Essay shoes

It is the first one or two sentences in an essay that’s killing me. That’s all I’m missing in order to just get the rest of the words out. I know that after these sentences I’ll say ‘In this essay, I will discuss how Sylvia Plath uses a confessional style to make distinct political and ideological points about pressing social and cultural issues, referencing some of her poems that invoke images of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust’.

And then I’ll go on to talk about ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Daddy’, and ‘The Munich Mannequins’. I’ll talk about her German pen-pal and how she was actually intrigued by her German ancestry, how she was an anti-war activist, and how her poems did NOT appropriate images of collective trauma to exemplify personal struggles, but rather the opposite (personal struggles were used to explain collective trauma). See? This summary + the part of the introduction that I know I’ll write is already 110 words. Add examples, explanations, and quotes and you’ve got 1100 words. Easy.

BUT THOSE SENTENCES AS THE BEGINNING OF THE ESSAY! And no, I don’t like to come back and write my introduction at the end. It makes no sense in my head. I already know all I’ll write about. Those sentences are going to be something general like ‘Confessional poetry was mostly attributed to women at the time’. I GOT IT! THAT’S HOW I’LL START - CONTEXT!

Thanks for tuning in for another episode of what is going on inside Bea’s head when she’s writing an essay.