Everyone Leaves Analysis

For this artifact, we had to analyze Wendy Guerra’s 2006 young adult novel Everyone Leaves. Before completing this essay, we learned about various concepts related to the novel, including the bildungsroman genre (which is closely related to the coming-of-age genre except it explains a character’s maturity after a dramatic event in their life) and the author’s hometown of Cuba. We then brainstormed different themes for the book, which were related to the essential questions of this artifact: “Why do people leave?” and “Why do people stay?” I think Mr. Smith assigned this artifact to demonstrate how literature not only connects to history, but also helps us not to repeat it. I chose to write about perseverance because it appeared very relatable to the concept of staying in one’s situation. At first, I used Post-It notes to simply highlight quotes that …show more content…
In addition, Mr. Smith assigned a Reading Process Project, which consisted of six page sets with four assignments each: TIEDIED paragraphs which centered around certain aspects of the story (particularly the theme); journal entries about a list of topics Mr. Smith assigned (the novel was written in diary form); different types of poems, such as free verse, ballads, senryus, and African praise poems; and drawings related to the story. The drawings seemed irrelevant to me; after all, I thought, this was world literature class and not visual art class. Afterwards, I began outlining my essay and composing my first draft during a timed writing session; all the while, I made countless revisions using a dictionary and thesaurus so I would not use the same word or phrase many times. After typing my first draft, I checked for grammar mistakes and improvements on GrammarBase.com and GrammarCheck.net,