to kill a mockingbird violence essay

101 To Kill a Mockingbird Essay Titles & Examples

If you struggle to find “To Kill a Mockingbird” essay topics on prejudice, race, the characters’ courage, or any other issue, look no further. Our team has prepared a list of titles and essay writing tips for this book.

🏆 Best To Kill a Mockingbird Essay Topics & Examples

📌 most interesting to kill a mockingbird essay titles, 👍 good to kill a mockingbird research topics, ❓ to kill a mockingbird essay questions.

Before we will talk about the do’s and don’ts in essay writing, let’s clarify the types of essay.

When working on “To Kill a Mockingbird” essay thesis, you can focus on the facts of the book or concentrate on your attitude towards its key issues and characters. According to your approach, we can divide essays into two main areas:

• Objective essay: you set out your personal thoughts on a chosen issue and provide supporting arguments and evidence;
• Subjective essay: you express your point of view on a specific topic without claiming the truth and strengthening it with facts.

For example, when you choose a “To Kill a Mockingbird” essay topics on goodness, you will state that Atticus is a kind and fearless. No doubt that this character has a positive role.

On the other hand, when you describe Mayella, you will have to choose: will you condemn her or express pity.

As for the essay content, it can be divided into many subcategories:

• Philosophical essay
• Critical essay
• Literary analysis
• Historical essay, etc.

There are also a few key literary types:

• Feature article, etc.

Do’s & Don’ts When Writing To Kill a Mockingbird Essays

Now, it’s time to talk about what you should write and what to avoid in your paper. First of all, you have to remember that all “To Kill a Mockingbird” essay titles should reveal the essence of the issue.

Recommendations for essay writing:

• Do mark your essay subject at the beginning of the text. “To Kill a Mockingbird” essay hooks will help you to catch the reader’s attention. Don’t forget to emphasize the central issue in the conclusion.
• Do support the style of presentation by your emotions, vision, and opinion. Use the “question-answer” in paragraphs. Make the transitions between paragraphs harmonious and smooth.
• Do use quotes, historical facts, and observations to argue the thesis statement, solve the main issue, and describe the key subject of the paper.
• Do stick to the central thesis of your essay. Avoid deepen into philosophical reflections — tell about concrete facts and examples. Here’s an example: don’t include the facts from the author’s biography if you focus on the events of the book and factors that affect discrimination.
• Do proofread the paper. Read carefully your essay several times and think if your readers will understand your expressions.
• Do not use specific terminology in “To Kill a Mockingbird” essay. For example, when you write about discrimination, you don’t necessarily have to provide its dictionary definition or use complex law, historical and psychological literature, and samples. Just your own language. However, it doesn’t mean that your opinion should seem ungrounded.
• Do add your emotions to the paper. Let your readers feel that you believe in your ideas when defending the essay thesis.
• Don’t choose the header before you write an essay. First, you should write an essay, and only then compile the title of your paper.

Well, now you know about the essay types, what to do, and what to avoid in your essay. Of course, you may ask: “What to write in my own essay?”

The key to success is to start. Check “To Kill a Mockingbird” essay examples on our website to get inspiration. Even the topic seems to you too complicated, start your research, and then you will be able to express new and original thoughts.

• “To Kill a Mockingbird”: Book and Movie Differences It is important to note that the film, To Kill a Mockingbird entails most of the aspects depicted in the novel.
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• Racial Prejudice in Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” Paul Lawrence Dunbar in his poem, “Sympathy” has vividly portrayed the pangs of a caged bird and likens it to the collective pain that colored people have felt like victims of racial prejudices.”And a pain […]
• “To Kill a Mockingbird” Novel by Harper Lee It is one of the main characteristics of the mockingbird includes its innocence and imitation of the songs of other birds in a loud voice.
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• American Novel: “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee It is also worth to mention that the novel is indeed relevant to its readership because it mirrors the nature of society affected by racism and inequality. Through the act of inclusiveness, I am in […]
• What It Takes to Kill a Mockingbird: In Search for the Differences Between the Novel and a Movie The characters both in the novel and in the movie were often pushed to the breaking point; however, one of such moments described in the book was left out of the movie.
• The Problem of Racism and Injustice in To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee In the novel, Harper Lee demonstrates her vision of the question of the social inequality with references to the problem of racism in the society based on prejudice and absence of actual principles of tolerance […]
• Social Issues in the “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee The phrase ‘to kill a mocking bird’ stands out as a metaphor in the book To kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
• To Kill a Mockingbird: Movie Analysis Speaking of the movements which convey the essence of the film without any speech “intrusion”, it would be a good idea to drive the example of Boo Radley standing in the darker corner of the […]
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How the moral lessons of To Kill a Mockingbird endure today

Assoc. Professor, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

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Anne Maxwell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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In our series, Guide to the classics , experts explain key works of literature.

Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird is one of the classics of American literature. Never out of print, the novel has sold over 40 million copies since it was first published in 1960. It has been a staple of high school syllabuses, including in Australia, for several decades, and is often deemed the archetypal race and coming-of-age novel . For many of us, it is a formative read of our youth.

Read more: 'Great books', nationhood and teaching English literature

The story is set in the sleepy Alabama town of Maycomb in 1936 - 40 years after the Supreme Court’s notorious declaration of the races as being “separate but equal” , and 28 years before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act . Our narrator is nine-year-old tomboy, Scout Finch, who relays her observations of her family’s struggle to deal with the class and racial prejudice shown towards the local African American community.

At the centre of the family and the novel stands the highly principled lawyer Atticus Finch. A widower, he teaches Scout, her older brother Jem, and their imaginative friend Dill, how to live and behave honourably. In this he is aided by the family’s hardworking and sensible black housekeeper Calpurnia, and their kind and generous neighbour, Miss Maudie.

It is Miss Maudie, for example, who explains to Scout why it is a sin to kill a mockingbird: “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corncribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us.”

Throughout the novel, the children grow more aware of the community’s attitudes. When the book begins they are preoccupied with catching sight of the mysterious and much feared Boo Radley, who in his youth stabbed his father with a pair of scissors and who has never come out of the family house since. And when Atticus agrees to defend Tom Robinson, a black man who is falsely accused of raping a white woman, they too become the target of hatred.

A morality tale for modern America

One might expect a book that dispatches moral lessons to be dull reading. But To Kill a Mockingbird is no sermon. The lessons are presented in a seemingly effortless style, all the while tackling the complexity of race issues with startling clarity and a strong sense of reality.

Read more: William Faulkner diagnosed modern ills in As I Lay Dying

As the Finches return from Robinson’s trial, Miss Maudie says: “as I waited I thought, Atticus Finch won’t win, he can’t win, but he’s the only man in these parts who can keep a jury out so long in a case like that.”

Despite the tragedy of Robinson’s conviction, Atticus succeeds in making the townspeople consider and struggle with their prejudice.

The effortlessness of the writing owes much to the way the story is told. The narrator is a grown Scout, looking back on her childhood. When she begins her story, she seems more interested in telling us about the people and incidents that occupied her six-year-old imagination. Only slowly does she come to the events that changed everything for her and Jem, which were set in motion long before their time. Even then, she tells these events in a way that shows she too young to always grasp their significance.

The lessons Lee sets out are encapsulated in episodes that are as funny as they are serious, much like Aesop’s Fables. A case in point is when the children return home from the school concert with Scout still dressed in her outlandish ham costume. In the dark they are chased and attacked by Bob Ewell the father of the woman whom Robinson allegedly raped. Ewell, armed with a knife, attempts to stab Scout, but the shapeless wire cage of the ham causes her to loose balance and the knife to go astray. In the struggle that ensues someone pulls Ewell off the teetering body of Scout and he falls on the knife. It was Boo Radley who saved her.

Another lesson about what it means to be truly brave is delivered in an enthralling episode where a local farmer’s dog suddenly becomes rabid and threatens to infect all the townsfolk with his deadly drool.

Scout and Jem are surprised when their bespectacled, bookish father turns out to have a “God-given talent” with a rifle; it is he who fires the single shot that will render the townsfolk safe. The children rejoice at what they consider an impressive display of courage. However, he tells them that what he did was not truly brave. The better example of courage, he tells them, is Mrs Dubose (the “mean” old lady who lived down the road), who managed to cure herself of a morphine addiction even as she was dying a horribly painful death from cancer.

He also teaches them the importance of behaving in a civilised manner, even when subjected to insults. Most of all Atticus teaches the children the importance of listening to one’s conscience even when everyone else holds a contrary view: “The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule”, he says, “is a person’s conscience.”

The continuing value in Atticus’ belief in the importance of principled thinking in the world of Black Lives Matter and the Australian government’s rhetoric of “African gangs” , is clear.

Atticus’ spiel on “conscience” and the other ethical principles he insists on living by, are key to the enduring influence of the novel. It conjures an ideal of moral standards and human behaviour that many people still aspire to today, even though the novel’s events and the characters belong to the past.

Lee herself was not one to shy away from principled displays: writing to a school that banned her novel, she summed up the source of the morality her book expounds. The novel, she said, “spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct”.

Fame and obscurity

When first published the novel received rave reviews . A year later it won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, followed by a movie version in 1962 starring Gregory Peck . Indeed, the novel was such a success that Lee, unable to cope with all the attention and publicity, retired into obscurity .

Interviewed late in life, Lee cited two reasons for her continued silence: “I wouldn’t go through the pressure and publicity I went through with To Kill a Mockingbird for any amount of money. Second, I have said what I wanted to say, and I will not say it again.”

The latter statement is doubtless a reference to the autobiographical nature of her book. Lee passed her childhood in the rural town of Monroeville in the deep south, where her attorney father defended two black men accused of killing a shopkeeper. The accused were convicted and hanged.

Undoubtedly influenced by these formative events, the biographical fiction Lee drew out of her family history became yet more complex upon the publication of her only other novel, Go Set a Watchman, in 2016. Critics panned it it for lacking the light touch and humour of the first novel. They also decried the fact that the character of Atticus Finch was this time around a racist bigot , a feature that had the potential to taint the author’s legacy .

Read more: Review/ Has Go Set a Watchman helped topple the notion of the white saviour?

Subsequent biographical research revealed that Go Set A Watchman, was not a sequel, but the first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird. Following initial rejection by the publisher Lippincot, Lee reworked it into the superior novel many of us know and still love today.

Lee gave us the portrait of one small town in the south during the depression years. But it was so filled with lively detail, and unforgettable characters with unforgettable names like Atticus, Scout, Calpurnia and Boo Radley that a universal story emerged, and with it the novel’s continuing popularity.

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To Kill a Mockingbird

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To Kill A Mockingbird is often categorized as a “bildungsroman,” or “coming of age” novel, following the childhood evolution, learning, and growth of young Scout and Jem. Over the course of the book, both characters develop increasingly-mature consciousnesses about the world; however, their individual growth processes are also specifically gendered as feminine and masculine. What are some of the ways Scout and Jem develop according to traditional southern standards for women and men? What are some of the ways both Scout and Jem resist that development?

Since the 1960 publication of To Kill A Mockingbird , Atticus Finch has been widely upheld as a role model for real world lawyers, even inspiring many people to pursue the practice of law. Recently, however, critics have argued that Atticus Finch didn’t do as much as he could have to disrupt the climate of racism, sexism, and classism he practiced within. Do you feel Atticus Finch continues to endure as a strong role model, or do you think his practices are outdated?

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Why some Believe being Gay is Considered a Sin in Certain Religions

This essay is about the belief that being gay is considered a sin in certain religions, exploring the reasons behind this view. It discusses how religious texts, such as those in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, have been interpreted to condemn homosexuality. The essay also highlights the historical and cultural contexts that influenced these interpretations and how societal norms have reinforced these beliefs. Additionally, it addresses the growing movement within various faith communities advocating for acceptance and inclusivity of LGBTQ+ individuals. By understanding the diverse perspectives on this issue, the essay emphasizes the importance of empathy, respect, and informed dialogue.

How it works

The inquiry into the moral standing of homosexuality is deeply entwined with religious doctrines, cultural mores, and historical milieus. Numerous religious traditions have maintained conventional perspectives on human sexuality, often deeming homosexuality as morally reprehensible. However, delving into the rationale and contexts underlying these convictions is imperative for fostering informed and considerate discourse.

The principal impetus behind the conviction that homosexuality constitutes a sin emanates from sacred scriptures. Notably, within Christianity, passages from the Bible, such as those found in Leviticus and Romans, have been construed to censure same-sex relations.

Leviticus 18:22 articulates, “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Similarly, Romans 1:26-27 delineates men forsaking natural relations with women in favor of indulging in acts with other men, deemed “shameful.” Throughout history, these scriptures have served as the theological bedrock for numerous Christian denominations, buttressing the notion that homosexuality contravenes divine edicts.

Nevertheless, contextualizing these scriptures within their historical and cultural milieu is imperative. Ancient societies espoused disparate conceptions of sexuality and gender roles compared to contemporary norms. The proscriptions against same-sex relations in these religious texts may have been shaped by imperatives to establish societal order, propagate progeny, and delineate religious communities from neighboring cultures. In light of this backdrop, interpretations of these passages can diverge markedly, with contemporary theologians and scholars positing that they do not necessarily pertain to loving, consensual same-sex relationships as understood in modern times.

Beyond Christianity, other religious traditions likewise proffer teachings addressing homosexuality. In Islam, for instance, the Quran recounts the saga of the people of Lot, who faced retribution for engaging in homosexual acts. Many Islamic scholars have construed this narrative as corroborative evidence of the sinful nature of homosexuality. Likewise, traditional Jewish teachings, rooted in the Torah, mirror the sentiments articulated in the Old Testament of the Bible, censuring homosexual conduct.

Notwithstanding these enduring religious interpretations, a burgeoning movement within various faith communities advocates for a more inclusive and affirming stance towards LGBTQ+ individuals. Advocates contend that the cardinal tenets of their faith—such as love, compassion, and equity—warrant the embrace of all individuals, irrespective of their sexual orientation. This viewpoint is gaining traction, particularly among younger cohorts and progressive religious factions, prompting a reassessment of conventional interpretations of religious scriptures.

In tandem with religious arguments, cultural and societal norms have exerted a profound influence on attitudes towards homosexuality. In numerous cultures, heteronormativity—the presumption that heterosexuality constitutes the default or preferred sexual orientation—has been deeply entrenched. This cultural bias frequently intersects with religious convictions, reinforcing the perception that homosexuality is aberrant or sinful. Over time, these attitudes have been contested by movements championing LGBTQ+ rights, underscoring the imperative of recognizing sexuality as a natural and multifaceted facet of human existence.

Moreover, acknowledging the sway of personal and familial convictions on individuals’ perceptions of homosexuality is crucial. For many individuals, their upbringing and communal teachings wield considerable sway over their conception of moral rectitude. When these convictions become intertwined with one’s identity and sense of belonging, interrogating or revising them can prove to be a multifaceted and emotionally charged endeavor.

In summation, the conviction that homosexuality constitutes a sin is entrenched in a confluence of religious interpretations, historical contexts, and cultural norms. While traditional religious scriptures have been marshaled to validate this stance, there exists an evolving comprehension within numerous faith communities that underscores inclusivity and acceptance. As society advances towards greater recognition of LGBTQ+ rights, it is incumbent upon us to approach this topic with empathy, deference, and a disposition towards substantive dialogue. Appreciating the diverse perspectives on this issue can engender a more inclusive and compassionate world for all.

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"Why Some Believe Being Gay Is Considered a Sin in Certain Religions." PapersOwl.com, Jun 01, 2024. Accessed June 7, 2024. https://papersowl.com/examples/why-some-believe-being-gay-is-considered-a-sin-in-certain-religions/

"Why Some Believe Being Gay Is Considered a Sin in Certain Religions," PapersOwl.com , 01-Jun-2024. [Online]. Available: https://papersowl.com/examples/why-some-believe-being-gay-is-considered-a-sin-in-certain-religions/. [Accessed: 7-Jun-2024]

PapersOwl.com. (2024). Why Some Believe Being Gay Is Considered a Sin in Certain Religions . [Online]. Available at: https://papersowl.com/examples/why-some-believe-being-gay-is-considered-a-sin-in-certain-religions/ [Accessed: 7-Jun-2024]

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