Persuasive Essay: Banned Books
Every year at the end of September, the American Library Association (or ALA) sponsors
Banned Books Week in order to celebrate the freedom to read and honor books that have
been challenged or banned somewhere in the world that year. This year Banned Books
Week is celebrating its 30th anniversary during the week of September 30-October 6.
The ALA believes that no material should be subject to censorship and opposes the idea
that censorship is needed at times when there are "threats to safety or national security, as
well as to avoid the subversion of politics and the corruption of morals.” Those in favor of
what is often referred to as “book-banning” feel that there are instances where the
censorship or removal of a book is necessary, especially in libraries geared toward younger
ages.
In order to construct this persuasive essay, you will need to use your own background
knowledge about banned books and the ones you have read as well as information from the
three articles provided to you. As you read the articles, complete a talking to the text. Then
ask yourself:
Are any instances in which schools and public libraries should
restrict or censor books in their collections?
If yes, then think about…
 Under what circumstances should
schools ban or censor books?
(ie. When is it ok to censor or ban
materials?)
 What does it accomplish by banning or
censoring books?
 What is the impact on schools, libraries,
students, parents, etc. when books are
banned or censored?
If no, then think about…
 What about violent, sexually-explicit, or
profane materials? Are they appropriate
to be in a middle school library?
 What about parents who do want their
children reading objectionable
materials?
 What about the idea that teenagers will
be encourage to try potentially
dangerous or morally objectionable
activities?
After deciding which stance you will take, revisit the articles to complete a Quote-NoteThought in order to pull out quotes or parts of the article to reference in your paper.
Each essay should have an introduction with a thesis statement, a body that include
cited information from the articles, and a conclusion and will be graded using the
Keystone Persuasive Writing Scoring Guidelines Rubric.
TIMES NEW ROMAN, 12-POINT FONT, DOUBLE-SPACED
Please complete a talking to
the text with each article!
Darkness Too Visible
Contemporary fiction for teens is rife with explicit abuse, violence
and depravity. Why is this considered a good idea?
By Meghan Cox Gurdon ∙ June 4, 2011
Amy Freeman, a 46-year-old mother of three, stood recently in the young-adult
section of her local Barnes & Noble, in Bethesda, Md., feeling thwarted and
disheartened.
She had popped into the bookstore to pick up a welcome-home gift for her 13year-old, who had been away. Hundreds of lurid and dramatic covers stood on the
racks before her, and there was, she felt, "nothing, not a thing, that I could
imagine giving my daughter. It was all vampires and suicide and self-mutilation,
this dark, dark stuff." She left the store empty-handed.
How dark is contemporary fiction for teens? Darker than when you were a child,
my dear: So dark that kidnapping and pederasty and incest and brutal beatings are
now just part of the run of things in novels directed, broadly speaking, at children
from the ages of 12 to 18.
Pathologies that went undescribed in print 40 years ago, that were still only
sparingly outlined a generation ago, are now spelled out in stomach-clenching
detail. Profanity that would get a song or movie branded with a parental warning
is, in young-adult novels, so commonplace that most reviewers do not even
remark upon it.
If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors,
constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is. There are
of course exceptions, but a careless young reader—or one who seeks out
depravity—will find himself surrounded by images not of joy or beauty but of
damage, brutality and losses of the most horrendous kinds.
Now, whether you care if adolescents spend their time immersed in ugliness
probably depends on your philosophical outlook. Reading about homicide doesn't
turn a man into a murderer; reading about cheating on exams won't make a kid
break the honor code. But the calculus that many parents make is less crude than
that: It has to do with a child's happiness, moral development and tenderness of
heart. Entertainment does not merely gratify taste, after all, but creates it.
If you think it matters what is inside a young person's mind, surely it is of
consequence what he reads. This is an old dialectic—purity vs. despoliation,
virtue vs. smut—but for families with teenagers, it is also everlastingly new.
Adolescence is brief; it comes to each of us only once, so whether the debate has
raged for eons doesn't, on a personal level, really signify.
As it happens, 40 years ago, no one had to contend with young-adult literature
because there was no such thing. There was simply literature, some of it
accessible to young readers and some not. As elsewhere in American life, the
1960s changed everything. In 1967, S.E. Hinton published "The Outsiders," a raw
and striking novel that dealt directly with class tensions, family dysfunction and
violent, disaffected youth. It launched an industry.
Mirroring the tumultuous times, dark topics began surging on to children's
bookshelves. A purported diary published anonymously in 1971, "Go Ask Alice,"
recounts a girl's spiral into drug addiction, rape, prostitution and a fatal overdose.
A generation watched Linda Blair playing the lead in the 1975 made-for-TV
movie "Sarah T: Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic" and went straight for Robin S.
Wagner's original book. The writer Robert Cormier is generally credited with
having introduced utter hopelessness to teen narratives. His 1977 novel, "I Am the
Cheese," relates the delirium of a traumatized youth who witnessed his parents'
murder, and it does not (to say the least) have a happy ending.
Grim though these novels are, they seem positively tame in comparison with
what's on shelves now. In Andrew Smith's 2010 novel, "The Marbury Lens," for
example, young Jack is drugged, abducted and nearly raped by a male captor.
After escaping, he encounters a curious pair of glasses that transport him into an
alternate world of almost unimaginable gore and cruelty. Moments after arriving
he finds himself facing a wall of horrors, "covered with impaled heads and other
dripping, black-rot body parts: hands, hearts, feet, ears, penises. Where the f—
was this?" No happy ending to this one, either.
In Jackie Morse Kessler's gruesome but inventive 2011 take on a girl's struggle
with self-injury, "Rage," teenage Missy's secret cutting turns nightmarish after she
is the victim of a sadistic sexual prank. "She had sliced her arms to ribbons, but
the badness remained, staining her insides like cancer. She had gouged her belly
until it was a mess of meat and blood, but she still couldn't breathe." Missy
survives, but only after a stint as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The argument in favor of such novels is that they validate the teen experience,
giving voice to tortured adolescents who would otherwise be voiceless. If a teen
has been abused, the logic follows, reading about another teen in the same straits
will be comforting. If a girl cuts her flesh with a razor to relieve surging feelings
of self-loathing, she will find succor in reading about another girl who cuts, mops
up the blood with towels and eventually learns to manage her emotional
turbulence without a knife.
Yet it is also possible—indeed, likely—that books focusing on pathologies help
normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility
and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such
extreme measures. Self-destructive adolescent behaviors are observably infectious
and have periods of vogue. That is not to discount the real suffering that some
young people endure; it is an argument for taking care.
The novel "Scars," a dreadfully clunky 2010 exercise by Cheryl Rainfield that
School Library Journal inexplicably called "one heck of a good book," ran into
difficulties earlier this year at the Boone County Library in Kentucky, but not
because of its contents. A patron complained that the book's depiction of
cutting—the cover shows a horribly scarred forearm—might trigger a sufferer's
relapse. That the protagonist's father has been raping her since she was a toddler
and is trying to engineer her suicide was not the issue for the team of librarians reevaluating the book.
"Books like 'Scars,' or with questionable material, those provide teachable
moments for the family," says Amanda Hopper, the library's youth-services
coordinator, adding: "We like to have the adult perspective, but we do try to target
the teens because that's who's reading it." The book stayed on the shelves.
Perhaps the quickest way to grasp how much more lurid teen books have become
is to compare two authors: the original Judy Blume and a younger writer recently
hailed by Publishers Weekly as "this generation's Judy Blume."
The real Judy Blume won millions of readers (and the disapprobation of many
adults) with then-daring novels such as 1970's "Are You There, God? It's Me,
Margaret," which deals with female puberty, 1971's "Then Again, Maybe I
Won't," which addresses puberty from a boy's perspective, and 1975's "Forever,"
in which teenagers lose their virginity in scenes of earnest practicality.
Objectionable the material may be for some parents, but it's not grotesque.
By contrast, the latest novel by "this generation's Judy Blume," otherwise known
as Lauren Myracle, takes place in a small Southern town in the aftermath of an
assault on a gay teenager. The boy has been savagely beaten and left tied up with
a gas pump nozzle shoved down his throat, and he may not live. The protagonist
of "Shine," a 16-year-old girl and once a close friend of the victim, is herself yet
to recover from a sexual assault in eighth grade; assorted locals, meanwhile,
reveal themselves to be in the grip of homophobia, booze and crystal meth.
Determined in the face of police indifference to investigate the attack on her
friend, the girl relives her own assault (thus taking readers through it, too) and
acquaints us with the concept of "bag fags," heterosexuals who engage in gay sex
for drugs. The author makes free with language that can't be reprinted in a
newspaper.
In the book business, none of this is controversial, and, to be fair, Ms. Myracle's
work is not unusually profane. Foul language is widely regarded among
librarians, reviewers and booksellers as perfectly OK, provided that it emerges
organically from the characters and the setting rather than being tacked on for
sensation. In Ms. Myracle's case, with her depiction of redneck bigots with methaddled sensibilities, the language is probably apt.
But whether it's language that parents want their children reading is another
question. Alas, literary culture is not sympathetic to adults who object either to
the words or storylines in young-adult books. In a letter excerpted by the industry
magazine, the Horn Book, several years ago, an editor bemoaned the need, in
order to get the book into schools, to strip expletives from Chris Lynch's 2005
novel, "Inexcusable," which revolves around a thuggish jock and the rape he
commits. "I don't, as a rule, like to do this on young adult books," the editor
grumbled, "I don't want to compromise on how kids really talk. I don't want to
acknowledge those f—ing gatekeepers."
By f—ing gatekeepers (the letter-writing editor spelled it out), she meant those
who think it's appropriate to guide what young people read. In the book trade, this
is known as "banning." In the parenting trade, however, we call this "judgment"
or "taste." It is a dereliction of duty not to make distinctions in every other aspect
of a young person's life between more and less desirable options. Yet let a
gatekeeper object to a book and the industry pulls up its petticoats and shrieks
"censorship!"
It is of course understood to be an act of literary heroism to stand against any
constraints, no matter the age of one's readers; Ms. Myracle's editor told
Publishers Weekly that the author "has been on the front lines in the fight for
freedom of expression."
Every year the American Library Association delights in releasing a list of the
most frequently challenged books. A number of young-adult books made the Top
10 in 2010, including Suzanne Collins's hyper-violent, best-selling "Hunger
Games" trilogy and Sherman Alexie's prize-winning novel, "The Absolutely True
Diary of a Part-Time Indian." "It almost makes me happy to hear books still have
that kind of power," Mr. Alexie was quoted saying; "There's nothing in my book
that even compares to what kids can find on the Internet."
Oh, well, that's all right then. Except that it isn't. It is no comment on Mr. Alexie's
work to say that one depravity does not justify another. If young people are
encountering ghastly things on the Internet, that's a failure of the adults around
them, not an excuse for more envelope-pushing.
Veteran children's bookseller Jewell Stoddard traces part of the problem to
aesthetic coarseness in some younger publishers, editors and writers who, she
says, "are used to videogames and TV and really violent movies and they love
that stuff. So they think that every 12-year-old is going to love that stuff and not
be affected by it. And I don't think that's possible."
In an effort to keep the most grueling material out of the hands of younger
readers, Ms. Stoddard and her colleagues at Politics & Prose, an independent
Washington, D.C., bookstore, created a special "PG-15" nook for older teens.
With some unease, she admits that creating a separate section may inadvertently
lure the attention of younger children keen to seem older than they are.
At the same time, she notes that many teenagers do not read young-adult books at
all. Near the end of the school year, when she and a colleague entertained students
from a nearby private school, only three of the visiting 18 juniors said that they
read YA books.
So it may be that the book industry's ever-more-appalling offerings for adolescent
readers spring from a desperate desire to keep books relevant for the young. Still,
everyone does not share the same objectives. The book business exists to sell
books; parents exist to rear children, and oughtn't be daunted by cries of
censorship. No family is obliged to acquiesce when publishers use the vehicle of
fundamental free-expression principles to try to bulldoze coarseness or misery
into their children's lives.
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Books We can Recommend for Young Adult Readers
BOOKS FOR YOUNG MEN:
BOOKS FOR YOUNG WOMEN:
Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi (2010)
This grueling post-apocalyptic National Book Award
winner earns its scenes of menace and the odd
expletive by believably conjuring a future in which
people survive by scavenging materials from the
rusting hulks of oil tankers. In a pitiless semicivilization, one single act of decency launches a
young man on a terrifying journey.
What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell (2008)
The events swirling around 15-year-old Evie in this
sophisticated National Book Award winner seem to
her, in the blinkered way of teenagers, mainly the
backdrop to her own sexual awakening. In a story
involving deceitful parents, stolen Jewish treasure, a
handsome ex-GI, adultery and murder, all set in
louche, off-season Palm Beach, it is only when Evie
must decide whether to lie—and whom to save—that it
is apparent that she is no longer a child.
Peace by Richard Bausch (2009)
For older teens, a taut World War II novel set in 1944
that evokes the conflicting moral struggles of war.
When a detachment of American GIs tramping through
the Italian countryside discovers an escaping German
soldier and a young woman hiding in the back of a
cart, the resulting bloodshed—is it murder or selfdefense?—sets off profound reverberations in the
men's hearts.
Old School by Tobias Wolff (2004)
Set in a smart New England prep school in the 1960s,
this story of a young man's search for authentic
identity captures the mixture of longing and ambition
that causes so many adolescents to try, if only for a
time, to shape themselves along other people's lines.
Here, the admired models are writers—Ernest
Hemingway, Ayn Rand, Robert Frost—who visit the
school and for whom the young protagonist contorts
himself in painful and revealing ways.
Ophelia by Lisa Klein (2006)
An inventive retelling of the story of Hamlet from the
perspective of beautiful, bewildered Ophelia. In
Shakespeare's play, we are meant to understand her as
a love-struck medieval girl gone mad. Here she is an
intelligent if impractical Elizabethan who, with the
help of Queen Gertrude, secretly marries Prince
Hamlet, fakes her own death and runs away with—
well, that would be telling, wouldn't it?
Angelmonster by Veronica Bennett (2005)
This elegant novel introduces us to 16-year-old Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin, future author of "Frankenstein,"
shortly before she meets the dashing poet Percy Bysshe
Shelley. The events that ensue seem as jolting today as
they were to the couple's early 19th-century
contemporaries: an adulterous escape from London to
Europe, the births and deaths of two children, a sojourn in
Italy with the "mad, bad, and dangerous to know" Lord
Byron (which included a famous night of telling ghost
stories), and Percy Shelley's tragic death at sea.
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (1953)
A science-fiction classic that offers surprisingly
mordant commentary on contemporary American life.
In a society where rampant political correctness has
resulted in the outlawing of books, Guy Montag works
as a "fireman" tasked with destroying intellectual
contraband. His wife spends her days immersed in the
virtual reality projected on screens around her. When
Guy accidentally reads a line from a book, he finds
himself strangely stirred—and impelled to an act of
recklessness that will change his life forever.
Teenagers whose families are maddeningly glued to
screens may find Guy's rebellion bracingly resonant.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by
Mark Haddon (2003)
Told (with the occasional expletive) from the
unreliable perspective of a high-functioning autistic
teenager, this mystery recounts 15-year-old
Christopher's effort to solve the killing of a
neighborhood dog. When the boy himself falls under
suspicion in the animal's death, his violent response
propels him toward discoveries that will ultimately
overturn his understanding of his own family.
True Grit by Charles Portis (1968)
The movie versions are fine, but they only
approximate the drollery and tenderness of this tale of
Wild West vengeance. Narrated in retrospect by a
rawhide-tough woman named Mattie Ross, the novel
recounts her girlhood quest to hunt down her father's
killer in lawless Indian Territory, with the aid of
dissolute U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn. The
brilliance is all in the tone: Beneath Mattie's blunt
manner lies a fierce intelligence and wagon-loads of
grit. Girls will love this one, too.
hZ for Zachariah by Robert C. O'Brien (1973)
A post-apocalyptic novel for adolescents that is all the
more frightening for its restraint. It has been a year
since all-out nuclear war has left Ann Burden
apparently the only girl in the radioactive remains of
the United States; thanks to a quirk of geography, her
family's farm (but not her family) survived the
cataclysm. When she sees a column of distant smoke,
Ann realizes that she is not alone, and soon she is
nursing back to health a man who turns out not to be
the person to play Adam to her Eve.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (1943)
This vivid novel of early 20th-century Brooklyn is
proof that mature material can be rendered with such
subtle humanity that a younger teen can read it with as
much enjoyment as a person many years older. I got
my copy in a used bookstore when I was 11 and was so
entranced by the story of book-loving Francie Nolan
and her impoverished Irish-Catholic family—her
beautiful mother, her handsome drunken father and
various other misbehaving or censorious relatives—
that I read it over and over throughout adolescence.
Only years later did I grasp everything that happened
between the adult characters. Isn't that what being a
young reader, or indeed a teenager, is all about?
Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood
By Sherman Alexie ∙ June 10, 2011
Recently, I was the surprise commencement speaker at the
promotion ceremony for a Seattle alternative high school. I
spoke to sixty students, who’d come from sixteen different
districts, and had survived depression, attempted suicide, gang
warfare, sexual and physical abuse, absentee parents, poverty,
racism, and learning disabilities in order to graduate.
These students had read my young adult novel, “The
Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian,” and had been
inspired by my autobiographical story of a poor reservation
Indian boy and his desperate and humorous attempts to find a
better life.
I spoke about resilience—about my personal struggles with
addiction and mental illness—but it was the student speakers
who told the most important stories about survival.
A young woman recalled the terrible moment when indifferent school administrators told her
that she couldn’t possibly be a teen mother and finish high school. So they suggested she get
a General Education Degree (GED) and move on with her life. But, after taking a practice
test, she realized that the GED was far too easy for her, so she transferred to that alternative
high school, and is now the mother of a three-year-old and a high school graduate soon to
attend college.
After the ceremony, many of the graduates shook my hand, hugged me, took photos with me,
and asked me questions about my book and my life. Other students hovered on the edges and
eyed me with suspicion and/or shyness.
It was a beautiful and painful ceremony. But it was not unique. I have visited dozens of high
schools—rich and poor, private and public, integrated and segregated, absolutely safe and
fearfully dangerous—and have heard hundreds of stories that are individually tragic and
collectively agonizing.
Almost every day, my mailbox is filled with handwritten letters from students–teens and preteens–who have read my YA book and loved it. I have yet to receive a letter from a child
somehow debilitated by the domestic violence, drug abuse, racism, poverty, sexuality, and
murder contained in my book. To the contrary, kids as young as ten have sent me
autobiographical letters written in crayon, complete with drawings inspired by my book, that
are just as dark, terrifying, and redemptive as anything I’ve ever read.
And, often, kids have told me that my YA novel is the only book they’ve ever read in its
entirety.
So when I read Meghan Cox Gurdon’s complaints about the “depravity” and “hideously
distorted portrayals” of contemporary young adult literature, I laughed at her condescension.
Does Ms. Gurdon honestly believe that a sexually explicit YA novel might somehow
traumatize a teen mother? Does she believe that a YA novel about murder and rape will
somehow shock a teenager whose life has been damaged by murder and rape? Does she
believe a dystopian novel will frighten a kid who already lives in hell?
When I think of the poverty-stricken, sexually and physically abused, self-loathing Native
American teenager that I was, I can only wish, immodestly, that I’d been given the
opportunity to read “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.” Or Laurie Halse
Anderson’s “Speak.” Or Chris Lynch’s “Inexusable.” Or any of the books that Ms. Gurdon
believes to be irredeemable. I can’t speak for other writers, but I think I wrote my YA novel
as a way of speaking to my younger, irredeemable self.
Of course, all during my childhood, would-be saviors tried to rescue my fellow tribal
members. They wanted to rescue me. But, even then, I could only laugh at their platitudes. In
those days, the cultural conservatives thought that KISS and Black Sabbath were going to
impede my moral development. They wanted to protect me from sex when I had already been
raped. They wanted to protect me from evil though a future serial killer had already abused
me. They wanted me to profess my love for God without considering that I was the child and
grandchild of men and women who’d been sexually and physically abused by generations of
clergy.
What was my immature, childish response to those would-be saviors?
“Wow, you are way, way too late.”
And now, as an adult looking back, I wonder why those saviors tried to warn me about the
crimes that were already being committed against me.
When some cultural critics fret about the “ever-more-appalling” YA books, they aren’t trying
to protect African-American teens forced to walk through metal detectors on their way into
school. Or Mexican-American teens enduring the culturally schizophrenic life of being
American citizens and the children of illegal immigrants. Or Native American teens growing
up on Third World reservations. Or poor white kids trying to survive the meth-hazed trailer
parks. They aren’t trying to protect the poor from poverty. Or victims from rapists.
No, they are simply trying to protect their privileged notions of what literature is and should
be. They are trying to protect privileged children. Or the seemingly privileged.
Two years ago, I met a young man attending one of the most elite private high schools in the
country. He quietly spoke to me of his agony. What kind of pain could a millionaire’s child
be suffering? He hadn’t been physically or sexually abused. He hadn’t ever been hungry.
He’d never seen one person strike another in anger. He’d never even been to a funeral.
So what was his problem?
“I want to be a writer,” he said. “But my father won’t let me. He wants me to be a soldier.
Like he was.”
He was seventeen and destined to join the military. Yes, he was old enough to die and kill for
his country. And old enough to experience the infinite horrors of war. But according to Ms.
Gurdon, he might be too young to read a YA novel that vividly portrays those very same
horrors.
“I don’t want to be like my father,” that young man said. “I want to be myself. Just like in
your book.”
I felt powerless in that moment. I could offer that young man nothing but my empathy and
the promise of more books about teenagers rescuing themselves from the adults who seek to
control and diminish him.
Teenagers read millions of books every year. They read for entertainment and for education.
They read because of school assignments and pop culture fads.
And there are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They
read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the
callow protestations of certain adults, that books-especially the dark and dangerous ones-will
save them.
As a child, I read because books–violent and not, blasphemous and not, terrifying and not–
were the most loving and trustworthy things in my life. I read widely, and loved plenty of the
classics so, yes, I recognized the domestic terrors faced by Louisa May Alcott’s March
sisters. But I became the kid chased by werewolves, vampires, and evil clowns in Stephen
King’s books. I read books about monsters and monstrous things, often written with
monstrous language, because they taught me how to battle the real monsters in my life.
And now I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen
facing everyday and epic dangers. I don’t write to protect them. It’s far too late for that. I
write to give them weapons–in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their
monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.
Who Decides What Books Teens Read?
By Natalie Garside ∙ September 27, 2011
There is something uniquely polarizing about banned books for teens and
children. When an adult decides to buy a book, the conflict of its content exists
only between themselves and social mores. When a teen or child reaches for a
book, immediately involved is a parent or caregiver. On the one hand you've got
authors, fiercely passionate about telling the truth in their writing, in
acknowledging the realities faced by teens and children no matter how dark or
brutal. On the other you have adults willing to stand between that content and
their child, to protect them from and nurture in them feelings and realities
unconnected to anything unpleasant. The battle between these two ideologies may
be a healthy one.
Recently Meghan Cox Gurdon's "Darkness Too Visible" article in the Wall Street
Journal ignited a fury of response in the Young Adult (YA) writing community
when it chastised local bookshops for exposing teens to depravity, violence and
abuse. She highlighted titles like Go Ask Alice a diary of a teen's spiral into drug
abuse, rape and prostitution and went so far as to site S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders
as "launching the industry" on YA novels with its tale of "class tensions, family
dysfunction and violent, disaffected youth."
Lauren Myracle's Shine about gay hate crimes in a small southern community,
and Cheryl Rainfield's Scars about a 15-year-old who copes with memories of
childhood sexual abuse by cutting herself, also made Cox Gurdon's list when they
were on the table for banning by the U.S. library system. She thought their
profanity and content crossed the line when parents and caregivers were trying to
exercise "judgement" and "taste" in what their children were exposed to. The
move to ban them fell through. She was honest about how cornered parents feel
when teachers, libraries and authors themselves accuse such censorship as
banning the truth and reality of the world from children and teenagers. She
acknowledges that the landscape is changing in literature and it is harder than ever
for a parent to have any real control over what their children are influenced by via
literature, television and movies.
Authors of Young Adult books immediately took up arms. Sherman Alexie,
author of the semi-autobiographical YA book The Absolutely True Diary of a
Part-time Indian countered with his own article, "Why the Best Kids Books Are
Written in Blood," describing the profound experiences he had touring high
schools and talking to teens about the real issues they deal with. He talked about
resilience and hope and the need for teens and children to connect with others
about their experiences. And he highlighted that darkness already exists in
children's lives and needed to be acknowledged.
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"I have yet to receive a letter from a child somehow debilitated by the domestic
violence, drug abuse, racism, poverty, sexuality, and murder contained in my
book. To the contrary, kids as young as 10 have sent me autobiographical letters
written in crayon, complete with drawings inspired by my book, that are just as
dark, terrifying, and redemptive as anything I've ever read."
Books like Laurie Halse Anderson's Speak whose heroine struggles to find the
courage to tell the truth about being raped at a party and Chris Lynch's
Inexcusable told from the perspective of a teen football player who can't
understand why what he has done is considered rape, made his list of books he
wishes had been available when he was an abused teen and felt unredeemable.
The Twittersphere lit up during this exchange with the hashtag #YASaves filled
with comments from YA Authors, teen readers, booksellers, teachers and parents
talking about the incredible influence and experience of reading on their lives.
Authors like Cassandra Clare whose Mortal Instrument series features an urban
fantasy landscape where teens confront issues of family dysfunction, loss, and
sexuality weighed in on their own teen experiences and the dark places within
them, claiming that difficult content confronted in kids and teen books plays a
vital role in helping them cope.
Ellen Hopkins, whose series of poetic , free-form YA books , beginning with
Crank cover the horrors of drug abuse and are particularly well-received in
Canada, tweeted, "It is ludicrous to assume a teen who reads about cutting will
choose to self-harm."
Other responses cautioned against painting Cox Gurdon's article too harshly:
"Cox Gurdon isn't saying: Never read young-adult books. She's saying: Know
what's in those books, and use judgment, as you would with movies."
Malinda Lo, author of Ash, a Cinderella retelling featuring a gay heroine who falls
in love with a royal huntress, tweeted, "The subtext of Gurdon's essay is that YA
literature has a responsibility to teens to show them a moral world. The problem
is: Whose morals?"
Responses were varied as illustrated in the book blog Bookshelves of Doom's
post, "A round up of WSJ #YASaves responses."
An incredible dialogue opened up between two groups of people who love
children and teens: parents and caregivers who cherish and protect them, and
authors who are determined to keep vigil with all of the feelings and experiences
teens and children have through the stories they tell.
QUOTE-NOTE-THOUGHT
Now that you have read the three articles and have completed a talking to the text with all three, please choose a
stance. Is there ever a time when censorship is appropriate? Review your talking to the text and complete the
Quote-Note-Thought chart in order to pull out six quotes that you can use in your paper to support your position.
NAME:
DATE:
PERIOD:
KEYSTONE PERSUASIVE SCORING GUIDELINES Censorship Essay
Scoring Doman
Distinguished (8)
Proficient (6)
Apprentice (4)
Novice (2)
Incomplete (0)
 Provides no
evidence of claim
or position
 Displays no
understanding of
task, purpose, and
audience
OR
 Does not respond
to the prompt
 Provides little to
no content
 Does not use
transitions to link
ideas
OR
 Does not respond
to the prompt
Thesis/Focus
 Establishes and
sustains a precise
claim or position
 Displays a clear
understanding of
task, purpose, and
audience
 Establishes a
claim or position
 Displays an
understanding of
task, purpose, and
audience
 Provides an
inconsistent claim
or position
 Displays a limited
understanding of
task, purpose, and
audience
 Provides vague
or indistinct claim
or position
 Displays a
minimal
understanding of
task, purpose, and
audience
Content
 Provides relevant
content and specific
and effective
supporting details
that demonstrate a
clear understanding
of purpose
 Uses sophisticated
transitional words,
phrases, and
clauses to link ideas
and create cohesion
 Considers possible
counterclaims
(alternate or
opposing
arguments)
 Chooses
sophisticated
organizational
strategies
appropriate for task,
purpose, and
audience
 Presents fair and
relevant evidence to
support claim or
position
 Includes a clear
and well-defined
introduction, body,
and conclusion that
support or reinforce
the argument
 Provides
relevant content
and effective
supporting details
 Uses transitional
words, phrases,
and clauses to link
ideas
 Acknowledges
possible
counterclaims
(alternate or
opposing
arguments)
 Provides
insufficient content
and ineffective
supporting details
 May use
simplistic and/or
illogical transitional
expressions
 May not
acknowledge
possible
counterclaims
(alternate or
opposing
arguments)
 Provides minimal
content
 Uses few or no
transitional
expressions to link
ideas
 Does no
acknowledge
possible
counterclaims
(alternate or
opposing
arguments)
 Chooses
appropriate
organizational
strategies for task,
purpose, and
audience
 Presents
relevant evidence
to support claim or
position
 Includes a clear
introduction, body,
and conclusion
that support the
argument
 Displays some
evidence of
organizational
strategies
 Presents
insufficient
evidence to support
claim or position
 May not include
an introduction,
body, and/or
conclusion
 Displays little
evidence of
organizational
strategies
 Presents little or
no evidence to
support claim or
position
 May not include
an identifiable
introduction, body,
and/or conclusion
Organization
 Displays no
evidence of
organizational
strategies
 Presents no
evidence to support
claim or position
 Does not include
an identifiable
introduction, body,
and/or conclusion
OR
 Does not respond
to prompt
Style
 Uses consistently
precise language
and a wide variety of
sentence structures
 Chooses an
effective style and
tone, and maintains
a consistent point of
view
 Uses precise
language and a
variety of
sentence
structures
 Chooses an
appropriate style
and tone, and a
point of view
 Uses imprecise
language and a
limited variety of
sentence structures
 May choose an
inappropriate style
or tone, and may
shift point of view
 Uses simplistic or
repetitious
language and
sentence structures
 Demonstrates
little or no
understating of
tone or point of
view
 Uses repetitious
language and
sentence structures
 Demonstrates no
understating of
style, tone or point
of view
OR
 Does not respond
to prompt
Conventions
 Writer makes few
errors and errors do
not interfere with
reader
understanding
 Writer makes
few errors and
errors seldom
interfere with
reader
understanding
 Demonstrates
control of
standard English
grammar and
usage
 Demonstrates
control of
standard English
capitalization,
punctuation, and
spelling
 Demonstrates
control of
sentence
formation
 Writer makes
errors and errors
may interfere with
reader
understanding
 Writer makes
errors and errors
often interfere with
reader
understanding
 Demonstrates
limited or
inconsistent of
standard English
grammar and
usage
 Demonstrates
limited or
inconsistent of
standard English
capitalization,
punctuation, and
spelling
 Demonstrates
limited or
inconsistent of
sentence formation
 Demonstrates
minimal control of
standard English
grammar and
usage
 Demonstrates
minimal control of
standard English
capitalization,
punctuation, and
spelling
 Demonstrates
minimal control of
sentence formation
 Writer makes
errors and errors
consistently
interfere with
reading
understanding
 Demonstrates
little or no control of
standard English
grammar and
usage
 Demonstrates
little or no control of
standard English
capitalization,
punctuation, and
spelling
 Demonstrates
little or no control of
sentence formation
 Demonstrates
command of
standard English
grammar and usage
 Demonstrates
command of
standard English
capitalization,
punctuation, and
spelling
 Demonstrates
command of
sentence formation
TOTAL: ______/50
COMMENTS: