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An Analysis Of Melinda's Speak

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Melinda doesn’t speak because of what happened at the party and she doesn’t think anyone will believe her. Or if they do believe her then Andy would do something to her or tell people that she was lying. Andy is popular so the students would think that Melinda had just said that to receive attention and make people forget what she had done at the party. The truth was that she was raped at the party and when she called the police, all of her friends were angry at her for getting them into trouble. They don’t understand what had actually happened. Melinda didn’t mean to make them angry, but she called the police because she was afraid. She is afraid that if she tells someone about what happened to her there would be severe consequences. They will either not listen, like Rachel, or they will not understand what really happened. …show more content…

Shut your trap; button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say.” Melinda’s fear of speaking out loud is shown on pg.156 during her suffragette speech. Her plan for the speech is to stand in front of the class holding a poster to protest the idea of giving a speech. Because she is so terrified of speaking, she is held back from several of the activities and social events in the school. Fear plays a crucial role in the novel and was one of the main reasons that Melinda found it so difficult to speak verbally throughout the

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Now that Melinda has confirmation that Rachel isn’t mad anymore, she’s able to tell her why she actually called the cops. Rachel seems genuinely concerned and asks Melinda who raped her. When Melinda tells her that is was Andy Evans, who Rachel “loves”, Rachel yells at her calling her a liar and leaves Melinda alone in the library. Ivy spots Melinda at the end of the day and takes her to the bathroom to see the stall Melinda wrote on. Under where Melinda wrote Andy’s name of Guys to Stay Away From, there’s multiple girls agreeing with her, calling him a monster, and saying call the cops.

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Also, the closet her “safe place” she always used to hide what happened at the party from everyone else becomes a dangerous place. “It”, also known as Andy Evans the boy who rapes her at the party breaks into the closet and tries to sexually assault her again. Melinda realizes she can't let this happen again and therefore fights back with everything she has. She realizes that her closet is not safe anymore and that she can't hide from her trauma. And that she can't hide from this problem, and she needs to stand up and speak to the problem.

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Melinda starts high school everyone hates her for calling the cops since lots of people got in trouble at that party. Melinda has one girl who she can call her

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Shut your trap, button your lip, can it. All that crap you hear on TV about communication and expressing feelings is a lie. Nobody really wants to hear what you have to say. " This quote relates to the title of the book "speak" it shows how Melinda believes that she will benefit from being silent. The quote shows that Melinda actually have a voice but only inside her head not anywhere else.

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" Speak also states on page 161 " I am a deer in headlights of a tractor, is he going to hurt me again? He couldn't in school... why am I so afraid. " These examples from the text show all the problems Melinda had, for instance what Andy did to her,

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This causes her to be unable to speak as normal and express herself only through self physical acts of hurting herself. However, through her pain, she begins to grow from a victim to a survivor and understands that the only way to go against evil is to speak out against it. Melinda in Speak is a high school freshman who is raped by Andy Evans who is a senior in high school. Due to him raping her she loses her ability to speak normally and say what she feels and how she feels. Melinda gains her confidence to speak in public freely again by the end of the story.

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The tragic event along with the rejection of her friends took a rather large toll on Melinda Sordino, in which, at one point, she stops

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This could be because of the lack of character development she has. However Melinda matured the way she thinks, not much physically. From the beginning of the book to the end, you can tell that Melinda does come out of her shell, and begins to interact with the people around her more. At pages 109-110, Melinda begins to communicate with David Petrakis using a notebook. They write stuff down and draw things back and forth until the bell rings.

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At the end of the story she finally found her voice and was able to stand up for herself. In the beginning, Melinda didn't talk to anyone, barely even to her parents. She says, “I have tried so hard to forget every second of that stupid party and here I am in the middle of a hostile crowd that hates me for what I had to do. I can't tell them what really happened” (Anderson, 28).

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Drunk, dazed and violated she called the police on the huge party she was at. She soon developed a case of post traumatic stress disorder. Melinda became closed off and stopped talking. She never told anyone about her rape. All of her old friends rejected her after the call to the police.

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Melinda has simply refused to say anything. To understand this, one needs to understand why Melinda chose to silence her own voice. At a party, over the summer prior to Melinda's freshman year in high school, Melinda was raped. Given that she, in a heightened state of fear, called the police. The party was broken up, everyone knows who called the police, and Melinda was alienated because of it.

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After Melinda admits to herself that she was raped, Melinda starts to realize that

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She feels ashamed and blames herself for not being a good enough wife for Tom, just as Melinda feels guilty as though the rape was her fault, even if it really wasn’t. It is later revealed that in reality, it was actually Tom who had done all those atrocious things. He would lie to Rachel, blaming her for all the things he had done, just to make her feel guilty, weak, and worthless. Just how Andy had made Melinda feel after he raped her. With this connection, I can better understand Melinda’s character through Rachel’s in The Girl on the Train, which I read and enjoyed before I read

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23) Who is the Speaker and to whom is he/she giving the speech? What is the THESIS of this person’s speech? The speaker is Amy Cuddy who is giving a persuasive, informative speech to a ted talk audience about the power of body language.

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Melinda, in a lot of ways, starts out like that it the book. She becomes a shell of herself from before the party happened and because no one else was there, she is lonely and doesn't have anybody to go to and to make matters even worse, she’s covered by the reputation that she has formed. In the book, Laurie Halse Anderson uses symbolism to convey exactly what Melinda can't say. In the beginning of the book, Melinda starts high school carrying her emotional wounds with her after something happens mysterious to her at a party during the summer.

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