Last year in my Ap Literature class we were assigned to write a parody of Hamlet’s famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. The purpose of this assignment was to be entertaining and humorous. In my parody, I chose to argue the philosophical question of whether or not i should even write my parody; seeing as though I had waited until the last night to even begin the assignment. Although the situation I had gotten myself into is what gave me the idea for my topic, if the purpose were not to be entertaining, my teacher would not have appreciated many of my remarks about her class. The assignment was meant to be read in front of my class and teacher, so i was able to allude to certain aspects of my class, or school, that most audiences would not have understood. For example, when i said “For who would bear the horrors of English...When he himself could have merely studied In contemporary literature”(15-21), I was referencing a very basic english class that a majority of seniors take called studies in contemporary literature. The genre of the assignment was a parody, which greatly affected the structure of my writing. I was supposed to model my meter and word choice after Hamlet’s, which helped guide the focus of my writing, but it also restricted my word choice. For example, when I said “To fail, to sleep-No more- and by a sleep to say we end The headache and the thousand sleepless nights That students are heir to” (5-8), it was almost an exact translation from Hamlet’s original text, but I still had to find words to insert that still fit the meter.

To write, or not to write - that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The agony of forming sentences

Or to ignore the task in its entirety.

By opposing, save my grade. To fail, to sleep-

No more- and by a sleep to say we end The

headache and the thousand sleepless nights

That students are heir to - ‘tis a simple dream

To be wished. To ignore the assignment

To forget, perchance to skip class tomorrow

For in that extra day, what writing may come.

When we have shuffled off this writer’s block.

Must give us pause. There is the respect

That makes the stress of writing so long-lived

For who would bear the horrors of English

The grader’s wrong, the student’s suffering

The pangs of annotating, the grades delay.

The insolence of teachers, and the spurns

Of those papers revised time after time.

When he himself could have merely studied

In contemporary literature

Who would bear the stress and anxiety -

That comes with being an AP student

But the dread of higher education

From which no student could escape

Community college.