Choose your quotation carefully—make sure it is thought-provoking, or you won’t have enough material to write about. Write down the quotation and the page number. When you reflect on the quotation, you may write almost anything intelligent that the quotation inspires. You may write about what it shows about a character, how it connects to another place in the book, what the tone is, what it makes you predict, what it makes you imagine, how you react to it, what your opinion is of it, how it connects to the real world, how it connects or differs from another piece of literature, what it reveals about the author’s perspective, how it effectively uses metaphor, personification, irony, foreshadowing, etc., how it creates suspense, tone, voice, etc., how it connects to you and your life, how it develops a theme in the novel, or how it provokes another idea. Make sure that you connect your ideas and write in paragraph form. See the model below, based on a quotation from Charlie Gordon in the short story, “Flowers for Algernon,” to see an example of what I expect.

p. 15 “Sometimes somebody will say hey look at Joe or Frank or George he really pulled a Charlie Gordon. I don’t know why they say that but they always laff.”

This statement clearly shows Charlie’s good-natured, but foggy view of the world. He tries so hard to please and to be friends, but he doesn’t realize that the rest of the world isn’t like he is. He can’t tell the difference between people laughing at him and people laughing with him. He even misses the most obvious insults. He will be so humiliated when he gets smart enough to realize that he not only has been laughed at by “good” friends, but that he laughed at his own stupidity without knowing it.

I like the way this quotation and this story show the world through Charlie’s eyes. Daniel Keyes’ approach makes a more interesting story because we can see Charlie’s progress in his writing as well as in his ideas. It allows me to imagine what the world might be like for people different than I am. It reminds me that everyone cares about how their intelligence is perceived and that everyone has a valid viewpoint, regardless of his intellect. The quotation also shows how some people can be so cruel to those younger, weaker, or less intelligent than themselves. Those guys at the factory must have been pretty insecure about themselves in order to tease someone like Charlie. I can’t believe that so many people will hurt others in the exact same way they’ve been hurt themselves.