Outside Reading: Reflective Essay

I Think I Found Your Cat
By: Sef Willen

This is a slightly disturbing reflective essay about an encounter that the author, Sef Willen, had. She is trying to inventory a burned down home for the insurance company. The disturbing aspect of this essay begins when she enters and describes its state as the home of a hoarder. It gets worse until the answer to the overarching question is answered, where is the family cat. Well needless to say, not alive.

Willen takes a tone of humor at the beginning, until the cat is found, when her tone switches to one that makes it sound as though she is genuinely sorry for this family and the illness they are dealing with. She creates this tone, at first, by displaying how ridiculous the home is. She uses almost unnecessary amounts of detail and comparisons to make it easy to picture the mountains of pink gumballs and other trash that is heavily detailed. She uses this detail when explaining her fall through the ceiling, which is funny but also disarming, lightening the mood and making the situation even easier to laugh at. When she switches her tone, she uses the twisted humor of some high school kids helping her, to make it obvious that this is not funny because she has stopped joking.

This switch in tone is a strength in this essay because it strikingly highlights the change in the situation that she is writing about. She is able to show what she finds funny, and what she thinks was not funny but undervalued during the experience. The weakness of this essay is the detail itself, even though it helps her to create the tone, the detail is disturbing. This much detail of the gross half-burned contents of the house makes it difficult to continue reading as the reader imagines wading through molten candy sludge and things that may once have been valuable.

The tone of this essay would not be appropriate for an AP essay because any of the evidence that was used would not be able to be taken seriously. This would defeat the purpose of writing the essay because it would be difficult to convince the reader to take the writer seriously. The way she created this tone on the other hand would be perfect for an essay. The descriptive details and comparisons would be excellent for supporting your evidence and claims. They would also help when describing the evidence itself, the more clear the evidence the better it will be able to connect to the claims.