Exposition Thingy

To many members of the public, streaking students are viewed as an abnormality at best, and a nuisance at worst. However, I believe that streaking students should deserve severe and cruel punishments for their most heinous crimes.

Fellow students, have you ever experienced that burning urge, after every exam, test and graded assignment, to take off all your clothes and dash around the school compounds? No? This, friends, is because of the stable sanity level of one’s brain. Generally, the saner one is, the less rashly one is prone to act. For example, insane people like to keep long hair and shout antiestablishment messages randomly in the streets. The reason why this act is rash and therefore insane is because it can in no way help the person doing it, but would probably do him all types of harm. Streaking is another symptom of insanity, for most corporations do not hire employees based on how aesthetically pleasing they look running stark naked: indeed, streaking will likely land you in a bad spot, as no one, not teachers, not managers, not even fellow students (most fellow students, anyway), likes to see unclothed youths frolicking. It would probably hurt your chance of getting employed - not that you have such a good chance in the first place, anyway.

Certain antisocial hippies masquerading as students claim that streaking has never harmed anyone before. Their sorry excuse of an argument is that famous schools the likes of UCLA do not punish its students for streaking; indeed, in those schools, streaking has more or less become a tradition there. They then further their presumptuous claims by saying that the authorities tolerate or even support such events. This, as I hardly need to point out, is illogical: such schools as UCLA resides in the fabled lands of the West. The students studying in those schools are worlds apart, both in culture and in mentality, from us Asiatics. Values of the West and the East probably cannot co-exist peacefully, unless one side owes the other three or four trillion dollars. Western concepts such as democracy, for example, work disastrously in the East. Eastern concepts, such as despotism, for example, work disastrously in the West. The ‘tradition’ of streaking will not be much different.

Finally, streaking students should be punished severely because of their potential to degrade the scores of their fellow students and upset the psychology of the teachers, which everyone knows are…delicate…to begin with. Imagine you, a teacher, strolling happily to your staffroom after a long and arduous term, full of benevolence and warm bubbly love, ready to take a cup of coffee to unwind before marking your students’ scripts. Then imagine some of those very same students, of whom you have been thinking such fond thoughts of, suddenly rushing past you down to the school hall in underwears and socks. Everywhere around you, you hear the derogative titter of the students, the contemptuous, condescending tone of your colleagues, who, while shaking their heads, wonders aloud which teacher had taught those clots. A few tentative fingers point your way; soon, all eyes stare accusingly at your squirming, writhing back. All your fond thoughts vanish. A bitter, cynical anger burns within you. Swiftly, you began to mutate into the vicious, nit-picking teacher you were so disparaging of in primary school. Every test you mark inadvertently fails. Every student you speak to runs away screaming and suffers nightmares every other night. Thus, with this vivid and life-like example, I hope to have convinced you of not being overly lenient, or indeed lenient at all, towards any streaking students.

In conclusion, I round off by saying that streaking students, who contributes absolutely nothing to society, and would probably degenerate it – and you – drastically, ought to be faced with the most dreadful castigation possible.

-- Wang YiHua (29)

Exposition Essay...?

What is an exposition?

Traditionally, exposition is a method of inquiry by which one dissects, analyses and defines a particular event, ideology or human behaviour. It is one of the most popularly-used rhetorical mode of discourse, commonly seen in news, scientific research, business and the legal world.

Fictionally, authors use exposition as a mean to convey information to the reader. This is usually done by creating a dramatic monologue, in which either the protagonist or the archvillain gives the reader sufficient information of the backstory of the essay. However, this method has been criticized for being dreary and dull, and many see it as short-cuts made by the author to spoon-feed the reader mass information as quickly as possible. One classical example exposition used in fiction is the White Council in The Fellowship of the Ring. Other forms of exposition in fiction is through the use of an unnamed narrator stating the occurrences and political atmosphere of the setting, or through a long-lost Log Book or Lore Chronicles to get the information across.

According to Wikipedia, there are 5 different types of exposition writing, and they are as follows:

Sequence writing lists events or steps in chronological order.
Descriptive essays use the senses of sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste to provide the reader with a mental image or feeling about the subject.
Classification writing uses an organizational strategy to arrange groups of objects or ideas according to a common theme.
Comparison writing shows the similarities and differences between two or more subjects.
Cause-and-effect writing, also known as analysis, identifies the reasons for an event or situation.