preview

Biographical Essay On Speak By Laurie Halse Anderson

Decent Essays

Laurie Halse Anderson, was born and was raised through many struggles that has built and strengthened her to the lady she is today. As a little child, she suffered from a speech impediment, an obstacle that took her a while to overcome. “When I was growing up, nobody thought I was going to become a writer. Especially if you talk to those early teachers. I struggled a bit to learn how to read. I had to go out for extra reading support and speech therapy, too, because I had a speech impediment when I was a little kid. When I did crack the reading code, I became that kid who was always in the library.” (Reading Rockets 1)
In second grade, her teacher taught her haiku, and she loved it because it was short. She could spell the words easier because they were shorter, and it would be harder for her to spell them wrong. Her teacher explained that she could write down her feelings and the reader could interpret them easier. In that class she had a moment where she realized she could write, and she loved every moment of it. (Reading Rockets 1)
As a child, Laurie could listen to her father's storytelling …show more content…

I wrote it before I wrote Speak. I actually got it to draft eight and it was still pretty bad so I put it down, took that year and wrote Speak. And the writing of Speak in that first person point of view taught me so much about how to get inside a character's head that I went back and changed the point of view of Fever and revised it a bunch more times until it was ready to be published. I did have one incident where a child heard an early section of the book and made me tone things down because I am a little blood thirsty. I brought the chapter to my daughter's fifth grade classroom in which the mom in the book has to be bled because she's so ill. And it was pretty detailed. And I read it out loud. And the room was warm. It was after lunchtime. And a little girl in the back of the room… passed right out cold.” (Scholastic

Get Access