8.9: Example Essay- Reader Response

Example Essay

Chase Williams

Professor Williams

EG 101

15 Oct 2022

Coming to Terms with a Single Story

        In her TedTalk "The Danger of a Single Story," Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses the negative effects of oversimplifying a person, a place, or a

group of people. She uses a number of examples to make her point, explaining how a narrow view of the world shaped by stories limited her worldview as a

young child and how stereotypes have affected her both as someone stereotyped by others and as someone who has, at times, stereotyped others. Adichie

shows how having a single story about a place or a group of people can limit a person's understanding of the world. Though it took me a while to fully see

Adichie's point, largely because of my own experiences, I can now see how telling a single story about a group of people or a place can lead to stereotypes,

othering, and even discrimination. It is clear that having a narrow view of the world can be particularly harmful to children, but these single stories can also

lead adults to develop assumptions that have real effects on the world around them.

          Adichie first shows shows the danger of sharing narrow views of the world with children. Growing up in Nigeria, Adichie loved to read, but all of her

books were about white children in England; when Adichie began to write stories herself, they were all set in places with lots of rain and the characters were

white with blue eyes.Adichie was representing the world she saw in her books rather than the world around her. As Adichie got older, she began reading

books by African women, and, as she notes, "I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails,

could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized" (par. 4). Adichie notes that these books were hard to find, even in Nigeria, but

books with characters that looked like her were important because they helped her see that she also had an important place in the world, one that deserved

to be represented in books. Without a wider range of stories to draw from, Adichie had unconsciously accepted a single, narrow version of what a "story"

could look like, and it took real effort to expand that view.

          I did not grow up in Nigeria, and my own experience with a single story looked very different, but reading Adichie's talk made me think back to

something I had never really examined before: what it is like to come from a place that other people feel entitled to summarize for you. I grew up in Kansas,

and I now attend college just outside Wichita, the largest city in the state. Almost as soon as people outside Kansas learn where I am from, the questions

start: have I ever been in a tornado, do I live near a farm, and do I ride a horse to school? Tornado warnings genuinely are common here, and I understand

why that detail sticks with people, since it is dramatic and easy to picture. However, being under a tornado warning and actually being in a tornado are two

very different things, and most Kansans go their whole lives without experiencing the second. The single story people tell about Kansas is one of endless flat

farmland, small towns, and constant severe weather, and while some of that is true for parts of the state, it leaves out the cities, the suburbs, and the wide

range of people who live in them.

          My college sits right outside a city of over 300,000 people, yet students here often say they feel like they have to explain, almost apologize, that they

are not quite as "rural" as people assume. Kansas is treated in the popular imagination as a single, uniform thing: rural, religious, and politically uniform,

when in reality the state includes large cities, small towns, people of many different backgrounds and beliefs, and plenty of disagreement among Kansans

themselves about nearly everything. Because I come from the group being flattened into one story, I felt the frustration of that flattening directly, in a much

smaller and lower-stakes way than Adichie describes, but recognizably the same shape. A single story about a place does not just misinform outsiders; it

also puts pressure on the people from that place to either fit the story or constantly correct it.

          A single story about a person or a group of people does not seem like a big deal at first, but Adichie shows the deep effects that these narrow stories

can have. As Adichie finishes her TedTalk, she notes that, "Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story

of that person" (par. 16). Adichie shares an example of encountering a single story as an adult that illustrates this kind of power: she traveled to Mexico and

was ashamed to realize how many preconceptions she had absorbed about Mexico and Mexicans, preconceptions that were quickly proven wrong by the

actual people and country she encountered. Ever since the rise of mass media, people have been handed single stories about places and groups, and our

brains are naturally inclined to draw broad conclusions from these small snippets of information. Throughout history, this tendency has been used

deliberately: those in power have shaped narrow, repeated narratives about certain places or groups in order to justify treating them unfairly, whether that

meant limiting opportunity, controlling public opinion, or excusing mistreatment altogether. These single  stories are rarely harmless. They can keep people

locked out of opportunity, unfairly judged, or permanently defined by one detail that was never the whole picture to begin with. Whoever controls the story

being told about a group of people holds real influence over how that group is seen and treated by everyone else.

          We live in a society where we do not always value stories. Instead the emphasis is so often on the sciences and technology. But telling stories matters

too, as Adichie explains. How have single stories impacted you?

Exercise 8.9: Analyzing The Example Reader Response

Thinking About the Example Reader Response

1. What is the author's thesis? Does it fulfill the requirements of a reader response thesis?
2. Look through the essay and note the use of signal phrases where the student author notes the author's name. How often does the student author do this? How does this help the student make it clear which ideas belong to the source?
3. Take a look at the student's transitions between paragraphs. Does the student use strong transitions between all paragraphs? What transitions could use some strengthening?
4. Look at the student’s source introduction (it is the first sentence where they mention the source). Does the source introduction meet the requirements outlined earlier in this chapter? What work does the author need to do to make this a stronger source introduction?
5. The conclusion is quite short. What could the author use to add to the conclusion and explain the significance of their point, as the teacher asked on the assignment sheet?