Manar Djinadou: Truth, Lies and Bias in Malcom X's Autobiography
Manar is a 12th grade student who wrote his Extended Essay in Literature on Malcolm X's autobiography. He is interested in the credibility and possible reliability issues with the controversial yet highly influential character's autobiography, co-authored with Alex Haley. Read his interview on his experience, and check out his essay!
Can you give us an elevator pitch of your Extended Essay?
My EE is basically about finding out what is true and what is not in the biography of Malcolm X, because I used that as my platform, and what does it show about autobiographies.
What was your Research question?
How do lies, truths, and biases in Malcolm X’s biography affect the nature of autobiography writing?
How did you find your topic?
I read the book over the summer and I was a bit skeptical of what he put inside. Also, because there are two authors, I was skeptical about that, so I wanted to know exactly what was true and what was not. And EE came around about that time so…
How did you narrow down to that question?
That was a struggle to be honest. I had the help of Mr. Bishop and Mrs. Omosefe. They showed me the different sections, how you have English and all of that, and we looked at the rubric and how I need to write going off of the rubric.
What was your greatest challenge?
Finding information. Researching. It’s a wide topic, so lots of people have opinions on it, so finding information, credible information, was very difficult.
What kind of resources did you find most useful?
Videos and interviews. Because then you get to see it straight from what the person said, and not just like, editorials and stuff.
How did you approach the research process?
I didn’t have an outline. I just started researching. I typed in key words in google at first, that was the main thing, but then I started figuring out what I wanted, so I went into different databases like Jstor, etc. and I found stuff from there.
What did your works cited look like?
It was mostly three books, three books and an interview.
What did you discuss in your viva voce? What was the outcome of your Extended Essay?
In the viva voce, Mr. Bishop and I talked about what I could learn from this process, researching and writing large pieces of work.
If you had 30 minutes to work on your essay, what would you do?
Maybe the research question. I would tweak it so it sounds better to the ear; it felt a little awkward.
Most important thing you learned
There’s always more to write about. There were always points in my essay where I was like “Ok, I wrote about this, what else is there to say?” but then Mr. Bishop would review it and say “you’ve got to talk about this, you need to develop it more”.
What would be your advice to students writing an Extended Essay in your subject?
Don’t play with the deadlines. The deadlines are very important. Like, it’s going to save a lot of time and stress if you stick to the deadlines and do the things you have to do.