Learning To Read And Write Analysis

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A reflective essay is a narrative form of essay. Such essay includes author’s personal experiences, memory, point of view and the reflection on the significance of those recalled memories. These are the main elements of reflective essay. Comley states, “your own experience and memory will be your primary source for reflective essay”. In the reflective essay, the author relies on his/her personal experiences and memory to support the main idea of the essay.
In the readings, Frederick Douglass’ “Learning to Read and Write”, Dudley Clendinen’s “The Good Short life”, and Jumpa Lahiri’s “Trading stories”,these readings involve memories, personal experiences etc. thus they are reflective essay. Authors of these readings are the narrators, they …show more content…

Despite being born as a slave, because of his determination and hard work, he was able to learn to read and write. He explains the method that he replied to learn to write, he says, “I used to spend the time in writing in the spaces left in Master Thomas’s copybook, copying what he had written”(71). Similarly, in “The Good Short Life” Clendinen writes his piece in a narrative form, he explains his life, the disease, his response to the disease he is experiencing and his wishes to be dead. Clendinen is diagnosed with ALS disorder which is a fatal muscular disorder. ALS has no cure thus he wished to be dead.Clendinen remembers the situation he went through when his mother was ill. He says, “i spent hundreds of days at Mother’s side, holding her hand, trying to tell her funny stories. She was being bathed and diapered and dressed and fed….” (75). He says he does not want his daughter to experience the same feeling he went through, therefore he wish to die. Lahiri’s “Trading Stories” talks about how she developed interest in reading and writing, her journey on becoming a writer, the obstacles that she faced. She says, “my love of writing led me to theft at an early age. The diamonds in the museum, what i schemed and broke the rules to obtain, were the blank notebooks in my teacher’s supply cabinet, stacked in neat rows, distributed for us to write out sentences or practice math”

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