Essay Lead Samples

Anecdote

You go out to buy a pair of shoes, but the Super Duper Store is the only one in town: all the smaller, family owned shops and specialty stores went out of business when the Super Duper Store moved in. Each small store couldn’t get enough varieties of shoes, and customers won’t pay more if they can buy something cheaper somewhere else, even though before, with all the small shops combined, consumers had a wider selection and, at certain times and places, cheaper prices.

But that’s all long gone now. You go into the Super Duper Store and check out the shoe selection. You need running shoes, and you have two choices: the fifty dollar pair, or the $120 pair. Neither seems that well made, or even what you’re looking for, but you don’t have a choice. There’s no other place to look, and you need shoes. So you buy the better pair, but not long after you’ve bought them, a sole falls off. Then you have to go back to the Super Duper Store and give them more money for more bad shoes you don’t want. This might seem to be a worse case scenario, but it’s a situation that’s worsening with the growth of huge, conglomerate corporations.

Quotation

Feminism?

“It makes me think of women who don’t shave their legs,” popular TV actress Sarah Michelle Gellar was recently quoted as saying in JUMP magazine. A figure in the media who influences a lot of adolescents, Gellar perpetuates a stereotype of feminism that makes a joke of the bold steps taken over the past century, stereotypes that in today’s society are much more widely recognized than feminism’s reality. As a third-wave feminist, I’d like to challenge people my age to look beyond these mistaken ideas and understand how feminist ideals make life richer and fairer, for both women and men.

News

Ninety percent of American smokers started as teenagers. There are lots of reasons for this scary statistic: peer pressure, parents who smoke, and, most significantly, because of the billions of dollars spent by the tobacco industry on ads that target kids.

Background

It was only this spring that I learned about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, near the end of World War Two. I was amazed that my country had done this. And I was shocked to discover the number of people killed by the bombs. On August 6th, 1945, the USA dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later another, more powerful, bomb of plutonium was dropped on the city of Nagasaki. I could not believe this happened just fifty-five years ago. I do not believe it was a necessary step to ending the war.

Announcement

Lethal Possibilities by Erin K. Witham

An elementary school principal dyes his hair green when students read 10,000 pages. Another school hosts a pizza party for students to celebrate a similar “achievement.” Give me a break. Readers don’t need prizes. Reading itself is the prize.