three sentences in length.  They are supposed to grab the reader’s attention and engage the reader in what topic you are writing about.  The story background should take up the majority of the introduction paragraph.  Its purpose is to briefly review the text’s plot and the evidence that you will include in the body paragraphs of your essay.  Also, a well-written story background gives the title of the text and its author and provides context for the thesis statement.  The thesis statement is supposed to be roughly one to two sentences.  It should state what you will argue and how you will argue along with a chronological listing of the evidence that you will include in the body paragraphs.  Theoretically, if your first paragraph contains all the requirements to these three sections, it will be a well-written introduction to the rest of your essay.

After learning how to construct an introduction paragraph of an essay, it was time to start writing our own introduction for the essay on To Kill a Mockingbird.  First, our teacher gave my class a certain amount of time to write our hook sentences.  Then, he told us to switch papers’ with your three other group members.  We had to read their hook sentences and give them a score and critic based on a certain rubric.  The class did this until everyone in their group had their paper graded by every group member.  Then, we did the same exact writing and grading process with our story background and thesis statement until we had a complete rough draft introduction of our essay.

Lastly, to end the recap of this school week in my English class, we went to the computer lab to create our own blog.  In this blog, I will summarize the main ideas of what my English class has completed for every week of this school year.



This picture represents the book cover for To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.