The following are mix and match samples that start with a more personal beginning. You can use the “I and then “we” throughout the essay to give it a more personal flavour. You can, but don’t have to, use a fully developed persona. If you do, I like the student/youth leader voice; you must make your voice perfectly clear in the opening.
Competing realities
Death of a Salesman: I used to be a bit of basketball wizard, and my father thought that I was the next big star. During intervals I used to help myself to a few balls here and there, just for a bit of fun and we’d run off with the mates. Dad thought it was funny and said it showed I had personality and what it took to succeed.
However, what he didn’t tell me, was that the coach was furious and threatened my father that he would expel me from the team if I didn’t return the balls. I never found out what happened but Dad probably talked his way out of it.
LINK TO PROMPT
This is just one example of how people see things from different perspectives. Much depends upon our age and our values. A lot depends upon self-interest. My father thought the coach was victimizing me, and the coach thought that my father was protecting me.
Others control my reality
I used to always walk home from the station, even late at night, because I enjoyed the exercise. I liked to watch dusk turning into darkness, and listening to the cats scamper home. However, after the murder of 17-year-old school girl, Masa Vukotic, at beginning of the year, I suddenly became quite fearful. Especially, after the chief Detective Inspector Mick Hughes told ABC Radio National that parks are not safe for females. “I suggest to people, particularly females, they shouldn’t be alone in parks”.
Clearly, the police are reminding us to be fearful. They are not the only ones who control our reality..
Sample 1: personalised beginning about clash of ideas, views and values (Galileo)
Last week, my family and I participated in the march to Parliament House to protest against the Government’s plan to slash the renewable energy targets. Motivated by recent claims that the earth may be inhabitable by 2050, we, and thousands of others, voiced our protest at the cuts. We believe that global warming is the “greatest moral challenge of our time”. It seems immoral that there are climate-deniers and apologists for the mining industries who believe that coal is the best guarantee for a prosperous future.
Link to prompt: Evidently, each generation has its challenges, as new ideas and theories clash. For the past 30 years scientific theory has challenged the status quo. This sets up a powerful divide between groups in society.
See Personal beginnings for conflict:
Whose reality
Other samples: a student persona/ protest against war/ how governments influence our realities: through flow of information: we see reality as we are (alter to how we see things from our own student perspective – environment)
Last week, I participated in the Campus Protest against the Abbott government’s decision to return to war. Just because Iraq asked us, none of us thought was sufficient justification to meddle yet again in another country’s affairs, and not one as complicated as the Middle East. Irrespective of how barbaric the Sunni jihadists are, war should never be the solution. Besides many of the Shiite militias we’re indirectly supporting, according to a recent report by Amnesty International (“Absolute Impunity: Militia Rule in Iraq”) are just as capable of barbaric actions. But of course that’s just one of many inconvenient truths that the Government will never tell us.
OR: How decisions / the powerful can influence perceptions/ realities: we see things from our own background (include views and values)
Last week, I participated in the Campus Protest against the Government’s plan to slash the renewable energy targets. It was heartening to see so many students concerned about the “greatest moral challenge of our time”, despite what some newspapers still believe is just a beat-up of the left. We are also urging Southern University to take a moral stance and divest its shares in the coal industry like many universities around the world. According to Ben Caldecott director of the Stranded Assets Programme it would send a powerful message, trigger negative public opinion towards the industry and curb future investment.
(Link to prompt: media coverage or challenge of ideas)
Personal one
For a few years now, the tension has been mounting between my parents and our neighbour over the dilapidated fence. My parents do not like fences and refuse to replace it. I’m not sure whether they’re against being hemmed in, or against the increasingly threatening demands of the neighbour. By stealth one night, he ripped it down and issued an ultimatum; the fence was going to be rebuilt whether we liked it or not. Somehow, during the simmering tension, I felt like the narrator in Robert Frost’s poem, who was of the view, “something there is that doesn’t love a wall” and yet the neighbour adamantly insisted “good fences make good neighbors”.
Link to prompt; Evidently, the fence reflected our opposing views to property, to nature and even to life itself. Likewise, in “Mending the Wall”, Robert Frost depicts the clash between a conservative-minded neighbour and a broad-minded progressive neighbour . This clash is often typical whenever change threatens the status quo or when two world views clash.
OR: / Intertwine in essay: Symbolically the neighbour’s territorial view of the world focuses on differences and separation, whilst I would like to think that we are more community-oriented. This clash is often evident between the interests of the powerful and the powerless or between victims and oppressor, or between the progressives and the conservatives.
Finish with another comment on the different competing world views.
See Personal beginnings: whose reality
Back to Summary Page Conflict
Back to Summary Page: Whose Reality