Rough Draft for Speak

Intro, Hook, Thesis:
Every adult can remember something about their adolescent or teenage years. Whether it was a best friend, a goal, a bully, or an event that change who that person would become in the future. Adolescent girls face incredible pressures from society to fit in, be beautiful, and sophisticated. This pressure at this critical age can sometimes make this growing time even more difficult and confusing. “Her eyes meet mine for a second, “I hate you,” she mouths silently. She turns her back to me and laughs with her friends. I bite my lip. I am not going to think about it. It was ugly, but it’s over, and I am not going to think about it” (Anderson, 5). In the young adult book, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, touches on some of the life changing affects of rape on a adolescent girl named Melinda.
Rape not only affects the young girl physically but sometimes she must endure ridicule from her peers because of the psychological effects of this act of violence.
Point One: Physical Pain
Explore your idea further. Ask critical questions.
“In my head, my voice is a clear as a bell: “No I don’t want to!” But I can’t spit it out….Wham! shirt up, shorts down, and ground smells wet and dark and No!- I am not here…he smells like beer and mean and he hurts me he hurts me and gets up” (Anderson, 135).
“I open up a paper clip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt was a cry for help, then what was this? A whimper, a peep? I draw little windowcracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting” (Anderson, 87).
Reflect on your own adolescent experience, and see how it fits with your idea
My high school boyfriend used to say that cutting myself was my pathetic cry for attention, because I was too afraid to go through with suicide. He used to say that all the time about all the girls who he saw slashed up.
It may have been stupid, but it was definitely a cry for some kind of help with the things I was dealing with on the inside as a young teen.
Melinda felt as though she had no where else to turn, and turning to the popular forms of getting attention such as “running away”, cutting, and wishing for death turned out to be just as useless as keeping in the pain.
Point Two: Psychological Pain
Explore your idea further. Ask critical questions.
Melinda feels guilty for not saying anything when she sees Andy Evans (IT, her rapist) dating girls her age, and then her friend Rachel. “I need to do something about Rachel, something for her…Rachel will hate me (she already hates me.) She won’t listen (I have to try.) I groan and rip out a piece of notebook paper and write her a note, a left-handed note so she won’t know its from me” (Anderson, 152).
“I know my head isn’t screwed on straight…I want to confess everything, hand over the guilt and mistake and anger to someone else… even if I dump the memory, it will stay with me, staining me” (Anderson, 51).

Reflect on your own adolescent experience, and see how it fits with your idea
Being subjected to emotional and physical abuse in a relationship effects your mental thinking and support for yourself. Being an adolescent and not knowing what is good and bad in a relationship or really how to stop it can be even more taxing on your mental strength. Melinda fought with herself and inanimate objects to decide on how to deal with her pain, with her struggle in school and with her old friends. Sometimes finding things that you can control is your best way to feel like you can do something in your life. After that dangerous relationship finally needed in college, I am still in therapy to help me cope with feelings of myself, feeling about him and how I can learn to trust again. Melinda was not lucky enough to have a family that saw her falling apart like I did. Though at the end of the novel she discovers her own strength and talks about her pain, readers do not know if she gets help for re working her thoughts inside.
Point Three: Isolation and Bullying From Peers
Explore your idea further. Ask critical questions.
“…IT creeps up. Little flecks of metal slice through my veins. IT whispers to me. “Freshmeat.” That’s what IT whispers. IT found me again. I thought I could ignore IT. There are four hundred other freshman in here, two hundred female…but he whispers to me” (Anderson, 86).
“Heather: “you don’t like anything. You are the most depressed person I have ever met, and excuse me for saying this, but you are no fun to be around and I think you need professional help” (Anderson, 105).
Reflect on your own adolescent experience, and see how it fits with your idea
Girls in adolescence are brutal to each other. There is low self-esteem floating about everywhere. The men do not help this as they rank the girls sexually and discover alcohol and their seemingly flawless charm. Peers will turn on the people who are different than the norm. Melinda was different and isolated because she called the police at a popular party, and now she was depressed and a loner. Her peers turned on her, her friends isolated her, and her rapist targeted his prey to try and make her okay with his act.
Conclusion, Brief Summary, Food for thought: