Home — Essay Samples — Environment — Jungle — Jungle Descriptive

test_template

Jungle Descriptive

  • Categories: Ecotourism Jungle

About this sample

close

Words: 511 |

Published: Mar 20, 2024

Words: 511 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Image of Alex Wood

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

  • 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
  • Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

author

Dr. Karlyna PhD

Verified writer

  • Expert in: Geography & Travel Environment

writer

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

1 pages / 506 words

1 pages / 424 words

3 pages / 1502 words

2 pages / 993 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Jungle

Written by Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book is a classic work of literature that has captivated readers for generations. The story follows the adventures of Mowgli, a young boy raised by wolves in the jungle of India. Throughout [...]

“The Jungle” written by Upton Sinclair in 1906 is a novel which provides an incite to the lives of lower class, early industrial era workers. The story recants horrific and graphic depictions of the meat packing industry in [...]

The album I chose to review is called Money Jungle, featuring Duke Ellington on the piano. This album was first recorded September 17th, 1962, however it wasn’t released until February 1963 by the record label United Artists. [...]

The hydrophobic cotton surface is facilely fabricated by an easy novel method through adsorption of fluorosurfactant on the cotton surface and then polymerization of low-surface-energy fluoro monomer in the presence of an [...]

This essay is about the description and development of a new product that is yet to be introduced to the market. My idea is creating a potless water heater which will be a convenient and quick way of heating water. I argue that [...]

One of or maybe even the biggest threat to humanity now, but even more in the future, is climate change. Yet, not only we humans are endangered by climate change, but also all other species will have to live with the differences [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

  • Instructions Followed To The Letter
  • Deadlines Met At Every Stage
  • Unique And Plagiarism Free

essay writing about jungle

  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

EveryWriter

A New Community of Writers

50 Jungle Adventure Writing Prompts

December 11, 2023 by Richard Leave a Comment

50 Jungle Adventure Writing Prompts

Here are 50 Jungle Adventure Writing Prompts that can take your imagination deep in the jungle. The lush green canopy beckons you deeper into undiscovered territory brimming with wonder and danger in equal measure. Prepare for thrilling expeditions through ancient ruins, close encounters with mysterious beasts, and imaginative worlds hidden within the untamed rainforest when you explore these 25 jungle adventure writing prompts!

Whether you crave wielding magical artifacts that defy reality, joining the high-stakes hunt stopping criminal enterprises threatening rare wildlife, or roleplaying as an intrepid documentarian risking it all to showcase vanishing ecosystems, you’ll find story ideas to spark your wildest jungle fantasies. Weave tales of cursed ancient civilizations, evolutionary experiments gone awry, portals to dinosaur dimensions, and more as you venture down these storytelling trails where truth collides with jungle legends.

So pack your imagination’s bug spray and machete to brave the wilderness where creativity takes root and flourishes. The verdant words await to envelop you in rainforest reveries! Let the story seeds in this blog post germinate epic yarns as you cultivate mystifying jungle tales wrapped in morning mists and emergent curiosities.

  • Your protagonist stumbles upon an ancient temple hidden deep in the jungle and gets trapped inside. What dangers and surprises await them?
  • A massive storm causes your protagonist’s plane to crash land in the jungle. Now they must survive and try to find their way back to civilization.
  • Your protagonist is a wildlife photographer on an expedition to capture rare animal behaviors. They get a once-in-a-lifetime chance but must risk their life to get the perfect shot.
  • While out for a jungle hike, your protagonist slips and falls into a steep ravine. Now injured, lost, and alone, can they find their way out?
  • Your protagonist discovers a rare flower deep in the jungle that bestows magical abilities to whoever consumes it. Do they use it for good or evil?
  • A team of scientists venture into unexplored jungle territory to document new species but discover prehistoric beasts long thought extinct.
  • Your protagonist stumbles upon a band of smugglers using the jungle’s dense vegetation and winding rivers to transport illegal wares.
  • An ancient artifact with untold powers has sat undisturbed in a hidden jungle temple for centuries until your protagonist disturbs its resting place.
  • A jungle guide must lead a group of tourists to safety through treacherous terrain after they ignore warnings and get lost.
  • Your protagonist plunges over raging rapids while whitewater rafting through the jungle. Can they survive and complete their journey?
  • A mysterious disease threatens a remote jungle village. Your protagonist tries to find the source and cure before it spreads further.
  • Greed leads your protagonist’s treasure hunting expedition into dangerous jungle territory containing deadly animals, traps, and hostiles protecting their lands.
  • Your protagonist discovers a secret entrance to a thriving, hidden world existing utterly cut off from modern civilization within the depths of the jungle.
  • Alien forces have invaded Earth and retreated into the jungle to establish a hidden base. Your protagonist stumbles upon it but is then captured.
  • Your protagonist encounters a jungle tribe with customs never before documented by outsiders. But violating their taboos has severe consequences.
  • A deranged war criminal has escaped custody and established a militia deep in the jungle. Your protagonist joins a specialized task force tracking them down.
  • Your protagonist is a park ranger striving to stop poachers decimating endangered jungle wildlife for profit. But the poachers fight dirty and won’t back down easily.
  • A jungle safari guide must use their expertise in survival and animal behavior to save tourists when their vehicles are attacked by wild animals.
  • Your protagonist discovers a new parasite transforming jungle animals into aggressive hybrid creatures. They try to document and cure this new threat before it spreads out of control.
  • While visiting an eco-lodge nestled in the rainforest canopy, your protagonist witnesses illegal logging threatening nearby indigenous communities dependent on the jungle to survive.
  • Your protagonist leads an expedition searching the Amazon rainforest for rare medicinal plants than can cure disease. But traversing the dangerous terrain and wildlife to find these miracle cures won’t be easy.
  • A team of documentary filmmakers disappear in the jungle. Your protagonist joins the dangerous search party to try rescuing them and uncover the truth of what happened.
  • Your protagonist stumbles upon a secretive research facility housing unethical jungle genetic experimentation projects, and must expose their illegal activities.
  • Tribal warfare breaks out in a remote jungle region over disputed lands rich in natural resources. Your protagonist tries negotiating peace but ultimately is forced to choose a side.
  • Cryptozoologists launch an expedition through treacherous jungle terrain, braving hazards to capture proof of the mythical creature they pursue before it disappears forever.
  • Your protagonist discovers an ancient civilization deep in the jungle that still lives much as it did thousands of years ago, untouched by modern technology or civilizations.
  • A kidnapped child is being held for ransom somewhere hidden deep in the winding jungle. Your protagonist joins the dangerous rescue mission.
  • An evil corporation is illegally clear-cutting rare sacred trees in the jungle needed by indigenous people for medicine. Your protagonist leads efforts to expose and stop them.
  • Your protagonist stumbles upon a massive crater in the jungle, leading them to discover it was caused by a meteorite now emitting mysterious energy with strange effects on wildlife.
  • While backpacking through the rainforest, your protagonist is bitten by a venomous snake miles from help. They race against time to find a rare flower said to counteract the venom.
  • Your protagonist’s plane crashes into the jungle, leading them to discover the lost ruins of an ancient temple. Inside lies a portal to another world full of magic and danger.
  • Your protagonist must safely guide a team of scientists studying endangered jungle wildlife through territories ruled by a violent drug cartel.
  • An ancient book discovered in a ruined jungle temple holds secrets that could revive an extinct Mesoamerican language and culture. But dangerous tomb guardians protect it.
  • Your protagonist discovers a family of Sasquatches living deep in the Pacific Northwest rainforest and struggles with whether to protect or expose them to the world.
  • Your protagonist stumbles upon an isolated jungle village practicing dark forbidden magic utilizing plants and rituals to gain power and defy death.
  • Your protagonist leads a documentary film crew trying to capture the first footage proving the existence of a destructive, legendary apeman beast lurking deep in the dense rainforest.
  • Your protagonist joins the search for a team of activists gone missing while trying to save the jungle ecosystem from an expanding palm oil plantation.
  • A jungle shaman calls upon your protagonist to help retrieve a sacred plant growing wild in treacherous terrain, necessary to cure a mysterious plague afflicting their people.
  • Your protagonist must help safely evacuate researchers from their jungle camp along an emergency wilderness trail after it’s overrun by escaped exotic animals.
  • Stranded campers with vital medicine head into perilous jungle territory hoping to find a clearing to signal helicopters for rescue after their plane crashes.
  • Vigilantes recruit your protagonist to stealthily venture into the jungle and infiltrate illegal mining operations poisoning river ecosystems with mercury.
  • Your protagonist discovers a pulsating egg in the ruined jungle temple of an ancient cult. Upon hatching, it spawns a nightmarish creature bringing their worst fears to life.
  • Your protagonist leads wealthy big game hunters on a jungle safari promised to secure record animal trophies, but regrets the environmental impact.
  • After their small plane crashes in the rainforest, your protagonist and the pilot spot ruins of an ancient civilization reclaimed by vegetation and attempt to find treasure.
  • Your protagonist is a zoologist documenting rare behaviors in endangered jungle wildlife. But hunting poachers will do anything to silence them.
  • Homeless children hide out together in the depths of the urban jungle after running away. Your protagonist, once one of them, strives to uncover their refuge.
  • Your protagonist discovers a glowing fungus deep in an unexplored rainforest emanating psychic visions. They plunge into madness the deeper they explore its origin.
  • A distressed woman emerges from the jungle begging for help after claiming she escaped from kidnappers. Your protagonist tries helping but senses not all is as it seems.
  • Your protagonist serves as guide and bodyguard for a TV celebrity host filming their survival show in the dangerous South American rainforest.
  • Cryptic carvings on an ancient temple lead your protagonist to activate a magical portal. They step through to discover an alternate world where dinosaurs rule.

We hope you were able to venture forth into fertile storytelling grounds filled with discovery and danger lurking behind every rainforest revelation. These jungle adventure writing prompts hold the potential for twisting tales stuffed with ancient secrets and bewildering phenomena hidden beneath lush canopies.

If these prompts inspired a writing adventure, please leave some of it in the comments. We’d love to read it. We also have a lot of other writing prompts on our site you may be interested in .

Related posts:

  • 50 Poetry Prompts Every Writer Should Try
  • Daily horror writing prompts 
  • 50 Fantastic Science Fiction Writing Prompts
  • 31 Creepy Writing Prompts for Every Day of October
  • 50 Christmas Fiction Writing Prompts

About Richard

Richard Everywriter (pen name) has worked for literary magazines and literary websites for the last 25 years. He holds degrees in Writing, Journalism, Technology and Education. Richard has headed many writing workshops and courses, and he has taught writing and literature for the last 20 years.  

In writing and publishing he has worked with independent, small, medium and large publishers for years connecting publishers to authors. He has also worked as a journalist and editor in both magazine, newspaper and trade publications as well as in the medical publishing industry.   Follow him on Twitter, and check out our Submissions page .

Reader Interactions

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Privacy Overview

essay writing about jungle

  • study guides
  • lesson plans
  • homework help

The Jungle Essay Topics & Writing Assignments

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

Essay Topic 1

Jurgis has a motto of "I will work harder." Does this attitude ever help Jurgis? Describe how. List at least two situations in which this positive attitude does not help Jurgis? Do you think this is a good motto to live by? Why or why not?

Essay Topic 2

The title, "The Jungle," is certainly applicable to the story itself. Explain the different ways a jungle relates to the characters, to the setting, and to the events in this story. How is Chicago like a jungle? Do you agree that this title was the best choice? Why or why not?

Essay Topic 3

Sinclair makes it pretty clear in the text the he feels socialism is the answer to the world's problems. Did you think Sinclair's arguments were convincing? Why or why not? How does socialism help Jurgis in this story?

Essay Topic 4

The character of Jurgis is...

(read more Essay Topics)

View The Jungle Fun Activities

FOLLOW BOOKRAGS:

Follow BookRags on Facebook

  • Create a List
  • Cathy Duffy Reviews Home >
  • Homeschool Reviews Core Curricula >
  • Composition & Grammar >
  • Ungraded, Multi-level Resources - Composition >

The Writer's Jungle: A Survivor's Guide to Writing With Kids

Julie Bogart's book The Writer's Jungle can be used as a standalone resource for teaching children to write or as a jumping off point for using other writing tools from Braver Writer. The Writer's Jungle comes as a PDF that you will want to print and put into a binder with tabbed dividers. You will be adding to the various sections ideas and examples you might glean from other Braver Writer resources or those you come up with on your own. While The Writer's Jungle presents a philosophy of writing, it is much more than that. Chapter by chapter, Bogart teaches parents how to teach writing skills, but parents can learn along with their children. You should read the lengthy, 22-page preface plus the briefer introduction and “How to Use this Book” before jumping into the chapters. The preface is not something you can easily skip as in many books; you really should read it since that is where you get the big picture of how The Writer's Jungle works. It even includes a few entertaining writing exercises that you will likely want to try with your family as well as a description of the “snip and pin” method of revising a written piece.

The entire book is 246 pages long, and that might seem intimidating. However, it seems to me that after you read the preface, you can read chapter one and start teaching. Working with the ideas in that chapter alone could keep you going for years! But you can move on through the other chapters, implementing as you go.

As Julie explains in the preface, a unique feature of The Writer's Jungle is the emphasis on literary elements rather than grammar, structure or other components. These are not ignored, but they play second fiddle. Reflecting the influence of Charlotte Mason and others, Bogart stresses the need to introduce children to quality literature, letting them interact with and develop appreciation for the turn of phrase that delights the reader.

In the first chapter, Bogart develops her ideas by urging parents/teachers to provide children with a language-rich environment as the nourishment they need to develop their own writing abilities. Narration, copywork, and dictation are tools familiar to Charlotte Mason fans that Bogart uses to develop skills at the basic level. She explains, “ I believe that early elementary writing programs are a bit silly. The number one priority of a writing program for kids under 12 should be to guard their enjoyment of writing. If you succeed in keeping them interested and willing, you'll have given them a wonderful gift.” Bogart believes this can be accomplished by having young children do less of their original writing and, instead, have them spend time interacting with “writing that's already written” (p. 6). So she provides concrete procedures and techniques for doing so along with practical advice on scheduling and assessment.

Each chapter continues to educate the parent/teacher while adding more techniques and teaching strategies. Among these are a communication game, freewriting, developing observation skills, overcoming writer's block, developing and narrowing topics, editing, developing a writer's “voice,” the ten most important elements of writing, and learning how to write essays and other structured forms.

Ideas in this book will take you all the way through high school. If you would like more assistance with regular assignments, you might subscribe to one of Bogart's two digital language arts subscription programs: The Arrow (for elementary and early junior high levels) and The Boomerang (for grades 7-9). Each nine-issue subscription includes a nine-month reading list, four passages for dictation for each month with helpful notes, and a writing focus and exercise for each month. The Slingshot , while no longer published on a subscription basis, has back issues available for those working with students at high school level. In each issue of the Slingshot, students study a classic work of fiction plus one poet and his or her work.

Even more helpful for those with high school students is Bogart's Help for High School. This 166-page e-book is written directly to students, although parents should also read it to be able to support and encourage students as well as to be able to evaluate work. Help for High School prepares students for the essay writing that will be required in higher education, but it does so by honing basic writing skills rather than teaching formulaic ways of writing. It is divided into two parts that deal with creative writing and expository writing respectively. However, creative writing is taught for use also as a building block or pre-writing strategy for expository writing rather being treated as a separate entity always distinct from expository writing. The “Keen Observation of an Idea” and “Telling the True Truth” modules in part one are particularly valuable as preliminary steps to essay writing. The first section also includes a great little piece on “apologetics” and writing for school assignments that every student AND parent should read. The second section teaches essay writing, including how to write a thesis statement, introductions and conclusions, citations, and the structure of an academic essay. However, Bogart stretches students to write two different kinds of essays, one “closed” and one “open.” The closed essay follows the traditional format students are commonly taught, while the open essay is an investigative piece for which students explore a question without choosing and defending a particular position. I appreciate this broader approach to essay writing since the latter type essay is closer to the essay writing done by adults in the “real world.”

Students work through the modules in Help for High School , completing the writing assignments for each section. Occasionally, tips for parental evaluation are included. While Help for High School is a natural extension of The Writer's Jungle , it can be used on its own. (Braver Writer sells a “package” that includes digital versions of both books, or you can purchase books individually.)

Students who need more interaction and/or guidance might benefit from one of the Brave Writer online writing courses. These courses last from three to eight weeks and focus on either basic skills or specialized topics. Current courses listed are Foundations in Writing, Kidswrite Basic, Kidswrite Intermediate, Nature Journaling, Mini Reports, SAT/ACT Essay Class, Shakespeare Family Workshop, and Shakespeare: Macbeth. Classes are asynchronous; students can work any time they wish as long as they keep up with the group. They do not have to be online at specific times. They log on, read the instructions, examples and assignment, work offline, post their work, read comments from the instructor on their work AND other students' work, and interact with other students by posting.

All of these resources and others available through www.bravewriter.com are designed to help students develop a love for writing along with the necessary skills. Busy parents are likely to appreciate the tutorial nature of many of these resources since they lighten the parent's teaching load.

Pricing Information

When prices appear, please keep in mind that they are subject to change. Click on links where available to verify price accuracy.

The Writer's Jungle - $79.

Core Curricula

  • Art & Music
  • Bible & Religion
  • Catholic Curricula
  • Composition & Grammar
  • Early Learning / Preschool
  • Foreign Language
  • Handwriting
  • History & Geography
  • Grade Level Packages & Courses
  • Math Supplements
  • Phonics & Reading
  • Spelling & Vocabulary
  • Unit Studies & All-In-One Programs
  • Register | Log in

Instant Key

  • Need For Parent or Teacher Instruction: moderate to high
  • Learning Environment: group or one-on-one
  • Grade Level: grades 4-12
  • Educational Methods: real books, memorization, interactive, creative activities, traditional activity pages or exercises
  • Technology: PDF
  • Educational Approaches: eclectic, Charlotte Mason
  • Religious Perspective: secular but Christian friendly

Publisher's Info

  • Brave Writer LLC
  • (513) 307-1405
  • https://bravewriter.com/

Note: Publishers, authors, and service providers never pay to be reviewed. They do provide free review copies or online access to programs for review purposes.

Disclosure of Material Connection: Some of the links in the post above are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission. Regardless, I only recommend products or services that I believe will add value to my readers. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255 "Guidelines Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising."

Writing Universe - logo

  • Environment
  • Information Science
  • Social Issues
  • Argumentative
  • Cause and Effect
  • Classification
  • Compare and Contrast
  • Descriptive
  • Exemplification
  • Informative
  • Controversial
  • Exploratory
  • What Is an Essay
  • Length of an Essay
  • Generate Ideas
  • Types of Essays
  • Structuring an Essay
  • Outline For Essay
  • Essay Introduction
  • Thesis Statement
  • Body of an Essay
  • Writing a Conclusion
  • Essay Writing Tips
  • Drafting an Essay
  • Revision Process
  • Fix a Broken Essay
  • Format of an Essay
  • Essay Examples
  • Essay Checklist
  • Essay Writing Service
  • Pay for Research Paper
  • Write My Research Paper
  • Write My Essay
  • Custom Essay Writing Service
  • Admission Essay Writing Service
  • Pay for Essay
  • Academic Ghostwriting
  • Write My Book Report
  • Case Study Writing Service
  • Dissertation Writing Service
  • Coursework Writing Service
  • Lab Report Writing Service
  • Do My Assignment
  • Buy College Papers
  • Capstone Project Writing Service
  • Buy Research Paper
  • Custom Essays for Sale

Can’t find a perfect paper?

  • Free Essay Samples

Essays on Jungle

Rikki-Tikki-Tavi: A Brave and Valiant Mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a short story in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. It's the story of a young Indian grey mongoose who is brave and valiant. The story has been anthologized and published in various versions as a short book. We will look at its...

Found a perfect essay sample but want a unique one?

Request writing help from expert writer in you feed!

Related topic to Jungle

  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

WRITERS HELPING WRITERS®

Helping writers become bestselling authors

Setting Thesaurus: Jungle/Rainforest

January 10, 2009 by BECCA PUGLISI

Vines, ferns, lush foliage, tall trees (traveller’s fan, Heliconia, trumpet trees, cahoon), dense undergrowth, fronds, lagoons, cliffs, rocky outcropping, downed trees, canopy blocking the sun, mosses, creepers, water vines, brown dead fall, mud, lizards, snakes…

bird calls, wings fluttering, monkey hoots/shrieks, animal movements (growls, grunts, snorts, paws hitting the ground, slithering, hissing, animal cries), running water (rushing creaks, waterfalls, rivers, streams or rain clattering off the leaves), one’s own heavy…

stuffy & warm air, rotting vegetation, body odor, natural plant smells (sweet to attract insects/pollinators, bitter to ward them off), animal musk, flowers (few in the jungle–more in the rainforest)

Water, air thick on the tongue, edible leaves and root or fruits, prey caught and cooked over a fire (gamy, stringy, chewy, rubbery), stale breath, fresh rain

Slippery leaves, rough vines, crumbly wet ground underfoot in places, branches crackling, holding branches back, squeezing through a stand of bamboo & feeling the smooth wood against the chest and back, sweat running down the neck and face, slurping dew off a leaf…

Helpful hints:

–The words you choose can convey atmosphere and mood.

Example 1: Dusk stained the glistening foliage with shadow and murk. As nightfall descended, the sounds of the jungle began to ebb. Uncertainty hung in the warm, wet air as the creatures began to prepare for the long stretch of darkness. Soon new sounds emerged: footfalls and the rumbling growls of predators walking their hunting ground.

–Similes and metaphors create strong imagery when used sparingly.

Example 1: (Simile)  Vines slithered down the cliff face like snakes, seeking the pool of tepid water below.

Think beyond what a character sees, and provide a sensory feast for readers

Logo-OneStop-For-Writers-25-small

Setting is much more than just a backdrop, which is why choosing the right one and describing it well is so important. To help with this, we have expanded and integrated this thesaurus into our online library at One Stop For Writers . Each entry has been enhanced to include possible sources of conflict , people commonly found in these locales , and setting-specific notes and tips , and the collection itself has been augmented to include a whopping 230 entries—all of which have been cross-referenced with our other thesauruses for easy searchability. So if you’re interested in seeing a free sample of this powerful Setting Thesaurus, head on over and register at One Stop.

The Setting Thesaurus Duo

On the other hand, if you prefer your references in book form, we’ve got you covered, too, because both books are now available for purchase in digital and print copies . In addition to the entries, each book contains instructional front matter to help you maximize your settings. With advice on topics like making your setting do double duty and using figurative language to bring them to life, these books offer ample information to help you maximize your settings and write them effectively.

BECCA PUGLISI

Becca Puglisi is an international speaker, writing coach, and bestselling author of The Emotion Thesaurus and its sequels. Her books are available in five languages, are sourced by US universities, and are used by novelists, screenwriters, editors, and psychologists around the world. She is passionate about learning and sharing her knowledge with others through her Writers Helping Writers blog and via One Stop For Writers —a powerhouse online library created to help writers elevate their storytelling.

Share this:

  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Reader Interactions

' src=

April 13, 2021 at 6:01 pm

Amazing, really helped me, especially the hints! Thank you

' src=

January 12, 2009 at 1:26 pm

Love these posts.. 🙂

January 11, 2009 at 2:30 pm

Glad we can help. Lady G!

Thanks PJ. I posted it a bit later than usual–maybe that messed you up, lol.

CR, I agree. I love tropical locals.

Thanks Bish. I’ve never tried it, but I’d love to.

' src=

April 14, 2020 at 10:14 am

Excellent piece of writing, I especially liked how descriptive you had made the little bits and phrases for other aspiring writers to use. I’m much more of a fantasy writer but I needed this in order to do something, so it came in really helpful! I can hardly wait to get on with my assignment!

With endless ‘Thank You’s’, TheRandomizer

January 11, 2009 at 7:46 am

Great stuff! (As an aside…I saw breadfruit listed. I absolutely LOVE breadfruit. I wish I could get it here where I live.)

January 10, 2009 at 10:03 pm

hmmmm . . . makes me want to go on a rain forest adventure!

January 10, 2009 at 9:39 pm

Nice! I was about to say “wait, don’t these come on Saturdays” but then I realized it was Saturday 🙂

January 10, 2009 at 9:09 pm

YES! This is exactly what I need right now for my Amazon jungle scenes. 🙂 Thanks!

Privacy Overview

Jungle: Jungle Essay an Short Words Jungle Paragraph

Jungle: Jungle Last month, we were taken to a jungle for a camp. We went there with our teachers and friends . We hired a forest guide. A tropical jungle is an awesome place to visit. I was looking forward to this visit as I had read a lot about jungles in stories.

A Visit To A Jungle Paragraph

essay on forest,essay writing,essay on jungle book,english essay,jungle book essay,essay on jungle book in english,essay,forest essay in english,essay jungle book,forest essay,essay on forest in english,essay on jungle safari,essay about jungle book,english essay on tree,esaay on jungle king,jungle,lion king of jungle english essay,jungle book essay in english,jungle book essay in english,lion essay,10 lines essay on jungle safari,essay on zoo

Jungle: The moment we entered the jungle, it became semi-dark. Sunlight could barely penetrate through the leaves of the tall trees. The sky was almost invisible because of the canopy of leaves high above us. At ground level, thick vegetation grew in every direction.

The air was moist and had a peculiar smell to it.We could hear the sound of insects and the chirping of birds. Though we could not see them, except for some birds, we knew they were there.

about forts in delhi,trending short video,comparison short video,red fort,redfort,fort,red fort tour,red fort vlog,red fort open,agra red fort,red fort agra,modi red fort,red fort live,redfortvkog,shorts,red fort delhi,red fort video,red fort baoli,red fort flood,about red fort,delhi red fort,red fort place,redfort flood,redfort delhi,delhi redfort,red fort museum,red fort ticket,red fort in 1857,red fort colour,red fort history

I had no idea how we would find a way through the bushes and trees . We just kept following the path which our teachers took. As we crossed the tall trees, the teachers marked them with chalk.

I realized then how easily an inexperienced person could get lost in the jungle.We then found an open space that looked safe and proper to build our tents. After settling down, we went for a walk.

Essay Paragraph Of Jungle

Jungle: We found a river close to our base and collected clean water from there. Here we saw a herd of elephants on the other side of the river drinking water. The forest guide warned us that there could be crocodiles in and around the river. Therefore, it was not advisable to be there for a long time.

Walking further, we saw different types of plants and trees. Some of them bore flowers that we had never seen before. The guide again warned us against plucking any flower or fruit as they could be poisonous.

We found a wide variety of mushrooms under the trees. For the first time in my life, I saw strange birds, insects, huge spiders, snakes, and vines as thick as a man’s hand. We could also hear the chattering of monkeys. The experience was unforgettable.

Jungle: The most uncomfortable thing about being in the jungle was the presence of leeches. These little bloodsuckers never gave up. Despite thick boots and clothes, they still managed to bite me.

I was given first-aid and felt better. As it turned dark, the jungle seemed to get scarier. We lit a bonfire to keep us warm and also to keep the jungle animals at bay. Though we were carrying emergency lights and torches

with us, they were not of much help. We could hear peculiar sounds of animals that frightened us. But our teachers comforted us and told us to be brave.The next day, it was time to leave.

We wrapped our things and packed our bags. We then followed the same path that we had taken while entering the jungle. When we emerged from the jungle, the clear blue sky was a welcome sight. We had an adventurous outing and returned home with a great experience.

Easy Writing

Essay writing, subscribe to get the new updates, related articles.

science and technology essay,essay on science and technology,essay on science and technology in english,science and technology essay in english,technology essay in english,space science and technology essay,science and technology essay topics,essay on space science and technology,short essay on science and technology,essay on science and technology for childen,science and technology,essay on science & technology,an essay on science and technology,technology essay

Write an Essay Science And Technology Short Word

essay on importance of games and sports,importance of games and sports essay,short essay on importance of games and sports,write an essay on importance of games and sports,essay on importance of games,importance of games and sports,importance of sports and games,write a short essay on importance of games and sports,importance of sports,essay on importance of sports,essay on value of games and sports,importance of games,write essay on importance of sports and games

“Father’s Day” || About Describe History Easy (Words 300)

Leave a reply cancel reply.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

  • Paragraph Junk Food || Essay Junk Food Disadvantages September 16, 2018
  • Play & Activities
  • Life Skills
  • Learning & Education
  • Play & Learning

FirstCry Intelli Education

  • Growth & Development
  • Rhymes & Songs
  • Preschool Locator

Essay On ‘The Forest’ For Children – 10 Lines, Short & Long Essay

' src=

Key Points To Note: Essay On The Forest For Lower Primary Classes

10 lines on the forest for kids, a paragraph on the forest, short essay on importance of the forest for children, long essay on the forest in english for kids, what will your child learn from this essay.

Young kids always benefit from writing essays on simple topics, such as essays on the forest. The whole essay writing process primarily improves a child’s thought process as they start writing about the things they experience and process. According to experts, essay writing enhances problem-solving, critical thinking, and thought formation skills. Forests are the earth’s lungs, so an essay on forests is one of the best topics for young children. This write-up will provide you with more details on how to write an essay about the forest.

As kids, before writing an essay on the forest, they need to understand that forests are crucial for the survival of humanity. The following are essential points to remember when writing an essay on forests for lower primary classes:

  • An essay has three segments – the introduction, body, and conclusion.
  • In your introduction paragraph, define what a forest is. Mention that forests are home to an innumerable species on the planet earth.
  • The body can have one or two paragraphs, depending on the child’s grade. In this segment, one can cover information about the importance of forests on our planet.
  • The conclusion can speak about the effects of deforestation and how we can combat climate change by preserving forests.

Following are ten lines on the topic, which can help kids form short sentences about the topic:

  • A forest is a large green wild area that grows naturally.
  • A forest is usually a big space covered with trees, thick vegetation, and animals living within.
  • They are an essential part of our ecosystem that must be preserved and protected.
  • Forests cover a large chunk of the area on earth.
  • They are an essential natural asset and hold enormous value.
  • The trees absorb the carbon dioxide and generate oxygen for us to breathe.
  • Since forests produce oxygen, they are also known as green lungs of the earth.
  • Forests are precious resources that need preservation.
  • They are home to innumerable species in the plant and animal kingdom.
  • Humans should learn to use the resources of the forest and preserve them to help save nature.

When younger kids start writing essays, they start with short paragraphs. Their teachers can also ask them to write five sentences about the forest. Following is a short paragraph on the forest for classes 1 and 2.

A huge amount or number of trees on a portion of land make up a forest. Forests are an excellent source of oxygen as plants and trees breathe out a significant amount of oxygen daily and breathe in carbon dioxide. This process helps keep the environment clean and the air pure. The plants and trees of a forest help preserve biodiversity and ecological balance. Forests are critical in sustaining cycles of condensation and evaporation that cause rains. They are an important resource that provide medicines, as trees’ roots and wood are used to make various medicines. Deforestation has played a huge role in decreasing the cover of forests on earth, resulting in global warming.

When kids start writing an essay, they can begin with a short essay on any given topic. Following is a short essay for kids on the subject of forests:

Forests, also known as the “green lungs of the earth”, and play a crucial role in sustaining and maintaining the planet’s natural equilibrium and balancing the food cycle.

Forests cover approximately 30% of the surface of the earth. Forests provide a home to fauna, flora, wildlife, and various animal and plant species. Forests have always given humans a great source of livelihood. However, we have failed to preserve and protect the forests. Our actions like deforestation have resulted in environmental imbalance. Also, the sun’s harmful UV rays can easily pass through the ozone layer because of the reduced forest cover, and these UV rays are harming the planet. Forests are crucial to maintaining an ecological balance on earth. It is high time we correct our actions and make an oath to plant more trees and protect what’s left of the forests.

When writing an essay for class 3, kids must provide more details on the topic. Following is a long essay on forests:

Forests are crucial for the existence of the earth. Without any forest cover on this planet, the devastating effects of climate change may be witnessed with a horrible impact on human life. Forests are vital to humans as they provide multiple resources that human beings use for survival.

Forests are home to various wild animals such as tigers, elephants, cheetah, lions, rhinoceros, wolves, etc. These animals are essential for a healthy food cycle, and they would become extinct if there were absolutely no forests. Every animal or bird has to play its part in maintaining the food cycle of the planet, and any disturbance in this food cycle will eventually lead to the extinction of human beings and animals.

Forests provide resources such as nutrients, wood, food, timber, fuels, and so much more to human beings to help them survive. Irresponsible actions of humans like cutting down forest land for agricultural purposes, conducting deforestation drives to expand villages and cities, killing animals for horns, furs, organs, etc., have led to depleted forest cover.

Issues like global warming, desertification, floods, forest fires, biodiversity losses, extinction, and much more are the results of such actions. We should try to do what we can to make our forests bloom and spread wider, and keep the environment around them healthy. 

Essay On Forest For Children - 10 Lines, Short and Long Essay

Different Types Of Forests

Various kinds of forests exist on planet earth. Following are the different types of forests:

  • Tropical Forests:  Tropical rain forests are around the equator in Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia. These forests have the largest species diversity per area in the world.
  • Temperate Forests:  Temperate forests grow in the next latitude ring, in north-eastern Asia, North America, and Europe. There are four well-defined seasons in this zone, comprising winter.
  • Boreal Forests:  Also known as taiga, Boreal forests are located between 50 and 60 degrees of latitude in the sub-Arctic zone. This area contains Scandinavia, Siberia, Canada, and Alaska.

Why Are Forests Important?

Forests provide us with various things that we need in our daily lives. Following are the benefits of the forest:

  • Close to 1.6 billion humans depend on forests for their livelihood.
  • Forests are the most geographically-diverse ecosystems on land.
  • Forests help balance oxygen, humidity, and carbon dioxide in the air.
  • Forests offer priceless economic, ecological, social, and health benefits.

Effects Of Deforestation

Deforestation can result in catastrophic effects. Humans have to learn to live without misusing the resources of the forest. This planet does not belong to humans solely, and we need to learn to share all forest resources with all the living beings on the earth.

Following are the four major effects of deforestation:

  • Soil Erosion
  • Disruption of the water cycle
  • Greenhouse gas emissions
  • Biodiversity losses
  • Animal extinction
  • Climate Change

Improving Forest Cover

Improving the forest cover will help prevent soil erosion during natural calamities like floods. Soil erosion is the elimination of topsoil which reduces the quality of the soil. Let us pledge to plant trees and prevent soil erosion.

In writing an essay on forests and the forest composition, your child won’t only learn about the definition of forests but will also know how important forests are for the existence of humanity and the survival of this planet. Your child will learn to respect mother nature.

1. Which One Is The Largest Forest In The World?

The world’s largest rainforest is the Amazon. It is home to more than 30 million people and one in ten known species on Earth.

2. When is International Forest Day Celebrated?

We celebrate International Forest Day on 21st March every year.

The existence of forests is imperative for human presence in the world, and they are the key source of many life-depending things like wood, medicines, etc. We must conserve our forests for the bright future of our upcoming generations.

Essay on My Favourite Spring Season for Class 1, 2 and 3 Kids Essay on Air Pollution in English for Class 1, 2 & 3 Children World Environment Day Essay for Lower Primary Class

  • Essays for Class 1
  • Essays for Class 2
  • Essays for Class 3

' src=

5 Recommended Books To Add To Your Child’s Reading List and Why

5 absolute must-watch movies and shows for kids, 15 indoor toys that have multiple uses and benefits, leave a reply cancel reply.

Log in to leave a comment

Google search engine

Most Popular

The best toys for newborns according to developmental paediatricians, the best toys for three-month-old baby brain development, recent comments.

FirstCry Intelli Education

FirstCry Intelli Education is an Early Learning brand, with products and services designed by educators with decades of experience, to equip children with skills that will help them succeed in the world of tomorrow.

FirstCry Intelli Education

Story Related Activities Designed to Bring the Story to Life and Create Fun Memories.

FirstCry Intelli Education

Online Preschool is the Only Way Your Child's Learning Can Continue This Year, Don't Wait Any Longer - Get Started!

©2021 All rights reserved

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use

essay writing about jungle

Welcome to the world of Intelli!

We have some FREE Activity E-books waiting for you. Fill in your details below so we can send you tailor- made activities for you and your little one.

lead from image

Welcome to the world of intelli!

FREE guides and worksheets coming your way on whatsapp. Subscribe Below !!

email sent

THANK YOU!!!

Here are your free guides and worksheets.

Logo

Short Essay On Jungle Book

  • Author Writer

Introduction

The jungle book is a story about an orphaned boy or man-cub named Mowgli who was abandoned in the jungle and was found by a panther named Bagheera who takes the boy to grow up with a pack of wolves where he was raised by Raksha. The stories are set in a forest in India. The book is one of the classic stories written by Rudyard Kipling. A major theme in the book is abandonment followed by fostering, as in the life of Mowgli, echoing Kipling's childhood.

A ten-year-old Mowgli becomes well acquainted with life in the jungle with the help of his wolf family. But being a human living in the jungle Mowgli was always in danger of some form. The wolf pack leader Akela tells Mowgli not to use his man tricks in front of the other animals when Mowgli uses the shell of fruit to grab water for himself during the drought that makes other animals look at him oddly (Akşehir 138). Then arrives the fearsome Sher Khan who is aware of Mowgli’s presence and considers Man to be forbidden in the jungle. Akela covers Mowgli and tells Sher Khan that he cannot have the boy. Sher Khan vows to come back for Mowgli once the river runs again. When the other wolves of the pack and Bagheera learned of the danger, they decided to take Mowgli back to the man-village. On their journey to the man village, Mowgli and Bagheera get separated once they come across a field of buffaloes where they are ambushed by Sher Khan. Bagheera holds the tiger off for Mowgli to run. The boy escapes and Sher Khan returns to the Peace Rock to confront the wolves where he throws Akela off the cliff and assumes leadership over the other animals and awaits for Mowgli to return. Now wandering alone in the jungle, Mowgli is met by yet another foe that tries to kill him. The snake called Kaa kept Mowgli under her spell with her hypnotic voice and eyes. Kaa told Mowgli of where he came from. She told him that he was an infant when his father came across a cave in the jungle and protected him from Sher Khan with the "red flower” (fire). Mowgli’s father blinded Sher Khan’s left eye and the tiger killed the man. As the boy was lost in her story, Kaa almost ate him by wrapping herself around Mowgli but a bear named Baloo saved him. Since he saved Mowgli’s life, he asked the boy to help him gather some honey. In the process of breaking off some honeycomb, Mowgli gets stung a few times but Baloo and Mowgli form a bond of friendship (Asghar and Muhammad 150). Baloo showed Mowgli that the human village is nearby and that he can go whenever he wanted, but Mowgli decided to stick with Baloo, who shows him all about the bare necessities of life.

As the story unfolds, we see Bagheera telling Baloo that he needed Mowgli to get to safety and away from Sher Khan.  Baloo reluctantly tells Mowgli he never thought of him as a friend and wanted him to go away. Heartbroken, Mowgli retreats to a tree and gets captured by a group of monkeys. Baloo and Bagheera see this and follow. The monkeys bring Mowgli to the temple of King Louie, a massive orangutan. Louie claims he can protect Mowgli, but he wants to learn the secret of the red flower (fire) and thinks Mowgli can solve it. Mowgli says he cannot, sending Louie into a fit of rage. Baloo and Bagheera arrive in the nick of time and fight the monkeys while Louie chases Mowgli, taunting him as he tells him that Akela, the pack leader has been killed by Sher Khan and Bagheera knew about it. As Louie tries to get Mowgli, he runs through his temple, causing it to crumble and crush him. Infuriated that  Bagheera didn’t tell him about Akela, Mowgli runs away and enters the man village undetected and takes a burning torch back into the jungle. As he runs back, the other animals see him with fire and follow (Park 228). A piece of ember falls from the torch and slowly starts a fire. Mowgli confronts Sher Khan as the other animals gather to watch. Sher Khan tries to turn the animals against Mowgli by stating that man has brought the red flower into the jungle. Mowgli tosses the torch right before Baloo and Bagheera show up. They along with the other animals, stand by Mowgli and against Sher Khan. Baloo battles Sher Khan. Bagheera tells Mowgli that he must fight like a man and not as a wolf. Sher Khan takes Baloo down, but before he can kill him, Raksha and other wolves attack Sher Khan. Mowgli sets a trap in the trees and waits for Sher Khan there (Mutiarani et al. 27). Escaping the wolves and Bagheera, the tiger climbs the tree and walks the branch where Mowgli is standing but Mowgli jumps to safety. Sher Khan ends up falling and is consumed by the fire. Mowgli returns to the other animals, and the river, aided by grateful elephants, turns its flow, putting out the fire. Mowgli finally reunites with his wolf brothers and Raksha. Baloo now lives close with Mowgli, Bagheera, and the other animals. The story of Mowgli later ends with Mowgli leaving the jungle bringing tears to the eyes of his friends in the jungle.

This story teaches us valuable life lessons as Mowgli undergoes an epic journey of self-discovery guided by a no-nonsense panther and a free-spirited bear.  It is entertaining as the adventures described are so exciting. This story teaches us about the bond of friendship and unconditional love. It also explains to us the laws of nature and to face our fear. Mowgli was afraid of Sher Khan, but he faced his fear and so could defeat it. The stories also illustrate the freedom to move between different worlds, such as when Mowgli moves between the jungle and the village. The book describes the amazing bond between man and animals. The Jungle Book is the perfect book for a person who loves fun and adventure like me.

Akşehir Uygur, Mahinur. "PERCEPTION OF NATURE AND THE LANGUAGE OF IMPERIALISM IN RUDYARD KIPLING’S THE JUNGLE BOOK." Celal Bayar Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi 16.1/2 (2018): 129-140.

Asghar, Jamil, and Muhammad Iqbal Butt. "Contrapuntal Reading of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book: Theorizing the Raj through Narrativity." NUML Journal of Critical Inquiry 15.1 (2017): 144-160.

Mutiarani, Mutiarani, Hasanul Misbah, and Aliya Nafisa Karyadi. "Rudyard Kipling’s Novel the Jungle Book as Moral Literacy Material on EFL Learning." English Language in Focus (ELIF) 3.1 (2021): 23-30.

Park, Minjin. "A Cognitive Approach to the Formal Aspects of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book." Children's Literature Association Quarterly 45.3 (2020): 224-243.

Request Writer

writer

Member Since : 24-07-2021

Orders In Progress

Orders Completed

About TIRTHANKAR

I have pursued my Law degree from a recognised University in India and I have been working as a Freelance Academic Writer on Law and Management for the last three years.

Recent Posts

  • A Sample Essay on Birds 21-08-2023 0 Comments
  • Is Homeschooling an Ideal Way... 21-08-2023 0 Comments
  • Essay Sample on Man 14-08-2023 0 Comments
  • Academic Writing(23)
  • Admission Essay(172)
  • Book Summaries(165)
  • College Tips(312)
  • Content Writing Services(1)
  • Essay Help(517)
  • Essay Writing Help(76)
  • Essays Blog(0)
  • Example(337)
  • Infographics(2)
  • Letter Writing(1)
  • Outlines(137)
  • Photo Essay Assignment(4)
  • Resume Writing Tips(62)
  • Samples Essays(315)
  • Writing Jobs(2)

If you want this website to work, you must enable javascript.

Donate to First Things

Writing My Autobiography

essay writing about jungle

A re you still writing?” he asked.

“I am,” I answered.

“What are you working on at the moment?”

“An autobiography,” I said.

“Interesting,” he replied. “Whose?”

The implication here, you will note, is that mine hasn’t been a life sufficiently interesting to merit an autobiography. The implication isn’t altogether foolish. Most autobiographies, at least the best autobiographies, have been written by people who have historical standing, or have known many important people, or have lived in significant times, or have noteworthy family connections or serious lessons to convey . I qualify on none of these grounds. Not that, roughly two years ago when I sat down to write my autobiography, I let that stop me.

An autobiography, to state the obvious, is at base a biography written by its own subject. But how is one to write it: as a matter of setting the record straight, as a form of confessional, as a mode of seeking justice, or as a justification of one’s life? “An autobiography,” wrote George Orwell, “is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.” Is this true? I prefer to think not.

Autobiography is a complex enterprise, calling for its author not only to know himself but to be honest in conveying that knowledge. “I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book,” wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Let him relate the events of his own life with Honesty, not disguising the feelings that accompanied them.” One of the nicest things about being a professor, it has been said, is that one gets to talk for fifty minutes without being interrupted. So one of the allurements of autobiography is that one gets to write hundreds of pages about that eminently fascinating character, oneself, even if in doing so one only establishes one’s insignificance.

The great autobiographies—of which there have not been all that many—have been wildly various. One of the first, that of the Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, is marked by an almost unrelieved braggadocio: No artist was more perfect, no warrior more brave, no lover more pleasing than the author, or so he would have us believe. Edward Gibbon’s autobiography, though elegantly written, is disappointing in its brevity. That of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, heavily striking the confessional note, might have been told in a booth to a priest. Ben Franklin’s autobiography is full of advice on how the rest of us should live. John Stuart Mill’s is astounding in its account of its author’s prodigiously early education, which began with his learning Greek under his father’s instruction at the age of three. Then there is Henry Adams’s autobiography, suffused with disappointment over his feeling out of joint with his times and the world’s not recognizing his true value. In Making It , Norman Podhoretz wrote an autobiography informed by a single message, which he termed a “dirty little secret,” namely that there is nothing wrong with ambition and that success, despite what leftist intellectuals might claim, is nothing to be ashamed of.

Please note that all of these are books written by men. Might it be that women lack the vanity required to write—or should I say “indulge in”—the literary act of autobiography? In Mary Beard’s Emperor of Rome , I recently read that Agrippina the Younger, the mother of Nero, wrote her autobiography, which has not survived, and which Mary Beard counts as “one of the great losses of all classical literature.” I wish that Jane Austen had written an autobiography, and so too George Eliot and Willa Cather. Perhaps these three women, great writers all, were too sensibly modest for autobiography, that least modest of all literary forms.

A utobiography can be the making or breaking of writers who attempt it. John Stuart Mill’s autobiography has gone a long way toward humanizing a writer whose other writings tend toward the coldly formal. Harold Laski wrote that Mill’s “ Autobiography , in the end the most imperishable of his writings, is a record as noble as any in our literature of consistent devotion to the public good.”

If Mill’s autobiography humanized him, the autobiography of the novelist Anthony Trollope did for him something approaching the reverse. In An Autobiography , Trollope disdains the notion of an author’s needing inspiration to write well. He reports that “there was no day on which it was my positive duty to write for the publishers, as it was my duty to write reports for the Post Office,” where he had a regular job. “I was free to be idle if I pleased. But as I had made up my mind to undertake this second profession [that of novelist], I found it to be expedient to bind myself by certain self-imposed laws.” Trollope recounts—emphasis here on “counts”—that as a novelist he averages forty pages per week, at 250 words per page. He writes: “There are those who would be ashamed to subject themselves to such a taskmaster, and who think that the man who works with his imagination should allow himself to wait till inspiration moves him. When I have heard such doctrine preached, I have hardly been able to repress my scorn.” Trollope then mentions that on the day after he finished his novel Doctor Thorne , he began writing his next novel, The Bertrams . For a long spell the literati refused to forgive Trollope for shearing inspiration away from the creation of literary art, for comparing the job of the novelist to a job at the post office. Only the splendid quality of his many novels eventually won him forgiveness and proper recognition.

A serious biography takes up what the world thinks of its subject, what his friends and family think of him, and—if the information is available in letters, diaries, journals, or interviews—what he thinks of himself. An autobiography is ultimately about the last question: what the author thinks of himself. Yet how many of us have sufficient self-knowledge to give a convincing answer? In her splendid novel Memoirs of Hadrian , Marguerite Yourcenar has Hadrian note: “When I seek deep within me for knowledge of myself what I find is obscure, internal, unformulated, and as secret as any complicity.” The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the scrupulously examined one is rare indeed.

My own life has not provided the richest fodder for autobiography. For one thing, it has not featured much in the way of drama. For another, good fortune has allowed me the freedom to do with my life much as I have wished. I have given my autobiography the title Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life , with the subtitle Especially If You’ve Had a Lucky Life . Now well along in its closing chapter, mine, I contend, has been thus far—here I pause to touch wood—a most lucky life.

My title derives from the story of Croesus, who ruled the country of Lydia from circa 585–547 b.c. , and who is perhaps today best known for the phrase “rich as Croesus.” The vastly wealthy Croesus thought himself the luckiest man on earth and asked confirmation of this from Solon, the wise Athenian, who told him that in fact the luckiest man on earth was another Athenian who had two sons in that year’s Olympics. When Croesus asked who was second luckiest, Solon cited another Greek who had a most happy family life. Croesus was displeased but not convinced by Solon’s answers. Years later he was captured by the Persian Cyrus, divested of his kingdom and his wealth, and set on a pyre to be burned alive, before which he was heard to exclaim that Solon had been right. The moral of the story is, of course: Never say you have had a lucky life until you know how your life ends.

I have known serious sadness in my life. I have undergone a divorce. I have become a member of that most dolorous of clubs, parents who have buried one of their children. Yet I have had much to be grateful for. In the final paragraph of a book I wrote some years ago on the subject of ambition, I noted that “We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing.” In all these realms, I lucked out. I was born to intelligent, kindly parents; at a time that, though I was drafted into the army, allowed me to miss being called up to fight in any wars; and in the largely unmitigated prosperity enjoyed by the world’s most interesting country, the United States of America.

Writing is a form of discovery. Yet can even writing ferret out the quality and meaning of one’s own life? Alexis de Tocqueville, the endlessly quotable Tocqueville, wrote: “The fate of individuals is still more hidden than that of peoples,” and “the destinies of individuals are often as uncertain as those of nations.” Fate, destiny, those two great tricksters, who knows what they have in store for one, even in the final days of one’s life? I, for example, as late as the age of eighteen, had never heard the word “intellectual.” If you had asked me what a man of letters was, I would have said a guy who works at the post office. Yet I have been destined to function as an intellectual for the better part of my adult life, and have more than once been called a man of letters. Fate, destiny, go figure!

T he first question that arises in writing one’s autobiography is what to include and what to exclude. Take, for starters, sex. In his nearly seven-hundred-page autobiography, Journeys of the Mind , the historian of late antiquity Peter Brown waits until page 581 to mention, in the most glancing way, that he is married. Forty or so pages later, the name of a second wife is mentioned. Whether he had children with either of these wives, we never learn. But then, Brown’s is a purely intellectual autobiography, concerned all but exclusively with the development of the author’s mind and those who influenced that development.

My autobiography, though less than half the length of Brown’s, allowed no such luxury of reticence. Sex, especially when I was an adolescent, was a central subject, close to a preoccupation. After all, boys—as I frequently instructed my beautiful granddaughter Annabelle when she was growing up—are brutes. I came of age BP, or Before the Pill, and consummated sex, known in that day as “going all the way,” was not then a serious possibility. Too much was at risk—pregnancy, loss of reputation—for middle-class girls. My friends and I turned to prostitution.

Apart from occasionally picking up streetwalkers on some of Chicago’s darker streets, prostitution for the most part meant trips of sixty or so miles to the bordellos of Braidwood or Kankakee, Illinois. The sex, costing $3, was less than perfunctory. (“Don’t bother to take off your socks or that sweater,” one was instructed.) What was entailed was less sensual pleasure than a rite of passage, of becoming a man, of “losing your cherry,” a phrase I have only recently learned means forgoing one’s innocence. We usually went on these trips in groups of five or six in one or another of our fathers’ cars. Much joking on the way up and even more on the way back. Along Chicago’s Outer Drive, which we took home in those days, there was a Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer sign that read, “Have you had it lately?,” which always got a good laugh.

I like to think of myself as a shy pornographer, or, perhaps better, a sly pornographer. By this I mean that in my fiction and where necessary in my essays I do not shy away from the subject of sex, only from the need to describe it in any of its lurid details. So I have done in my autobiography. On the subject of sex in my first marriage (of two), for example, I say merely, “I did not want my money back.” But, then, all sex, if one comes to think about it, is essentially comic, except of course one’s own.

On the inclusion-exclusion question, the next subject I had to consider was money, or my personal finances. Financially I have nothing to brag about. In my autobiography I do, though, occasionally give the exact salaries—none of them spectacular—of the jobs I’ve held. With some hesitation (lest it seem boasting) I mention that a book I wrote on the subject of snobbery earned, with its paperback sale, roughly half-a-million dollars. I fail to mention those of my books that earned paltry royalties, or, as I came to think of them, peasantries. In my autobiography, I contented myself with noting my good fortune in being able to earn enough money doing pretty much what I wished to do and ending up having acquired enough money not to worry overmuch about financial matters. Like the man said, a lucky life.

If I deal glancingly in my autobiography with sex and personal finances, I tried to take a pass on politics. My own political development is of little interest. I started out in my political life a fairly standard liberal—which in those days meant despising Richard Nixon—and have ended up today contemptuous of both our political parties: Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, as the critic Dwight Macdonald referred to them. Forgive the self-congratulatory note, but in politics I prefer to think myself a member in good standing of that third American political party, never alas on the ballot, the anti-BS party.

Of course, sometimes one needs to have a politics, if only to fight off the politics of others. Ours is a time when politics seems to be swamping all else: art, education, journalism, culture generally. I have had the dubious distinction of having been “canceled,” for what were thought my political views, and I write about this experience in my autobiography. I was fired from the editorship of Phi Beta Kappa’s quarterly magazine, the American Scholar —a job I had held for more than twenty years—because of my ostensibly conservative, I suppose I ought to make that “right-wing,” politics. My chief cancellers were two academic feminists and an African-American historian-biographer, who sat on the senate, or governing board, of Phi Beta Kappa.

T he official version given out by Phi Beta Kappa for my cancellation—in those days still known as a firing—was that the magazine was losing subscribers and needed to seek younger readers. Neither assertion was true, but both currently appear in the Wikipedia entry under my name. The New York Times also printed this “official” but untrue version of my cancellation. In fact, I was canceled because I had failed to run anything in the magazine about academic feminism or race, both subjects that had already been done to death elsewhere and that I thought cliché-ridden and hence of little interest for a magazine I specifically tried to keep apolitical. During my twenty-two years at the American Scholar , the name of no current United States president was mentioned. If anything resembling a theme emerged during my editorship, it was the preservation of the tradition of the liberal arts, a subject on which I was able to acquire contributions from Jacques Barzun, Paul Kristeller, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Frederick Crews, and others.

That I was fired not for anything I had done but for things I had failed to do is an indication of how far we had come in the realm of political correctness. I take up this topic in my autobiography, one theme of which is the vast changes that have taken place in American culture over my lifetime. A notable example is an essay on homosexuality that I wrote and published in Harper’s in 1970, a mere fifty-three years ago. The essay made the points that we still did not know much about the origin of male homosexuality, that there was much hypocrisy concerning the subject, that homosexuals were living under considerable social pressure and prejudice, and that given a choice, most people would prefer that their children not be homosexual. This, as I say, was in 1970, before the gay liberation movement had got underway in earnest. The essay attracted a vast number of letters in opposition, and a man named Merle Miller, who claimed I was calling for genocide of homosexuals, wrote a book based on the essay. Gore Vidal, never known for his temperate reasoning, claimed my argument was ad Hitlerum . (Vidal, after contracting Epstein-Barr virus late in life, claimed that “Joseph Epstein gave it to me.”) I have never reprinted the essay in any of my collections because I felt that it would stir up too much strong feeling. For what it is worth, I also happen to be pleased by the greater tolerance accorded homosexuality in the half century since my essay was published.

The larger point is that today neither Harper’s nor any other mainstream magazine would dare to publish that essay. Yet a few years after the essay was published, I was offered a job teaching in the English Department of Northwestern University, and the year after that, I was appointed editor of the American Scholar. Today, of course, neither job would have been available to me.

Do these matters—my cancellation from the American Scholar , my unearned reputation as a homophobe—come under the heading of self-justification? Perhaps so. But then, what better, or at least more convenient, place to attempt to justify oneself than in one’s autobiography?

Many changes have taken place in my lifetime, some for the better, some for the worse, some whose value cannot yet be known. I note, for example, if not the death then the attenuation of the extended family (nephews, nieces, cousins) in American life. Whereas much of my parents’ social life revolved around an extensive cousinage, I today have grandnephews and grandnieces living on both coasts whom I have never met and probably never shall. I imagine some of them one day being notified of my death and responding, “Really? [Pause] What’s for dinner?”

I take up in my autobiography what Philip Rieff called, in his book of this title, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, a development that has altered child-rearing, artistic creation, and much else in our culture. Although the doctrines of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and others are no longer taken as gospel, their secondary influence has conquered much of modern culture. My parents’ generation did not hold with therapeutic culture, which contends that the essentials of life are the achievement of self-esteem and individual happiness, replacing honor, courage, kindness, and generosity.

In my autobiography, I note that when my mother was depressed by her knowledge that she was dying of cancer, a friend suggested that there were support groups for people with terminal diseases, one of which might be helpful. I imagined telling my mother about such groups, and her response: “Let me see,” she is likely to have said. “You want me to go into a room with strangers, where I will listen to their problems and then I’ll tell them mine, and this will make me feel better.” Pause. “Is this the kind of idiot I’ve raised as a son?”

T hen there is digital culture, the verdict on which is not yet in. Digital culture has changed the way we read, think, make social connections, do business, and so much more. I write in my autobiography that in its consequences digital culture is up there with the printing press and the automobile. Its influence is still far from fully fathomed.

One of my challenges in writing my autobiography was to avoid seeming to brag about my quite modest accomplishments. In the Rhetoric , Aristotle writes: “Speaking at length about oneself, making false claims, taking the credit for what another has done, these are signs of boastfulness.” I tried not to lapse into boasting. Yet at one point I quote Jacques Barzun, in a letter to me, claiming that as a writer I am in the direct line of William Hazlitt, though in some ways better, for my task—that of finding the proper language to establish both intimacy and critical distance—is in the current day more difficult than in Hazlitt’s. At least I deliberately neglected to mention that, in response to my being fired from the American Scholar, Daniel Patrick Moynihan flew an American flag at half-mast over the Capitol, a flag he sent to me as a souvenir. Quoting others about my accomplishments, is this anything other than boasting by other means? I hope so, though even now I’m not altogether sure.

I have a certain pride in these modest accomplishments. Setting out in life, I never thought I should publish some thirty-odd books or have the good luck to continue writing well into my eighties. The question for me as an autobiographer was how to express that pride without preening. The most efficient way, of course, is never to write an autobiography.

Why, then, did I write mine? Although I have earlier characterized writing as a form of discovery, I did not, in writing my autobiography, expect to discover many radically new things about my character or the general lineaments of my life. Nor did I think that my life bore any lessons that were important to others. I had, and still have, little to confess; I have no hidden desire to be spanked by an NFL linebacker in a nun’s habit. A writer, a mere scribbler, I have led a largely spectatorial life, standing on the sidelines, glass of wine in hand, watching the circus pass before me.

Still, I wrote my autobiography, based in a loose way on Wordsworth’s notion that poetry arises from “emotion recollected in tranquility.” Writing it gave me an opportunity to review my life at the end of my life in a tranquil manner. I was able to note certain trends, parallels, and phenomena that have marked my life and set my destiny.

The first of these, as I remarked earlier, was the fortunate time in which I was born, namely the tail end of the Great Depression—to be specific, in 1937. Because of the Depression, people were having fewer children, and often having them later. (My mother was twenty-seven, my father thirty at my birth.) Born when it was, my generation, though subject to the draft—not, in my experience of it, a bad thing—danced between the wars: We were too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam. We were also children during World War II, the last war the country fully supported, which gave us a love of our country. Ours was a low-population generation, untroubled by the vagaries of college admissions or the trauma of rejection by the school of one’s choice. Colleges, in fact, wanted us.

Or consider parents, another fateful phenomenon over which one has no choice. To be born to thoughtless, or disagreeable, or depressed, or deeply neurotic parents cannot but substantially affect all one’s days. Having a father who is hugely successful in the world can be as dampening to the spirit as having a father who is a failure. And yet about all this one has no say. I have given the chapter on my parents the title “A Winning Ticket in the Parents Lottery,” for my own parents, though neither went to college, were thoughtful, honorable, and in no way psychologically crushing. They gave my younger brother and me the freedom to develop on our own; they never told me what schools to attend, what work to seek, whom or when to marry. I knew I was never at the center of my parents’ lives, yet I also knew I could count on them when I needed their support, which more than once I did, and they did not fail to come through. As I say, a winning ticket.

As one writes about one’s own life, certain themes are likely to emerge that hadn’t previously stood out so emphatically. In my case, one persistent motif is that of older boys, then older men, who have supported or aided me in various ways. A boy nearly two years older than I named Jack Libby saw to it that I wasn’t bullied or pushed around in a neighborhood where I was the youngest kid on the block. In high school, a boy to whom I have given the name Jeremy Klein taught me a thing or two about gambling and corruption generally. Later in life, men eight, nine, ten, even twenty or more years older than I promoted my career: Hilton Kramer in promoting my candidacy for the editorship of the American Scholar , Irving Howe in helping me get a teaching job (without an advanced degree) at Northwestern, John Gross in publishing me regularly on important subjects in the Times Literary Supplement , Edward Shils in ways too numerous to mention. Something there was about me, evidently, that was highly protégéable.

I  haven’t yet seen the index for my autobiography, but my guess is that it could have been name-ier. I failed, for example, to include my brief but pleasing friendship with Sol Linowitz. Sol was the chairman of Xerox, and later served the Johnson administration as ambassador to the Organization of American States. He also happened to be a reader of mine, and on my various trips to Washington I was often his guest at the F Street Club, a political lunch club where he reserved a private room in which we told each other jokes, chiefly Jewish jokes. I might also have added my six years as a member of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts, whose members included the actors Robert Stack and Celeste Holm, the Balanchine dancer Arthur Mitchell, Robert Joffrey, the soprano Renée Fleming, the novelist Toni Morrison, the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, the architect I. M. Pei, the painter Helen Frankenthaler, and other highly droppable names.

Confronting one’s regrets is another inescapable element in writing one’s autobiography. Ah, regrets: the red MG convertible one didn’t buy in one’s twenties, the elegant young Asian woman one should have asked to dinner, the year one failed to spend in Paris. The greater the number of one’s regrets, the grander their scope, the sadder, at its close, one’s life figures to be. I come out fairly well in the regrets ledger. I regret not having studied classics at university, and so today I cannot read ancient Greek. I regret not having been a better father to my sons. I regret not asking my mother more questions about her family and not telling my father what a good man I thought he was. As regrets go, these are not minor, yet neither have I found them to be crippling.

Then there is the matter of recognizing one’s quirks, or peculiar habits. A notable one of mine, acquired late in life, is to have become near to the reverse of a hypochondriac. I have not yet reached the stage of anosognosia, or the belief that one is well when one is ill—a stage, by the way, that Chekhov, himself a physician, seems to have attained. I take vitamins, get flu and Covid shots, and watch what I eat, but I try to steer clear of physicians. This tendency kicked in not long after my decades-long primary care physician retired. In his The Body: A Guide for Occupants , Bill Bryson defines good health as the health enjoyed by someone who hasn’t had a physical lately. The ancients made this point more directly, advising bene caca et declina medicos (translation on request) . For a variety of reasons, physicians of the current day are fond of sending patients for a multiplicity of tests: bone density tests, colonoscopies, biopsies, X-rays of all sorts, CT scans, MRIs, stopping only at SATs. I am not keen to discover ailments that don’t bother me. At the age of eighty-seven, I figure I am playing with house money, and I have no wish to upset the house by prodding my health in search of imperfections any more than is absolutely necessary.

The older one gets, unless one’s life is lived in pain or deepest regret, the more fortunate one feels. Not always, not everyone, I suppose. “The longer I live, the more I am inclined to the belief that this earth is used by other planets as a lunatic asylum,” said George Bernard Shaw, who lived to age ninety-four. Though the world seems to be in a hell of a shape just now, I nonetheless prefer to delay my exit for as long as I can. I like it here, continue to find much that is interesting and amusing, and have no wish to depart the planet.

Still, with advancing years I have found my interests narrowing. Not least among my waning interests is that in travel. I like my domestic routine too much to abandon it for foreign countries where the natives figure to be wearing Air Jordan shoes, Ralph Lauren shirts, and cargo pants. Magazines that I once looked forward to, many of which I have written for in the past, no longer contain much that I find worth reading. A former moviegoer, I haven’t been to a movie theater in at least a decade. The high price of concert and opera tickets has driven me away. The supposedly great American playwrights—Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Edward Albee—have never seemed all that good to me, and I miss them not at all. If all this sounds like a complaint that the culture has deserted me, I don’t feel that it has. I can still listen to my beloved Mozart on discs, read Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Dickens, George Eliot, Willa Cather, and the other great novelists, watch the splendid movies of earlier days on Turner Classics and HBO—live, in other words, on the culture of the past.

“Vho needs dis?” Igor Stravinsky is supposed to have remarked when presented with some new phenomena of the avant-garde or other work in the realm of art without obvious benefit. “Vho needs dis?” is a question that occurred to me more than once or twice as I wrote my autobiography. All I can say is that those who read my autobiography will read of the life of a man lucky enough to have devoted the better part of his days to fitting words together into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into essays and stories on a wide variety of topics. Now in his autobiography all the sentences and paragraphs are about his own life. He hopes that these sentences are well made, these paragraphs have a point, and together they attain to a respectable truth quotient, containing no falsehoods whatsoever. He hopes that, on these modest grounds at least, his autobiography qualifies as worth reading.

Joseph Epstein  is author of  Gallimaufry , a collection of essays and reviews.

Image by  Museum Rotterdam on Wikimedia Commons , licensed via Creative Commons . Image cropped. 

Stacked Mgazines

Articles by Joseph Epstein

Close Signup Modal

Want more articles like this one delivered directly to your inbox?

Sign up for our email newsletter now!

essay writing about jungle

Is a robot writing your kids’ essays? We asked educators to weigh in on the growing role of AI in classrooms.

Educators weigh in on the growing role of ai and chatgpt in classrooms..

Kara Baskin talked to several educators about what kind of AI use they’re seeing in classrooms and how they’re monitoring it.

Remember writing essays in high school? Chances are you had to look up stuff in an encyclopedia — an actual one, not Wikipedia — or else connect to AOL via a modem bigger than your parents’ Taurus station wagon.

Now, of course, there’s artificial intelligence. According to new research from Pew, about 1 in 5 US teens who’ve heard of ChatGPT have used it for schoolwork. Kids in upper grades are more apt to have used the chatbot: About a quarter of 11th- and 12th-graders who know about ChatGPT have tried it.

For the uninitiated, ChatGPT arrived on the scene in late 2022, and educators continue to grapple with the ethics surrounding its growing popularity. Essentially, it generates free, human-like responses based on commands. (I’m sure this sentence will look antiquated in about six months, like when people described the internet as the “information superhighway.”)

Advertisement

I used ChatGPT to plug in this prompt: “Write an essay on ‘The Scarlet Letter.’” Within moments, ChatGPT created an essay as thorough as anything I’d labored over in AP English.

Is this cheating? Is it just part of our strange new world? I talked to several educators about what they’re seeing in classrooms and how they’re monitoring it. Before you berate your child over how you wrote essays with a No. 2 pencil, here are some things to consider.

Adapting to new technology isn’t immoral. “We have to recalibrate our sense of what’s acceptable. There was a time when every teacher said: ‘Oh, it’s cheating to use Wikipedia.’ And guess what? We got used to it, we decided it’s reputable enough, and we cite Wikipedia all the time,” says Noah Giansiracusa, an associate math professor at Bentley University who hosts the podcast “ AI in Academia: Navigating the Future .”

“There’s a calibration period where a technology is new and untested. It’s good to be cautious and to treat it with trepidation. Then, over time, the norms kind of adapt,” he says — just like new-fangled graphing calculators or the internet in days of yore.

“I think the current conversation around AI should not be centered on an issue with plagiarism. It should be centered on how AI will alter methods for learning and expressing oneself. ‘Catching’ students who use fully AI-generated products ... implies a ‘gotcha’ atmosphere,” says Jim Nagle, a history teacher at Bedford High School. “Since AI is already a huge part of our day-to-day lives, it’s no surprise our students are making it a part of their academic tool kit. Teachers and students should be at the forefront of discussions about responsible and ethical use.”

Sign up for Parenting Unfiltered.

Teachers and parents could use AI to think about education at a higher level. Really, learning is about more than regurgitating information — or it should be, anyway. But regurgitation is what AI does best.

“If our system is just for students to write a bunch of essays and then grade the results? Something’s missing. We need to really talk about their purpose and what they’re getting out of this, and maybe think about different forms of assignments and grading,” Giansiracusa says.

After all, while AI aggregates and organizes ideas, the quality of its responses depends on the users’ prompts. Instead of recoiling from it, use it as a conversation-starter.

“What parents and teachers can do is to start the conversation with kids: ‘What are we trying to learn here? Is it even something that ChatGPT could answer? Why did your assignment not convince you that you need to do this thinking on your own when a tool can do it for you?’” says Houman Harouni , a lecturer on education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Harouni urges parents to read an essay written by ChatGPT alongside their student. Was it good? What could be done better? Did it feel like a short cut?

“What they’re going to remember is that you had that conversation with them; that someone thought, at some point in their lives, that taking a shortcut is not the best way ... especially if you do it with the tool right in front of you, because you have something real to talk about,” he says.

Harouni hopes teachers think about its implications, too. Consider math: So much grunt work has been eliminated by calculators and computers. Yet kids are still tested as in days of old, when perhaps they could expand their learning to be assessed in ways that are more personal and human-centric, leaving the rote stuff to AI.

“We could take this moment of confusion and loss of certainty seriously, at least in some small pockets, and start thinking about what a different kind of school would look like. Five years from now, we might have the beginnings of some very interesting exploration. Five years from now, you and I might be talking about schools wherein teaching and learning is happening in a very self-directed way, in a way that’s more based on … igniting the kid’s interest and seeing where they go and supporting them to go deeper and to go wider,” Harouni says.

Teachers have the chance to offer assignments with more intentionality.

“Really think about the purpose of the assignments. Don’t just think of the outcome and the deliverable: ‘I need a student to produce a document.’ Why are we getting students to write? Why are we doing all these things in the first place? If teachers are more mindful, and maybe parents can also be more mindful, I think it pushes us away from this dangerous trap of thinking about in terms of ‘cheating,’ which, to me, is a really slippery path,” Giansiracusa says.

AI can boost confidence and reduce procrastination. Sometimes, a robot can do something better than a human, such as writing a dreaded resume and cover letter. And that’s OK; it’s useful, even.

“Often, students avoid applying to internships because they’re just overwhelmed at the thought of writing a cover letter, or they’re afraid their resume isn’t good enough. I think that tools like this can help them feel more confident. They may be more likely to do it sooner and have more organized and better applications,” says Kristin Casasanto, director of post-graduate planning at Olin College of Engineering.

Casasanto says that AI is also useful for de-stressing during interview prep.

“Students can use generative AI to plug in a job description and say, ‘Come up with a list of interview questions based on the job description,’ which will give them an idea of what may be asked, and they can even then say, ‘Here’s my resume. Give me answers to these questions based on my skills and experience.’ They’re going to really build their confidence around that,” Casasanto says.

Plus, when students use AI for basics, it frees up more time to meet with career counselors about substantive issues.

“It will help us as far as scalability. … Career services staff can then utilize our personal time in much more meaningful ways with students,” Casasanto says.

We need to remember: These kids grew up during a pandemic. We can’t expect kids to resist technology when they’ve been forced to learn in new ways since COVID hit.

“Now we’re seeing pandemic-era high school students come into college. They’ve been channeled through Google Classroom their whole career,” says Katherine Jewell, a history professor at Fitchburg State University.

“They need to have technology management and information literacy built into the curriculum,” Jewell says.

Jewell recently graded a paper on the history of college sports. It was obvious which papers were written by AI: They didn’t address the question. In her syllabus, Jewell defines plagiarism as “any attempt by a student to represent the work of another, including computers, as their own.”

This means that AI qualifies, but she also has an open mind, given students’ circumstances.

“My students want to do the right thing, for the most part. They don’t want to get away with stuff. I understand why they turned to these tools; I really do. I try to reassure them that I’m here to help them learn systems. I’m focusing much more on the learning process. I incentivize them to improve, and I acknowledge: ‘You don’t know how to do this the first time out of the gate,’” Jewell says. “I try to incentivize them so that they’re improving their confidence in their abilities, so they don’t feel the need to turn to these tools.”

Understand the forces that make kids resort to AI in the first place . Clubs, sports, homework: Kids are busy and under pressure. Why not do what’s easy?

“Kids are so overscheduled in their day-to-day lives. I think there’s so much enormous pressure on these kids, whether it’s self-inflicted, parent-inflicted, or school-culture inflicted. It’s on them to maximize their schedule. They’ve learned that AI can be a way to take an assignment that would take five hours and cut it down to one,” says a teacher at a competitive high school outside Boston who asked to remain anonymous.

Recently, this teacher says, “I got papers back that were just so robotic and so cold. I had to tell [students]: ‘I understand that you tried to use a tool to help you. I’m not going to penalize you, but what I am going to penalize you for is that you didn’t actually answer the prompt.”

Afterward, more students felt safe to come forward to say they’d used AI. This teacher hopes that age restrictions become implemented for these programs, similar to apps such as Snapchat. Educationally and developmentally, they say, high-schoolers are still finding their voice — a voice that could be easily thwarted by a robot.

“Part of high school writing is to figure out who you are, and what is your voice as a writer. And I think, developmentally, that takes all of high school to figure out,” they say.

And AI can’t replicate voice and personality — for now, at least.

Kara Baskin can be reached at [email protected] . Follow her @kcbaskin .

  • Newsletters
  • Account Activating this button will toggle the display of additional content Account Sign out

The Anti-Abortion Endgame That Erin Hawley Admitted to the Supreme Court

Somewhat lost in the debate around abortion pills and oral arguments that took place at the Supreme Court in FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine on Tuesday was one deeply uncomfortable truth: The very notion of what it means to practice emergency medicine is in dispute, with anti-abortion doctors insisting upon a right to refuse treatment for any patient who doesn’t meet their test of moral purity. Indeed, the right asserted is that in the absence of certainty about which patients are morally pure, the doctors want to deny medication to all patients, nationwide.

In public, the plaintiffs in this case—a group of doctors and dentists seeking to ban medication abortion—have long claimed they object to ending “unborn life” by finishing an “incomplete or failed” abortion at the hospital. But in court, they went much further. Their lawyer, Erin Hawley, admitted at oral argument that her clients don’t merely oppose terminating a pregnancy—they are pursuing the right to turn away a patient whose pregnancy has already been terminated . Indeed, they appear to want to deny even emergency care to patients whose fetus is no longer “alive,” on the grounds that the patient used an abortion drug earlier in the process. And they aim to deploy this broad fear of “complicity” against the FDA, to demand a nationwide prohibition on the abortion pill to ensure that they need never again see (and be forced to turn away) patients who’ve previously taken it. This is not a theory of being “complicit” in ending life. It is a theory that doctors can pick and choose their patients based on the “moral distress” they might feel in helping them.

It should come as no surprise that the same judge who tried to ban mifepristone in this case, Matthew Kacsmaryk, has also attempted to legalize anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination in health care nationwide. This is the ballgame: weaponize subjective religious beliefs against secular society to degrade the quality of care for everyone. If you can’t persuade Americans to adopt hardcore evangelical views, exploit the legal system to coerce them into it anyway.

Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine is at once embarrassingly frivolous and existentially important. Don’t let the jokes about how silly the Comstock Act seems , or how speculative the theory of standing is, get in the way of taking a serious look at the claims on offer. The plaintiffs say they are terrified that one day, a patient may walk into their emergency room suffering complications from a medication abortion prescribed by some other doctor. This patient may need their assistance completing the abortion or simply recovering from the complete abortion, which these plaintiffs deem “complicity” in sin. And they say the solution is either a total, nationwide ban on mifepristone, the first drug in the medication abortion sequence, or a draconian (and medically unnecessary) set of restrictions that would place mifepristone out of reach for many patients. (The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5 th Circuit ruled to reinstate those restrictions at their behest.)

It is a twisted line of logic, one that should never have reached the Supreme Court in the first place. But it is also a product of the court’s past indulgence of outlandish claims about moral “complicity.” As was made plain in the oral arguments and briefing, activist doctors are no longer satisfied with personal conscience exemptions already granted under state and federal law; they now insist that nobody, anywhere, should have access to the abortion pill, in order to ensure that they themselves won’t have to treat patients who took one. At a minimum, they say, they should be able to radically roll back access to the pill in all 50 states to reduce the odds that one of these handful of objectors might someday encounter a patient who took it. This extremist argument lays bare the transformation of the idea of “complicity” from a shield for religious dissenters to a sword for ideologues desperate to seize control over other people’s lives and bodies.

At oral arguments, several justices pressed Hawley, who argued on behalf of Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, with an obvious retort: Why can’t her clients simply refuse to treat these hypothetical someday patients on the grounds that they cannot help end the “life” of a fetus or embryo? After all, federal law guarantees doctors the right not to have to provide an abortion if doing so is “contrary to his religious beliefs or moral convictions.” Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh secured assurances from Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, early in the arguments, that under no circumstances could the government force any health care provider to ever participate in an abortion in violation of their conscience. Justice Elena Kagan asked Prelogar: “Suppose somebody has bled significantly, needs a transfusion, or, you know, any of a number of other things that might happen.” Would the plaintiffs object to treating them? Prelogar said the record was unclear.

Hawley, who is married to far-right Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, then approached the lectern and cleared up any confusion: Yes, she insisted, treating a patient who has undergone a medication abortion violates the conscience of the plaintiff physicians even if there is no “live” fetus or embryo to terminate anymore. “Completing an elective abortion means removing an embryo fetus, whether or not they’re alive, as well as placental tissue,” Hawley told Kagan. So the plaintiffs don’t object just to taking a “life.” They also object to the mere act of removing leftover tissue, even from the placenta.

Of course, these doctors must remove “dead” fetal tissue and placentas all the time—from patients who experienced a spontaneous miscarriage. By their own admission, the plaintiffs regularly help women complete miscarriages through surgery or medication. Those women they will gladly treat. Other women, though—the ones who induced their own miscarriage via medication—are too sinful to touch. Before the plaintiffs can administer even lifesaving emergency treatment, they need to know the circumstances of this pregnancy loss: Spontaneous miscarriages are OK; medication abortions are not.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, too, zeroed in on this admission. She told Hawley that she had thought the objection was to “participating in a procedure that is ending the life [of the fetus].” Hawley told her no: Any participation in an abortion, even through the indirect treatment of a patient without a “live” fetus, violated the doctors’ conscience. So, wait. What about “handing them a water bottle?” Jackson asked. Hawley dodged the question, declining to say whether helping a patient hydrate would constitute impermissible complicity in sin.

All this is reminiscent of Little Sisters of the Poor , a case about a Catholic charitable group that was afforded an exemption from the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate. The Little Sisters were asked to check a box signaling to the government that they could not comply with the mandate, at which point the government would step in to cover their employees. But the Little Sisters refused, viewing this action—the checking of a box to opt out of coverage—as “complicity” in abortion because it would in turn trigger government payment for contraception (which they viewed as abortifacients). The Supreme Court and the Trump administration ultimately indulged the Little Sisters’ claim .

Here, we have emergency room physicians asserting that they will not participate in lifesaving medical intervention unless they approve of the reason for the pregnancy loss. Presumably, if the pregnant patient is an unwed mother, or a gay or transgender person, the doctor would be similarly complicit in sin and decline service. Seen through this lens, since one can never know which sins one is enabling in the ER, each and every day, a narrow conscience exemption becomes a sweeping guarantee that absolutely nobody in the country can ever have access to basic health care, let alone miscarriage management. (Of course, these plaintiffs might focus only on one set of “sins” they see as relevant.) In a country effectively governed by Kacsmaryk and his plaintiff friends, a gay person suffering a stroke could be turned away from any hospital because of his sexual orientation, all to spare a doctor from a glancing encounter with prior sin. As Tobias Barrington Wolff, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, put it to us in an email, this unbounded view of complicity “is part of enacting the social death of people and practices you abhor, which in turn can contribute to the material death of people and practices you abhor.”

One of the most exhausting lessons of post- Roe America is that being “pro-life” definitively means privileging the life of the presumptively sin-free unborn—or even their “dead” remains—over the life of the sin-racked adults who carry them. This is why women are left to go septic or to hemorrhage in hospital parking lots; it is why C-sections are performed in nonviable pregnancies, at high risk to mothers; it’s why the women who sued in Texas to secure exceptions to that state’s abortion ban are condemned by the state as sinners and whores . And it’s why—in the eyes of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine — it is a greater hardship for a physician to “waste precious moments scrubbing in, scrubbing out” of emergency surgery, as Hawley put it, so long as they don’t believe that the emergency warrants their professional services, than it is for a pregnant person, anywhere in the country, including in states that permit abortion, to be forced to give birth.

At oral argument, Hawley explained that her clients have “structured [their] medical practice to bring life into the world. When they are called from their labor and delivery floor down to the operating room to treat a woman suffering from abortion drug harm, that is diametrically opposed to why they entered the medical profession. It comes along with emotional harm.” The emotional harm alleged here is that unless these doctors approve of the specific circumstances of the ER visit, they violate not only their own medical preference but also their religious convictions. But they will never truly know enough about the sins of their patients to be able to shield themselves against being a link in a chain of subjective lifelong sin. And to be a doctor, especially an emergency physician, should be to understand that your patients’ private choices and spiritual life are not really open to your pervasive and vigilant medical veto. This deep-rooted suspicion of patients deemed insufficiently pure for lifesaving treatment didn’t begin with the availability of medication abortion. It will assuredly not end there.

comscore beacon

IMAGES

  1. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Essay Example

    essay writing about jungle

  2. The Jungle Literary Analysis Essay by TeachingIn160

    essay writing about jungle

  3. Jungle and Safari Writing Prompts by K's Classroom Kreations

    essay writing about jungle

  4. Lost in Jungle Complete Essay

    essay writing about jungle

  5. Jungle and Safari Writing Prompts

    essay writing about jungle

  6. diary writing on jungle safari

    essay writing about jungle

VIDEO

  1. The Jungle Book

  2. (Part 1) Stranded For 3 Weeks In The Amazon Jungle, One Of Them Is Still Missing

  3. jungle par kavita

  4. Janglaat Per Urdu Mazmoon for Class 8

  5. LIFE IN JUNGLE

  6. 21 March 2024

COMMENTS

  1. Jungle Descriptive: [Essay Example], 511 words GradesFixer

    The jungle is a place of mystery and wonder. It is a dense, lush, and vibrant ecosystem teeming with life and energy. The sights, sounds, and smells of the jungle are truly awe-inspiring, and it is an experience that cannot be easily forgotten. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on.

  2. Jungle Essays: Samples & Topics

    Difference Between Jungle and Forest. 2. The Wildlife and Human Life in the Jungle. 3. The Beauty of the Rumassala Jungle Beach. 4. Analysis of an Article Mistaking Africa: Curiosities and inventions of the American Mind: American Ignorance About Africa. 5. Heat Island Effect: How We Can Reduce the Jungle Fires and Save the Forests

  3. The Jungle: Sample A+ Essay

    In The Jungle, his exposé of immigrant labor, Upton Sinclair had two seemingly compatible goals: to stimulate outrage at the practice of selling diseased meat to the public and to arouse sympathy for laborers who worked in the unsanitary conditions of the warehouses. However, in his novel, Sinclair places psychologically shallow, unrealistic characters in an extremely detailed, realistic ...

  4. 50 Jungle Adventure Writing Prompts

    December 11, 2023 by Richard Leave a Comment. Here are 50 Jungle Adventure Writing Prompts that can take your imagination deep in the jungle. The lush green canopy beckons you deeper into undiscovered territory brimming with wonder and danger in equal measure. Prepare for thrilling expeditions through ancient ruins, close encounters with ...

  5. The Jungle: Suggested Essay Topics

    1. How does the title of The Jungle relate to the themes of the novel? Give specific examples. 2. In what ways does Sinclair depict capitalism as destructive? Consider the characters' personal lives and social interactions. 3. Do you find Sinclair's argument for socialism persuasive? Why or why not?

  6. Jungle

    Setting: A dense, tropical jungle in the heart of the Amazon, teeming with life and brimming with the untamed energy of nature. Main Character: Alex, a 28-year-old wildlife photographer and adventurer, passionate about capturing the untamed beauty and mystery of the natural world. Theme: The essay will revolve around the raw beauty, sounds, and ...

  7. "The Jungle Book" by Rudyard Kipling Essay (Critical Writing)

    One of these works is called The Jungle Book and is written by Rudyard Kipling. Devoted to the description of the life of a human being, the book, though, manages to combine this description with the visions of nature of the jungle and the laws according to which animals live there. The main character of the story is a boy called Mowgli.

  8. The Wildlife and Human Life in the Jungle

    After a short time, the doctors in the mental institution decided to do a complicated treatment to stop him behaving like a "barbarian" - if you will and start behaving like a civilized human being. But, you see, Michael decided to be part of the jungle for a reason. And what doctors didn't understand at the time, was that his "barbaric ...

  9. The Jungle Essay Topics & Writing Assignments

    Essay Topic 4. The character of Jurgis is... (read more Essay Topics) This section contains 1,271 words. (approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample. More summaries and resources for teaching or studying The Jungle. View all Lesson Plans available from BookRags.

  10. "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair.

    As for the figurative language, the very title "Jungle" and its usage in the foreword is the brightest example of it. Jungle defines not only the industry but the whole essence of the human co-existence. Humor and irony are also used by Schlosser who considers the reasons of degrading of the society and its values (Sinclair, 2007).

  11. The Jungle Descriptive Essay

    The Jungle Descriptive Essay. As the sun rose over the horizon it awoke the jungle slowly and efficiently. Soon I could hear the morning birds chirp with all their heart and that triggered joy and excitement in my soul. A morning breeze toured the jungle making the flowers and leaves tango with rhythm and finesse as though they were experts.

  12. The Writer's Jungle: A Survivor's Guide to Writing With Kids

    01 March 2016. The Writer's Jungle: A Survivor's Guide to Writing With Kids. Julie Bogart's book The Writer's Jungle can be used as a standalone resource for teaching children to write or as a jumping off point for using other writing tools from Braver Writer. The Writer's Jungle comes as a PDF that you will want to print and put into a binder ...

  13. Free Essays on Jungle, Examples, Topics, Outlines

    Essays on Jungle. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi Book Review. Rikki-Tikki-Tavi: A Brave and Valiant Mongoose Rikki-Tikki-Tavi is a short story in The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling. It's the story of a young Indian grey mongoose who is brave and valiant. The story has been anthologized and published in various versions as a short book. We will look at its...

  14. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair: Critical Analysis Research Paper

    Plot. Members of the intelligentsia emerge as secondary characters in The Jungle on a periodic basis. The employees, and especially Jurgis, play a key part in the narrative. Jurgis is a fresh image for the writer, one that is both unique and representative of a wide range of employees.

  15. Setting Thesaurus: Jungle/Rainforest

    Setting is much more than just a backdrop, which is why choosing the right one and describing it well is so important. To help with this, we have expanded and integrated this thesaurus into our online library at One Stop For Writers.Each entry has been enhanced to include possible sources of conflict, people commonly found in these locales, and setting-specific notes and tips, and the ...

  16. Jungle Descriptive Essay

    Jungle Descriptive Essay. The jungle looked like a child had sploshed layers of solid blue, white and green paint on a blank canvas, the blue strip of sky, white line of sweltering bubbly clouds and a vast green canopy stretching beneath. It created a sign - a flag, the blue, white and green banner of the jungle, surmounted on high to declare ...

  17. Jungle: Jungle Essay an Short Words Jungle Paragraph » Easy Writing

    A Visit To A Jungle Paragraph. Jungle: The moment we entered the jungle, it became semi-dark. Sunlight could barely penetrate through the leaves of the tall trees. The sky was almost invisible because of the canopy of leaves high above us. At ground level, thick vegetation grew in every direction. The air was moist and had a peculiar smell to ...

  18. Essay On 'The Forest' For Children

    Young kids always benefit from writing essays on simple topics, such as essays on the forest. The whole essay writing process primarily improves a child's thought process as they start writing about the things they experience and process. According to experts, essay writing enhances problem-solving, critical thinking, and thought formation ...

  19. Short Essay On Jungle Book

    The jungle book is a story about an orphaned boy or man-cub named Mowgli who was abandoned in the jungle and was found by a panther named Bagheera who takes the boy to grow up with a pack of wolves where he was raised by Raksha. The stories are set in a forest in India. The book is one of the classic stories written by Rudyard Kipling.

  20. English

    1. Create a new Lesson on SLS. 2. Add Activity Title (Individual Writing) 3. Thinking Routine (Students to think of possible nouns, action verbs and sound words that can be seen or heard in the park.) 4. Free Response Question 1 (Explain the activity by providing a tutorial on how to download the template, write on the template using Mark Up ...

  21. Mowgli: The Darker Jungle Book [Free Essay Sample], 801 words

    The Gritty Jungle Book. The Ringer explains that when you boil it down, Mowgli is just a gritty and dark retelling of a classic story. It had to be released on Netflix because the PG-13 rating and disturbing scenes would have driven away younger audiences, which is the main demographic that would have brought in ticket sales.

  22. Should college essays touch on race? Some feel the affirmative action

    CHICAGO — When she started writing her college essay, Hillary Amofa told the story she thought admissions offices wanted to hear. About being the...

  23. Writing My Autobiography by Joseph Epstein

    The essay attracted a vast number of letters in opposition, and a man named Merle Miller, who claimed I was calling for genocide of homosexuals, wrote a book based on the essay. Gore Vidal, never known for his temperate reasoning, claimed my argument was ad Hitlerum .

  24. Is a robot writing your kids' essays?

    Kara Baskin used ChatGPT to plug in this prompt: "Write an essay on 'The Scarlet Letter.'" Within moments, the software created an essay as thorough as anything she'd labored over in AP ...

  25. I Tested Three AI Essay-writing Tools, and Here's What I Found

    (The essay-writing businesspeople are probably using these, too, so you're better off eliminating the middleman and using them on your own.) The best AI essay-helper tools.

  26. The anti-abortion endgame Erin Hawley admitted to the Supreme Court

    Hawley, who is married to far-right Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, then approached the lectern and cleared up any confusion: Yes, she insisted, treating a patient who has undergone a medication ...