Everybody Leaves Reflective Essay

My artifact is an essay focusing on a theme from Everybody Leaves,arguing about how the author reveals the theme and proving it with 6 pieces of evidence. I learned the world can be a cruel place for many individuals, I consider myself blessed to have been born in San Francisco.I also learned about how other people live their life everyday, struggling to get by, wondering what will they eat, if they eat, and overall the pain of poverty and how it can affect an entire community. I used the book to find evidence and better understand the situation of its community through the eyes of Nieve Guerra. My essays main idea was to show how the life of one individual affected by the choices of others. It shows how the individual has no control over her own life and how she never had a choice to begin with. I was assigned this artifact to show my understanding of Everybody Leaves and how

the author reveals the theme of the story. I analyzed the book looking for evidence and revealing how it relates to the theme to create my essay.
I went with my particular theme because I have already seen many examples in the story and it was the only theme that really caught my attention.

The theme talked about one individual already having her destiny chosen for her. In order to start this essay I had to come up with a hook, a theme about the book, find evidence from the book to back it up, and a counter argument to show that I can protect my argument. I formed my essay in TIEDIED format and wrote a timed essay to know how long it would take to write my essay. The leadership skill I used the most was Thinking Critically by finding evidence in the boot, connecting the evidence to my theme, coming up with a way to engage the reader and finally thinking of a counter argument. Without a doubt, there will be many essays in college, I am even using these skills in my Common application questions by finding evidence to support the prompt I am writing about. In addition, I used the “Engaged Scholar” Core value by meeting the deadlines each assignment is due and protecting my argument from my counter-argument with evidence and

inferences.

The easy part of the essay for me is connecting my evidence to my theme since I looked for evidence with the intent of having it support my argument. The challenging part was finding 6 pieces of evidence because that is a lot of evidence for one argument and it involves a lot of skimming through pages. The phrase “This reveals where Nieve’s life took a wrong turn, but she was not behind the wheel, metaphorically speaking.”,reveals my use of metaphors and how I use them to show a connection from my evidence to my thesis. It adds variety to my discussions and a clever way to support my argument. Throughout my high school experience, not only do I believe I gained new skills, but only improved on my skills as a writer. I can annotate more precisely, find ways to organize evidence with improvised techniques, connect my work to the outside work and cite evidence. I still believe I have a long way to go in feeling confident in my writing skills because I believe there is always room for improvement and writing has endless possibilities. I am not sure about College writing because all this time I have had help from other people and college is completely different from High-school.