ELA Essay Part A

Your Task:
After you have read the passages and answered the multiple-choice question write a unified essay about the power of reading as revealed in the passages. In your essay, use ideas from both passages to establish a controlling idea about the power of reading. Using evidence from each passage, develop your controlling ideal and show how the author uses specific literary elements or techniques to convey that idea.

"Knowledge is power". This quote means that the more you know the more power you have of yourself and your surroundings. Books hold a great deal of knowledge. In books you can find many new ideas and things not known to you. Both passages, The Reader by Richard Wilbur and passage II by Itala Coluino, show just how books can make people gain knowledge.

The Reader is a poem, which shows how rereading a book can make someone wiser. In The Reader it says that the woman who reread the stories she liked as a child "meet them (the characters in the story) this time with a wiser eye." When she read the stories again she understood more of the propose of the character. Also when she reread the stories she read them with anticipation even if she knew that fate of the story.

Passage II is a short story that talks about how people that are closed minded open their minds to new ideas by reading books. In this passage the soldiers were sent to censor books. However they became so amused with what they were reading that the stopped reporting the books and began to just read them. The soldiers opened their minds to new ideas and did not censor the books that would contradict the "military prestige." As a result of this the soldiers were pensioned off for health reasons. However the soldiers kept learning new ideas by going to the library.

Both passages show how people can learn from books and the story they read. They see that the stories hold their own knowledge in which they can learn from. Their minds become open to many new things. They also can see things in different perspective if they reread the stories. They become wiser with what they learn from the stories.

Reading can bring knowledge to those who read. They learn new things and can also learn about themselves through the stories. They become open-minded to the ideas of other people. The passages show how people can come to accept and learn from the stories that books hold.