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The following
Summary-and-Response essay was built from the Essay Planning Sheet below.
Please first read the
professional essay, Don't
Let Stereotypes Warp Your Judgments by Robert Heilbroner
ESSAY PLANNING SHEET (Follow the Color Key to see the organization)
Essay’s Thesis Sentence: Heilbroner gives us three ways we can eliminate stereotyping
behavior from our lives.
Topic (Point) of First Body Paragraph: Become aware of mental standardized pictures.
Topic (Point) of
Second Body Paragraph: Become suspicious of all judgments.
Topic (Point) of Third
Body Paragraph: Be wary of generalizations about people.
Topic (Point) of Fourth
Body Paragraph: ________________________________
ESSAY
Sample
Student Essay—Summary-and-Response—Example #1
|
A summary of,
followed by a response to, Robert Heilbroner’s
essay “Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your Judgments.”
Stereotyping affects many areas of our lives,
shaping not only how we view the world as a whole, but also how we view each
individual we meet. I, myself, am occasionally guilty of stereotyping
and have come in contact with many others who are guilty of the same
thing. In his essay “Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your Judgments” Robert Heilbroner discusses the many faces of
stereotyping. According to Heilbroner there
is nothing positive about stereotyping because it makes us lazy thinkers and
harms both the people we are stereotyping and ourselves. THESIS
SENTENCE: Heilbroner gives us three ways we can eliminate stereotyping
behavior from our lives. Topic (Point) of First Body Paragraph: Become aware
of mental standardized pictures. The first
suggestion Heilbroner gives to eliminate stereotyping
is to “become aware of the standardized pictures in our heads, in other
people’s heads, in the world around us” (34). My father believes that all
French people are stupid, rude “Frogs”. I don’t know why he believes
this; he doesn’t even know that many French people. I have never heard
my father say anything positive about a French person. He must have had
a negative experience with one French person and so now judges all French
people by the same yardstick. This judgment on my father’s part is very
unfair. He has not met every French person in the world, so he
cannot say that all French people are stupid and rude. He could
say that one Frenchman he met was that way, but should not judge all men by
one man. Topic (Point) of Second Body Paragraph: Become suspicious
of all judgments.
The second idea Heilbroner states as a way to
eliminate stereotyping people is that “we can become suspicious of all
judgments that we allow exceptions to prove” (35). He describes a situation
where an older person says that all teenagers are wild, and when he meets a
teenager who is responsible he says that this one particular teenager is an
exception to the rule. When I was in high school we did a lot of
studying on Nazi Germany, and I specialized my essay writing on the
extermination of the Jews. It would have been so easy for me to fall
for the idea that all Germans were monsters, but because I took German as a
second language from an amazing older German man, I did not believe this
stereotype. I could have looked at him as an exception to the rule, but
chose instead to believe that there were many wonderful people in Germany
during this time that were trapped in a terrible situation they could do
nothing about. Topic (Point) of Third Body Paragraph:
Be wary of generalizations about people.
The third idea that Heilbroner states is that “we
can be wary of generalizations about people” (36). How true this
is. I am Canadian and while working in the tourist industry in Canada,
many people I worked with looked at Americans as being very rude and
opinionated. It was true that some of the tourists we met from America
were rude and opinionated, but just as many were not. We cannot make
generalizations that include a whole nation of people. If we were to do
this, we could say that all Muslims are terrorists, that
all Blacks are afraid of snakes, (that one was from my neighbor just last
week!!) that all Canadians say “eh” and that all Americans are rude
and opinionated. Conclusion
There is never an all or nothing situation with people. “People” breaks
down into an individual person, and each person is unique and original.
Each person is as individual as their DNA or their fingerprints. Not
even identical twins have the same fingerprint. And the “fingerprint”
we each leave on this world is an individual thing, and cannot be lumped into
a stereotype of any sort. We were all created equal…but very, very
different. Works Cited Heilbroner, Robert. “Don’t Let Stereotypes Warp Your judgments.” National
Relationship Review 22 August 2002: 34-37 |