Fredrick Douglass: Poem Analysis

9/16/13
ENG 100
This title means nothing to me I never really liked to read growing up, as it was almost always homework or a task assigned by my parents. My brother and I would rather play the Nintendo gamecube in the basement of our old home than fall asleep trying to read one chapter of the Harry Potter books without dozing off into slumber. Over the course of high school I began to fall out of sync with the world around me. The transition from grade school left me with few friends and not a single ounce of stability. I started to shut myself off from connecting with others and each day started to feel bland and unbearable. Now I'm not going to claim to have been outright depressed but I was defiantly not the happiest person out there. The first time we were assigned a book in my freshman english class I was thoroughly disheartened when I saw the 324 pages of the Ender's Game novel sitting on my desk. But it clicked. For some reason my interest was caught by this book of a strange society, hook line and
Learning to read and write on his own, I feel as though he was very successful in conveying his story on how he accomplished this. In his opening paragraph he effectively stated what his short essay is about and most of the content he would be covering. While reading, “Learning to Read and Write,” for the second time, I noticed that his sentence structure seems very simple, a lot more simple than the rest of the essay. “I lived in Master Hugh's family for seven years. During this time, I learned to read and write.”pg 1. In contrast to his structure, Fredrick Douglass uses words such as stratagems. While this word is not unheard of, to me it does not feel like a stretch to say that words such as these seemed to be a bit above his vocabulary. Beyond this, I feel like his opening paragraph was a success in setting up the rest or the essay and doing so in a timely