First Draft

Final Draft

Tori McNamara

Ms. Hagge

AP Language and Composition

05/31/23

More Than Just One Leaf

In Hope Jahren’s prologue of her memoir Lab Girl, Jahren provides the reader with an introduction to her book by asking the reader to look around them and recognize how humans have changed our world. Jahren poses a series of rhetorical questions to make the reader acknowledge how important every part of our world is. She also states statistical facts about our forests to show how significant our impact on Earth really is. 

As we all know, numbers can be scary. When I say that one in five women will be assaulted at some point in their life, that is frightening. If I said that your phone has almost ten times as much bacteria as a public bathroom does, that is also scary. Well, when Jahren says, “Every ten years, we cut down about 1 percent of this total forest, never to be regrown,” that is also frightening and that is why she says this (45-47). Jahren presents multiple statistical facts in order to make her point that humans are harming our planet. These facts are very prominent in her writing and when you read them they are very shocking. Her intention is to make the reader feel as if they have been ignoring this problem of human takeover of our environment, and she hopes to encourage them to act now because, as Jahren says, right now “That’s more than one trillion leaves that are ripped from their source of nourishment every single day. And it seems like nobody cares” (50-52).

Jahren believes that our world is not as simple as it seems. A plant is not just a plant. A leaf is not just a leaf. A tree is not just a tree. In her prologue, there are two ways that Jahern tries to make her audience realize this. One way she does this is by describing the long and difficult process through which the tree was originally “designed” three hundred million years ago. This shows how complicated our forests are because they have taken so long to develop into what they are today. Another way she does this is by asking a series of rhetorical questions: “I start by looking at color: Exactly what shade of green? Top different from the bottom? Center different from the edges? And what about the edges? Smooth? Toothed?...” (58-63). Here, Jahren is talking about the questions she asks a leaf because by doing this she is showing that she cares about it. She asks these questions to the reader to encourage them to do the same. Jahren goes on to say that by asking these questions, the reader becomes a scientist and a scientist is someone who cares and recognizes the importance of even one singular leaf. She does this to do exactly as she stated before, to “convince” her reader that people need to care. 

Throughout the prologue of her book Lab Girl, biologist Hope Jahren poses rhetorical questions to her reader to get them to care about our environment and states statistical facts to show what happens to our world when not enough people show they care. 

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