The book Speak is a book written by Laurie Halse Anderson, it is about a young girl named Melinda Sordino and is about a very serious and all too common issue: rape and depression. Rape is a serious problem, it can completely destroy a person, making them never the same again. Depression is always an uphill battle and is even worse when your friends turn their back on you and your family does not notice something is seriously wrong with you. Melinda was a young girl enjoying life until an older boy named Andy Evans took advantage of his size and raped her.
Speak Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Selective Mutism “I know my head isn’t screwed on straight. I want to leave, confess everything, hand over the guilt and mistake and anger to someone else. There is a beast in my gut, I can hear it scraping away at the inside of my ribs. Even if I dump the memory, it will stay with me, staining me” (Anderson 51).
and she didn’t talk to anyone. Melinda has been trying to overcome her trauma since the start of her freshman year but she hasn't been able to find the courage to overcome it until the end of the year. The book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson is about a girl named Melinda that had a traumatic experience at a party during the summer because of this Melinda has a hard time making friends going into the 9th grade. Melinda is also conflicted about her individuality and questions if she can trust anyone with being herself.
Heather from speak is not guilty of being a bad friend. This is evident when Heather is the only other person that is willing to accept Melinda and listen to what Melinda has to say. Heather sets a plan “[Heather] wants us to join five clubs, one for every day of the week” (Anderson 22). This represents friendly behaviour, as Heather is assisting Melinda in making new friends, while also boosting her own social rank.
In the book, Speak, written by Lauren Halse Anderson, different parts of the story can both be correlated and contrasted to events at Glen A. Wilson High School and my own personal experiences. The setting of Merryweather High, the people involved in the story, and Melinda, herself, all can be related to what I have encountered in my life. However, as much as they may be similar, there are also vast amounts of differences. As much as Merryweather High is a typical high school setting, here at Glen A. Wilson, it is both typical and not at the same time. Also, the characters involved in such a story can be compared to those I have met in my life, yet, I have seen some of these made-up personalities only in books or movies.
Melinda reaches inside, and pulls out the slip of paper that says “tree”, at first she thinks that the subject is stupid and boring, but it ends up helping her cope in the long run. In Speak, Melinda goes through three main phases in her artwork, the confused phase, where she is trying to find a voice, the dead phase, where she thinks speaking up will not help in her situation, and the healing phase, which
Animals use camouflage to hide themselves from a predator. Some butterflies have giant spots on their wings that look like eyes, to mislead the predator into thinking it is a different animal. Similarly, this quality is seen in humans. Teachers for example, can create a test to seem so difficult that everyone is most likely to fail. They mislead the students into thinking that unless they studied all night, they will fail.
“To be human is to be beautifully flawed. ”(Eric Wilson). All humans are flawed. That is what makes them human. Flaws sometimes are hurtful, but they make the character interesting.
In the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, Janie struggles to create a voice for herself and learns when her silence is more powerful than her words. Janie uses her voice at times when she feels powerless or when someone is silencing her. When Janie is in situations where she is being silenced or confronted, she chooses to be either speak out or stay silenced. When Janie is silent, she is able to set herself up in a position of taking her power back from those who try to make her feel powerless. As the novel goes on Janie learns how to be silent at times when her words aren’t as powerful as her silence.
Peer Pressure for Drugs What I believe how peer pressure influence teenagers into using drugs is because they want to imitate what others are doing and they want to look cool in front of everyone. What I consider Laurie Halse Anderson the author of “Speak” is saying about peer pressure is when someone forces you to do something and you don’t want to do it, they will leave you and if you do it they will make you do many other things you don’t want to do. How Melinda Sordino influenced by peer pressure because of her friends telling her to take a drink at the party, to let loose and drink a beer and she took the risk(Halse). I have experienced coercion when I was walking in the park, with my smaller crazy cousins that wanted to play in the long green slide, and this frightening man asked me if I wanted to smoke with him as we passed by him, however I said no and I walked away,
Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel: Speak, it’s an incredible narrative that tells the story of Melinda Sordino, a grade nine girl who was raped at the age of thirteen during a party. The novel has wonderful amount of details and symbols that explain how Melinda is slowly able to surpass the fears of her past and create a better life. Nonetheless, on the movie directors decided to cut off some of these important details that were fundamental to understand the story. In particular, one of the most obvious modifications make in the movie is the school’s mascot change.
Chris Tamayo Mr. Rodriguez English III; Period 5 18 August 2015 Part 1: Character Identification Sunny - Sunny is a street walker at the Edmont Hotel. She was hired by Holden through Maurice. Bernice - Bernice is one of the three tourists from Seattle. She is known as a very good dancer. Ackley - Ackley is Holden’s dorm neighbor at Pencey Prep.
Speak Have you ever gone through a trauma? “ Recovery doesn't erase the trauma as if it had never happened, it just makes it easier to deal with” ( American Academy of Experts in Traumatic Stress). The novel Speak is about a teenage girl going through her tough high school years. She started the school year with no friends and with a heavy secret weighing over her. One might think that her problems are just teenage normal ones, but what they don't know is that she was suffering from a sexual assault, rape.
It may seem that Holden does not like anything at first glance, but with closer inspection, he is fond of things one may not expect from him. One of the things he likes that was not expected in the beginning was children. He seemed to dislike almost everyone and label them as “phony”. As one progresses in the book however, it is revealed that he loves kids and they are one of the few things that keep him truly happy.
The novel Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, is about a girl named Melinda, who shows signs of depression throughout the story. She has no friends and is hated by people she doesn’t even know. This is because she called the cops at a party, where she was raped. Anderson includes literary elements to show how Melinda is depressed. Throughout the novel, she uses many different literary elements to show Melinda’s conflict.
