Overcoming a Single Story by Nina

Overcoming a Single Story by Nina - July 2026 Scholarship Essay

While I struggled with AP Chemistry, or some units in World History, my hardest class was AP Literature and Composition. You can memorize the periodic table, the history of the Russian Empire, how many electrons hydrogen releases, or the causes of World War II, but the English subject is a little more complicated. Literature is not black and white but rather is convoluted and vague. A hat is not just a hat in Catcher in the Rye, people do rise from the dead in Morrison’s Beloved, and Edna Pontellier’s death in The Awakening was happy? I am bothered by the illogical reasoning yet simultaneously awed by the depth.
Literature, as I have learned, is a unique complex between writer and reader. A book is a structure decorated by experience and interpretation. Unfortunately, I always felt excluded from this relationship, unable to see beyond a conk shell in Lord of the Flies or Ophelia’s death in Hamlet. Thomas C. Foster explains “that reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer’s alone.” (Foster 40). In literature, fiction or non-fiction, Dr. Seuss or Shakespear, one must recognize the interplay between reader and text.
This all shifted one day when my teacher read us a poem out loud at the end of class, and it touched me – “Free Flight” by June Jordan. Suddenly, I was the girl in the poem, and I understood that sometimes simple words are just replacements for feelings that only experience can describe. From that moment, no piece of literature was a single story, but rather an opportunity to broaden my perception and awareness.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie brilliantly voices this desire to learn in her TED talk, The Danger of a Single Story. She explains how a narrowed perspective results in incomplete understanding, making us ignorant to anything beyond our limited knowledge. Learning has broadened my world; it has inspired me to look at things in a different way, allowed me to be a more empathetic individual, and pushed me to search beyond the single story.
Ultimately, the world is not black and white or objectively simple. Critical thinking is the attempt to reason at the highest level of quality in a fair-minded way. This topic, literature and composition, has given me the foundation to be more empathetic, to be more aware, to face our society with a curious mindset. Of course this was not easy, it challenged a standard of accepting prejudice and refusing diversity. The discomfort of learning is never over, but a well-rounded education is the key to leading a responsible life.