10th Grade English

Corbin Williams

Censorship Essay

February 9 (3rd Quarter/2020)

Mrs. Muckley

Sophomore Year- JAGS English 10 - Investigate the World - Poses a researchable question on a local, regional, and/or global, and explains its significance to the global community

My artifact for my sophomore English class is my paper on why censorship is a major issue. This essay, written during our Fahrenheit 451 unit, explains why censorship is an important issue, citing different examples such as laws and education. “Investigate the World,” which is the ISSN Domain that I chose for this artifact, matches this artifact very well because within this article I used evidence and reasoning to answer the question of why censorship is a major issue and why steps need to be taken for it to be solved. This question was not only answered with examples from the book but also with some real world examples, describing the global significance of the issue of censorship in the book. This demonstrates the ISSN Domain topic of investigating the world as I used this essay to take a concept described in a scientific fiction novel and apply it to the real world, identifying the issue in real world countries and its effects on society.

The purpose of this assignment was to take a topic or theme from the book, Fahrenheit 451, and write an essay about one of its major topics or themes with a very specific structure that we spent multiple weeks developing. Not only were we assigned to write our papers with a certain structure, but we also had to prove a point and answer a question in our paper with as much detail as possible. When deciding on a topic for my paper, I chose censorship because it was a theme that was very well represented in the book, but it is also something that could be applied to the world today and something that could teach me about certain global issues around the world. While writing this paper, I acquired many skills that will be a great help to me for years to come. A very significant thing that I learned was the proper MLA citation of books and articles, which I used in my essay to support my argument. I had also not had a whole lot of experience researching global issues, so finding examples of censorship in the real world with events such as the French Revolution and the rule of North Korea was something that was a very valuable experience for me.

This paper in my sophomore English class demonstrated global competency because I took a topic that was mentioned in a book and not only described the issue of censorship in the context of the book’s plot, but also connected that issue to real-life global events to use as support in a persuasive essay. I do not believe that global connections were part of the assignment, meaning that I demonstrated a large interest at the time in seeing how the topics discussed in the book affected different parts of the world. Looking back at this essay a year later I would love to continue researching censorship around the world and adding to what I started a while back. This demonstrates my growth as a JAGS student because this paper was one of the kinds of assignments that sparked my interest in global studies and they were the first steps, along with other things like GO Night, to growing into becoming a globally competent citizen.