My junior year of high school was kind of weird in terms of essays. For my American Literature class, the teacher only required us to write one essay the entire year (Anthem essay). We wrote one other that was required for the school district (District Writing Assessment) and another for our state testing. For my US History class, we only wrote essays for our finals and we did them by hand (I really wish I had my spring final essay because I thought it turned out so good! :')).
Instead of writing essays for Am. Lit., we made posters or wrote essay prompts. However, my teacher never required the essay to be written, so I spent my class time writing down the prompts (all they wanted was to know that we were paying attention and reading the book).
I really wish I had some essays for you, but that class was in the morning and I was tired all the time (I know, excuses).
During the year we read a number of books, and Cannery Row by John Steinbeck was my favorite. Below are some essay prompts I came up with:
Prompt 1: How do the emotions of the characters of Cannery Row support the three main theories of emotion: James-Lange theory, Cannon-Bard theory, and Singer-Schachter Two-factor theory.
Prompt 2: How do Mack and the boy's intentions differ from their actions and how does this impact the plot?
Prompt 3: How does the spillover effect influence the character's reactions?
Prompt 4: How do the animals throughout Cannery Row reflect the human characters?
Prompt 5: How do the character's actions support various items in psychology?
e.g. Flashbulb memory, Spillover effect, Circadian rhythm, Insecure attachments, Reinforcement, etc.
Prompt 6: How does Mack manipulate people/the situation in his favor throughout Cannery Row?
Prompt 7: How does Steinbeck depict monogamous relationships throughout Cannery Row?
Prompt 8: How are the characters of Mack and Doc similar?
Something that I loved to do was connect what I was learning in AP Psychology to characters in books, it made them seem more real to me. As you can see this influenced the prompts I created.
Although the purpose of this update is to help anyone who needs a prompt for this book, should I write an essay according to one of these prompts?
YOU ARE READING
Essays
RandomThese are high school and college essays and stories (that were graded as essays) that I have written in the past. This is to be a writing source for students to get inspiration when writing their essays! Although these essays received A's or B's, y...
