Essay on a Theme from Downriver

Ask yourself: What message does the author convey by telling the story? What does the author want us to learn or consider by reading the novel? The theme can take the form of a brief and meaningful insight, a comprehensive vision of life, or it may be a single idea.

For instance, Downriver has many topics (friendship, courage, leadership, family, trust, survival, responsibility, loss, making mistakes). The theme would be the lesson you learned about one of the topics from reading the story. For your theme, you have to determine what lesson you learned about a topic such asmaking mistakes, and you might end up with the theme: It is important to learn from mistakes. The theme must be written as a complete sentence. Do not use the word you!

Make an outline for your essay. Once you decide on a theme, write the theme in the form of a complete sentence. That sentence will be your thesis statement.

Outline

  1. Introduction
  1. Hook the reader (catch the reader’s attention by using a question, observation, or a detail from story)
  2. Introduce Downriver by giving a brief statement about the novel. Include the title & author.
  3. Claim/Thesis Statement (theme)
  1. First example from the story that supports thetheme
  2. Supporting detail
  3. Supporting detail
  4. Second example from the story that supports the theme
  5. Supporting detail
  6. Supporting detail
  7. Third example from the story that supports the theme
  8. Supporting detail
  9. Supporting detail
  10. Conclusion
  11. Summarize the claim/thesis statement (theme) using different words.
  12. Leave readers with an interesting thought, something to keep their attention once they have finished reading your essay (connect the theme to the real world outside the novel).

*Use your outline to write your essay. Each Roman numeral contains the information for each paragraph. Do NOT number your paragraphs!

Take the information from your outline and put it into well-written sentences (5 sentences per paragraph) that make up each of your essay’s five paragraphs.

Do NOT number the paragraphs in your essay.

Each paragraph should have at least five well-written sentences.

You may type your essay if you want—but doesn’t have to be—as long as you write neatly.