Ninth grade students in Stephanie Hurt’s English class at Brodhead High School have participated in the National Writing Project’s College, Career, and Community-Ready Writer’s Program (C3WP) all year. Students learned to consider multiple perspectives around an issue and to write evidence-based arguments asking for change. For their final argument, students chose an issue they care about, researched the conversation surrounding the issue, and wrote an evidence-based letter to a real audience, such as these letters to the editor. 

From Emaleigh McNeece

Brodhead High School 

To the editor:

Imagine going on a vacation somewhere tropic with your family for spring break. You all wanted to go on a boat ride out in the ocean to see all the wildlife. But when you were on the boat, after seeing turtles, whales, dolphins and cool fish, you started seeing a bunch of weird coloring, nasty looking items that were not a good sight to see. The items you were witnessing was trash. Not just trash, but dead animals too. The dead wildlife you were seeing were all victims of people’s actions, and this kind action was considered littering. 

Littering has been a problem for many years. There is so much trash everywhere in the world that it is creating more and more problems. One of the items that people think is most littered is plastic straws. According to Ashley May, “As companies such as Starbucks move away from plastic straws, environmental advocates say these items aren’t the worst litter offender.” Plastic straws are not even in the top five of littering. The top 5 list is cigarette butts, paper, food wrappers, confections and napkins/tissues and these are what end up into the bodies of water. Even though some of these items may end up in places that are impossible for people to put them there, or some trash is blown out of garbage cans and end up on streets, sidewalks and oceans and we still blame the people. It may be accidental when trash is blown out, but no one takes the initiative to pick it up and throw it away. But when there are people purposely throwing trash on the ground because they are too lazy to put it in the trash, it kind of makes you scratch your head and think, why?

Littering is against the law, but do people really enforce it? What’s the point of having the law if people are not going to really look to see if it is happening. But that is the problem, you can see it is a problem when you drive down the highway, or go on a boat in water, but no one does anything about it. I think that littering should be watched more by the police because it could help our environment so much. According to “Toddler gets ticketed for” the police ticketed a 2 year old because an envelope was in the ally with her name on it. Now I think that was a little extreme, but makes sense because you never know what really happens. This day in age, many people do not teach their children that littering is bad. I am kind of glad they were on top of the problem, but when it is a 2 year old, they don’t really know better. People need to instill in their children that littering is wrong, so they can fix it for their generation.

Littering is something that can’t be fixed, but can be controlled. Having the laws be more enforced can help upcoming generations, but it can’t just be said, it has to be done. The people have to do the deed of helping pick it up or just not commit the crime. We need to think of the consequences of littering and how it can affect the Earth. We have to keep the world a better place.