The Showing of the HeLa Cells and the People Connected to Them
By: Spencer Carroll Period: 3
Rebecca Skloot wrote The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks she used a method of writing called “show, don’t tell” this is a technique often employed in various kinds of texts to enable the reader to experience the story through action, words, thoughts, senses, and feelings rather than through the author's description. The goal is to allow readers to interpret significant details in the text. Skloot describes the different characters with memories from not only the perspective of the character but of those around them as well. There were three main characters in the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. The first being Henrietta Lacks herself, Skloot used the “show, don’t tell” method of writing describing memories from
…show more content…
One such memory was of when school would let out she would go and work the field with day and the cousins, this memory let you infer that Henrietta was a hard working young woman who did whatever she could to help out her family. Often “If the weather was nice, when they finished working, the cousins ran straight to the swimming hole they made each year by damming the creek behind the house” (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, pg 20). “At nightfall they built fires with pieces of old shoes to keep the mosquitoes away, and watched the stars from beneath the big oak tree where they’d hung a rope to swing from. They played tag, ring-around-the-rosy, and hopscotch, and danced around the field singing until Grandpa Tommy yelled for everyone to go to bed” (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, pg 20). Those memories allowed for the inference that Henrietta loved her family and that they were extremely close. Skloot showed us this bond not by telling us directly but by describing events of her childhood that let us see the bond of her and her family, instead of just