Narrative Essay

Krystal Perez

5 March 2014

ENG 1121-D428

Essay #1

 

Who Are You?

 

Just take a moment and think about the question, “What makes you, you?” I’m not asking you to come up with an answer having to do with genetics but to think deeply about certain things that influence you enough to have an effect on your personality and behavior. Some people can’t answer this. I have grown into be the person I am today because of things I have experienced. There are many different certain aspects in my life such as my family, society, and my education that influence me and have helped shape me into the person I am today.

Growing up, similar to many other young girls I’ve always looked up to my mother as a role model. My father and my mother separated before I was born, so my father has always been distantly in my life. However, since we never did live together and my mother was the one always around, she was always the only one really there for my sisters and I. I have seen my mother struggle in ways a mother shouldn’t need to do. The older I got, the more I learned to understand the difficulties my mother faced in putting food on the table every night, paying the bills that needed paying, and supplying my family with other necessities. The older I get, the more I’m starting to realize how much I don’t want to live the same life she lived. Life struggles are inevitable and nobody can live a perfect life, but I don’t want to have children at such a young age the way my mother did. Watching my mother go through so much makes me want to be successful so that I can give her the life that she deserves and continue the rest of my life in such a way that she won’t have to provide for me and my sisters. This has also taught me how to be more of an independent person.

A time so difficult in my mother’s life has brought some insight to me as to the person I do and do not want to be when I get older, and the person I have to be now. I was always the “baby” in my family until I was eleven years old, when my mother had my little sister. I went from always getting what I wanted to being known as the “middle child”. Now I bring my little sister everywhere that I go. Knowing that she’s always around me has really helped me become the person that I am today. When she says certain things like, “You’re the best sister ever” or, “I want to be like you”, it just makes me realize that not everything can be about me. I know that there’s more to my life than just thinking about myself and my needs, when I have to be a better person for her. The way that my mother was always there for me and my older sister, makes me want to be there for my little sister so that she can know that she doesn’t have to go through anything alone, and that I will always be there for her.

Where I live, people I have to see every day and my friends are all variables of society that influence my life just as greatly as my mother and my little sister. I was born and raised in Harlem, New York City and there is no question about it that the area that I live in is a dangerous place to live. Being located where I am, I have learned to be strong because of losing people to the streets and wanting to not falling into peer pressure. I had more friends when I was a child than I do now because sadly all of the females that I befriended when I was younger are now single teenage mothers. These people that I associated myself with showed me what it’s like to fall into being a statistic. They also made me realize that I don’t want to end up like them. I have the potential to be the person they couldn’t be.

I have never traveled outside of this country, mostly because of my fear of airplanes, but the thought of this pushes me to want this type of lifestyle. I can see that the world has a lot to offer me and this motivates me to try and be as successful as I can to experience it. When I am older I want to be able to say that I’ve traveled to many different countries and met many different people and learned about many of their different customs. I am not afraid and ashamed to say where I came from but I just want to start my own life somewhere new. I want to be able to leave the place I grew up in where it belongs, the past.

I never had trouble as a student. I graduated sixth grade with the title Valedictorian and graduated High School being rated third in my class. I’m also very competitive when it comes to school, which has helped me get good grades all my life. I always worry about getting low grades which causes me to study more and leads me to having better grades. I’m confident about my intelligence and ever since I was little, it was always my dream to become a nurse. Not everyone will agree with the decisions I make about my future, and some people even tell me that I can’t do it. However, knowing what I want to be has led me to become more and more self-motivated.

Along the way, many things in my life have had a great influence on me. These things come in forms such as experiences with my family, like my mother’s struggles and being a good enough role model for my little sister, the society around me, and pursuing my education. So, as I have asked before, what exactly makes you, you? Sometimes the answer is right in front of your face, you just haven’t realized it yet.

 

Narrative Essay first paragraph

Krystal Perez

7 May 2014

ENG 1121-D428

Narrative Essay first paragraph

 

 

Just take a moment and think about the question, “What makes you, you?” I’m not asking you to come up with an answer having to do with genetics but to think deeply about certain things that influence you enough to have an effect on your personality and behavior. Some people can’t answer this. I have grown into be the person I am today because of things I have experienced. There are many different certain aspects in my life such as my family, society, and my education that influence me and have helped shape me into the person I am today.

 

Textual Analysis Essay Outline

Krystal Perez

17 March 2014

ENG 1121-D428

Essay #2 Outline

 

Introduction

Line Opener – Some people don’t know what innocence is until they lose it.

Thesis Statement – The author’s use of plot, imagery, and symbolism helps tie this poem together to create one big unifying theme about innocence at the end.

 

Body

Topic #1 – Plot

a) Sets sympathetic tone

b) Sequences major parts in life of person in poem

c) Imagery

 

Topic #2 – Symbolism

a) Butterfly wings as a symbol

b) “Her walls are a frenzy of beige and cream, painting over princess stickers peeled from childhood corners…”

 

Topic #3 – Theme

a) Loss of Innocence

b) Loss of Childhood

Rhetorical Situation for Narrative Essay

Krystal Perez

ENG 1121

Professor Guthrie

12 February 2014

 

Rhetorical Situation for my essay

 

1. Purpose – The purpose of my narrative essay is to give readers three major topics that influence my life. Within those topics will be subtopics that will further explain how these topics make me, me and how they help shape my personality.

2. Genre – Narrative Essay

3. Audience – My audience can range from children to adults. This even sounds like a topic for a College essay so my audience could be the college admissions office.

4. Stance –

5. Media – Print

 

Narrative Essay Outline

Krystal Perez

ENG 1121

Professor Guthrie

12 February 2014

 

Essay #1 Outline

 

Introduction

Line Opener – Just take a moment and think about the question, “What makes you, you?” Some people can’t answer this.

Thesis – There are many different certain aspects in my life such as my family, society, and my education that influence me and helped shape me into the person I am today.

 

Body

A) Family

a) My mother – wanting to give her the best, wanting to live a different life

b) Little Sister – her looking up to me, and being a role model

c) Pressure – My family is always pressuring me to stay in school and do what’s best for me and my future

 

B) Society

a) Growing up where I did, Not being a statistic

b) Seeing what’s out there, knowing what I want, traveling, what’s acceptable to society, and what’s not.

c) Friends … making decisions for myself

 

C) My Education

a) What do you want to be when you grow up?

b) Knowing how smart I am; thriving to learn and know more

c)

 

Conclusion

Restate the thesis; “Sometimes, the answer is all around you and you don’t even realize it.”

 

Textual Analysis First Paragraph

Krystal Perez

7 May 2014

ENG 1121-D428

Textual Analysis Essay first paragraph

 

Some people don’t know what innocence is until they lose it. The beginning of a person’s life is inherently marked with being innocent. “Lying Fairies” is a poem found online by an anonymous writer, written about a young girl who starts to lose her innocence at a young age. As one reads, one can see that the more the young girl experiences, the less pure she gets. In this poem, the author states major things that happen in a young girl’s life that makes her feel vulnerable at the end. The author’s use of plot, imagery, symbolism and theme helps this poem come together at the end.

Textual Analysis Essay

Krystal Perez

7 April 2014

ENG 1121-D428

Essay #2

 

Lost Innocence

Some people don’t know what innocence is until they lose it. The beginning of a person’s life is inherently marked with being innocent. “Lying Fairies” is a poem found online by an anonymous writer, written about a young girl who starts to lose her innocence at a young age. As one reads, one can see that the more the young girl experiences, the less pure she gets. In this poem, the author states major things that happen in a young girl’s life that makes her feel vulnerable at the end. The author’s use of plot, imagery, symbolism and theme helps this poem come together at the end.

The author of “Lying Fairies” sets up the plot of the poem with a sympathetic tone while sequencing major points in a young girl’s life as she gets older. The author starts the poem with a young girl at the age of twelve, and goes on to write about how this young girl’s life changes as she gets older. The author continues to count up the girl’s age and mentions the certain things that the girl is doing the older she gets. At twelve and a half years old, the young girl is said to be always riding her bicycle as unknown fingers, which we can only imagine to belong to boys, are holding onto her waist. By the age of thirteen, the girl is already smoking and hanging out with boys in the backseat of cars. The girl starts to pay more attention to boys than her school work. At “thirteen and two and a half quarters,” the young girl is now afraid to grow up anymore and wishes that she could go back to being four years old. The older she is getting, the more she smokes. She starts to write poetry to express her emotions since she feels like she can’t tell anyone about the “depression” that she’s going through. “Parental discipline terrifies her…,” the author states, which could possibly mean that the young girl gets in trouble with her parents a lot. The author ends the poem with the girl being fifteen, saddened from a love gone wrong and now depressed with having nobody to console her.

The plot of this poem is well told through the element of imagery. Imagery is a technique used so writers can paint a picture in their audience’s mind to aid in understanding the writing better. In “Lying Fairies”, the details that the author provides give the reader a clear picture of what to visualize. The poem states things like, “She misses being four and dressing up like a pumpkin because fairy godmothers existed…” The girl in the poem missed being an age when things weren’t real. It seems as though that at this age, she was able to make things up when things got difficult for her. This shows how much she has grown and how much things have changed for her. It then states that “she’s thirteen and summer smells like rolled up joints,” to her now. As a reader, with this information and use of imagery, one can picture a four year old dressing in pink and playing make believe to an instant picture of a teenage girl smoking her problems away.

The poem “Lying Fairies” shows a symbolic side. The poem starts, “An abyss built of butterfly wings and emptiness…” In my opinion, butterflies are usually associated with childhood. Children draw butterflies because they are found to be “pretty”. The author describes an abyss filled with butterflies and emptiness, and in some way that could symbolize the young girl’s soul. The older she gets, the emptier she is inside. The poem ends by saying, “Her butterfly wings, snapped a long time ago.” It seems as though the author put in the butterfly wings to correspond to her childhood innocence. After everything the poem stated that the young girl had gone through, her innocence has snapped, comparing it to the wings of a butterfly. Symbolism lies within another line in the poem when stated, “Her walls are a frenzy of beige and cream, painting over princess stickers peeled from childhood corners.” By saying this, the author was trying to prove her point that with age, the girl was starting to leave her childhood in the past. Only at the age of thirteen, she started painting her walls a different color just to cover up the stickers that were once on her wall from when she was little. Also, the fact that she colored her wall beige and cream shows how solid and matured the young girl was starting to believe that she was becoming.

One major theme that could be found in “Lying Fairies” is the theme of lost innocence. It seems as though the author was trying to portray the idea that as a person gets older, changes are inevitable. The author mentions that at fifteen, the girl forgets what smiling and crying feels like anymore. Smiling is associated with childhood because it’s what children spend most of their time doing. I believe that the author mentions the young girl’s ability not to cry anymore because it’s normal to see a child cry but as she gets older, crying is a sign of weakness, and she doesn’t want to show weakness. The author’s repetition of the age fifteen can possibly mean that this is when the girl is aware of the loss of her innocence. She is a teenager now, and she feels as though she is depressed and that nobody understands the emotional pain she is going through, which she didn’t have to feel as a child.

The author uses plot, imagery, and symbolism help the reader understand the story better in order to tie it all together in the end with the theme of innocence. In my opinion, the more things a person experiences, the less pure they become. In the poem, the young girl was having fun growing up, but then came a time when she was scared to do anymore growing up. I believe that when you’re suddenly aware of how much you’ve changed from a child, you are aware of how much less innocent you are. Things change, people change, and lives change. Growing up is something we cannot escape.

 

Brooklyn Navy Yard (Research Paper)

Krystal Perez

ENG 1121-D428

15 May 2014

Research Paper

 

Brooklyn Navy Yard

 

New York City, “the city that never sleeps”, consists of five boroughs. Each of these boroughs is significant in their own way and known for many different things. One of these boroughs, Brooklyn, has had some major changes done these past few years to an important aspect of it. The Brooklyn Water Front is a part of Brooklyn that is located near the Brooklyn Bridge which has recently been renovated. The plan is to consist of 15 new buildings, 4.5 million square feet for office space and 8,500 new housing units. One important part of the Brooklyn Water Front that is being renovated is the United States Navy Yard, which is also famously known as the Brooklyn Navy Yard or simply as the Navy Yard. The Brooklyn Navy Yard is a very important historical feature to Brooklyn because of the history behind it, what it turned out to be after it was closed down, and how helpful it has been to the economy.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard was built in 1801 and was opened from 1806 until 1966. Bought by federal authorities for only $40,000, the Brooklyn Navy Yard had many docks and was best known as the United States’ Navy’s shipyard. During this time, the buildings in the Navy Yard were made up of handmade bricks and even consisted of a naval hospital, built for soldiers who were then injured. The Naval hospital was built and used from 1830 to 1838 and reconstructed from 1841 to 1843. However, it stopped being used and was taken down in the mid-1970s. The Brooklyn Navy Yard was also used as the site of a British prison ship that was used to imprison about 11,000 American soldiers and other prisoners during the Revolutionary War.

The Brooklyn Navy Yard was originally built so that the United States Navy could build more merchant vessels. A lot of famous and well known ships were built, decked, and repaired there. According to the records of Columbia University, the battleship North Carolina was put into deck there to be repaired in 1937 and a couple of years later, battleship Iowa and Missouri were finished being rebuilt and repaired in the year 1942. Also, in the year 1942, the battleship Maine was launched from the Brooklyn Navy Yard. A couple of years later on January 12, 1953, the ship Antietam was launched and was named “America’s first angle deck aircraft carrier” after completing its test operations in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Without the Brooklyn Navy Yard, it isn’t clear where most of these ships would have needed to go to in order to get repaired. Also, without the Brooklyn Navy Yard, some of the world’s best known battleships and carriers wouldn’t even have been built. These ships have given the Brooklyn Navy Yard a reason to live up to its name.

Throughout history, the Brooklyn Navy Yard has changed and been turned into an area of private manufacturing. After the Navy Yard was closed in 1966, it was used for commercial activity. The Bloomberg administration invested into the Navy Yard and invested $250 million so that the Navy Yard’s infrastructure could be boosted, and this included the water, the roads, and the sewer. Today, more than about 200 different companies occupy it and own different parts of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the land associated with it. From business companies to retail companies and more, one of the most important buildings occupying the Brooklyn Navy Yard is Building 92. This is somewhat like a museum that opened in November of 2011. People are allowed to visit Building 92 to take tours and view some exhibits that preserves the nature of what the Navy Yard once was. Building 92 also has a part of it called the Employment Center. This center is where people go to in search for jobs. The Daily News has reported that the Navy Yard is “exploding with new development – ranging from a mega supermarket to massive new sounds stages and medical labs.” The same newspaper article claims that the Navy Yard helps people get jobs that will most likely grow into management roles.

Along with all of the other improvements being made to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, it is evident that the Navy Yard has always been associated with the economy in a positive way. After the American Civil War, the Brooklyn Navy Yard employed up to 6,000 men. In the year 1938, The Brooklyn Navy Yard recorded to employ about ten thousand people. Not only were these workers men, but they were also a part of an organization called the Works Progress Administration (WPA).The WPA was an organization formed in April 1935 and was one of the largest agencies in its time to employ almost 8 million jobs to unemployed people. These men employed by the Navy Yard from the WPA carried out jobs as construction workers, to painting new building, and even helping build railroad tracks. Even today, The Brooklyn Navy Yard is associated with the economy with the help of the Employment Center. According to The Brooklyn Navy Yard’s website, the Employment Center “identifies, pre-screens, and places qualified job seekers in various types of employment.” In other words, The Employment Center has been providing jobs for many people in Brooklyn and different parts of New York City. A woman named Loretta Swindell claimed that “she walked into the yard’s employment center and walked out with a job working on a demolition project within the complex.” Although it hasn’t provided jobs to as many as ten thousand people, the Employment Center has slowly been changing the lives of many people and adding on to the economy by making sure people who need the jobs, get them.

Many people pass the Brooklyn Water Front each and every day and don’t even know the history behind it. It provided many things to the people in the nineteenth through twentieth century. So, starting off as a shipyard for many ships to be developed and repaired for war, the Navy Yard could be known as one of the most historical features that New York City has. After the shipyard was closed and even today, the Brooklyn Navy Yard is still important because it was being used for commercial use by many companies. What once was, is still is. The Brooklyn Navy Yard is slowly helping better the economy by helping people find jobs. People may look at the Brooklyn Navy Yard as just a part of the Brooklyn Water Front but the Brooklyn Navy Yard has a strong background and will continue its legacy.

 

 

 

 Work Cited

 

 

Bartelstone, John. The Brooklyn Navy Yard. Brooklyn, NY: PowerHouse, 2010.      Print.

 

Berner, Thomas F. The Brooklyn Navy Yard. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 1999. Print.

 

Blau, Reuven. “Full Speed Ahead! Historic Brooklyn Navy Yard Exploding with New Development, Job Opporunities.” NY Daily News. NY Daily News, 29 Jan. 2014. Web. 15 May 2014.

 

Lange, Alexandra. “New Improved Brooklyn.” NYMag.com. New York Magazine, n.d. Web. 15 May 2014.

 

Stobo, John R. “Brooklyn Navy Yard.” Brooklyn Navy Yard. Columbia University, n.d. Web. 15 May 2014.

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