TOEFL iBT, Independent Writing, Email has made communication between people less personal.

Writing Topic

Consider the following statement. Email has made communication between people less personal. Do you agree with this idea? Support your response by including specific reasons and examples.

☆Let’s Think

Over the past 25 years or so, email has become so popular that the word email is the almost same as the word mail now. Before email came into popular use, mailing meant sending letters or post cards. Obviously, these means of communication are generally more bothersome than email, not to speak of consuming more time and money. It was easier, faster, and cheaper to communicate in person than by mail before.

Now it seems that email has taken place of much part of communication. In business, for example, much of it is conducted through, very often only through, emailing. Personal communication seems to have been affected by this technological change, too. Some think opportunities of personal communication have reduced because of the frequent use of email. Others think that people are enjoying their personal communication more than ever by emailing and text messaging.

☆Essay Structure

♦Sample essay structure in the case that you have two or three reasons to support your argument

【Introduction = Outline】　主張と理由の概略 

【Point 1】理由1の詳細 

【Point 2】理由2の詳細 

【Point 3 / Counterargument-treatment】理由3の詳細または反論の処理

【Conclusion = Wrap-up】結論 

♦Your Sample Essay Structure

【Introduction = Outline】

【Point 1】

【Point 2】

【Point 3 / Counterargument-treatment】

               

【Conclusion = Wrap-up】

☆An Essay for Ideas and Expressions

A villain in an old suspense movie―I think it was Snake Eyes―says, before shooting a person who had tried to personally warn the US President of a danger, "How naïve you were, trying to contact the President by e-mail!” Even deleting the extreme case of hacking as in the case of this movie scene, the impression is that Information Technology has deprived us of the personal area in our communication. However, I cannot totally agree with the statement that email has made communication between people less personal. In some cases, email seems to make personal communication more possible than before. When people talk about communication and the new technology, the discussions seem to be made from mainly three perspectives: openness of the Internet, opportunities for face-to-face communication, and the contents. They lead me to different conclusions. Yet it also seems to come down to the view that whether communication between individuals is personal or not seems to be affected not so much by IT history as by personal history.

The Internet is technically open to everyone. The information on it was meant to be shared by all on the net when it was developed using the public money. Although email is encrypted and, without hacking, its messages stay between individuals, carbon copy (cc) or blind carbon copy (bcc) functions allow the sender to share the message with many people other than the recipient. Also, a moment of lapse can make you unwittingly expose your personal messages to the eyes of countless people. Almost every month, we read about a public figure making a wrong hit and sending a message with an inappropriate expression or picture to everyone on the mailing list before profusely apologizing to the public and/or forced to retire early. If this discussion can include the services related to email function such as message-board discussion or SNS, the inclusiveness will be almost limitless. It is well-known that personnel managers routinely refer to Twitter or Facebook for the information of job candidates and employees. When you really want to be personal, avoid IT.

When it comes to face-to-face communication, the total time we spend on it seems to have reduced owing to the development of email functions. Parents often complain about their children exchanging text messages with their peers even when they are spending time together with their family. More often than before, business is done only through exchanges of emails. It is not uncommon that employees in the same company who have never met or talked with each other have been working together through emailing on a project for years. However, it is also often said that emails help people communicate with their family and friends even when they are away from each other. You can also receive or send personal messages even while you are at work or in class. This was impossible before the service was invented.

In terms of message contents, communication seems to have become more personal than before the advent of email. Since it is more casual than a letter, an email can be written in very roughly or intimate ways. Also, it can be written and sent more readily than a letter. Again, if you include the evolved forms of email like chat rooms or Twitter, no one is excluded in learning someone else's、often a perfect stranger's, personal matter. People upload their personal opinions, personal pictures, and many other kinds of personal information, which are exposed to the eyes of people all over the world. Even in my personal experience, I have encountered many more personal messages of the people I have never met over the past ten years than I had done in the previous decades clearly because of the introduction of emailing services and its derivatives.

Now, this might be a rather personal view, but communication between people may not be influenced very much by changes of means of communication. Personally, I feel that communication is always personal, meaning on the individual level. As far as I know, when I feel that I am really communicating with someone, in other words, having an interaction open-heartedly,  I am interacting with one person whether in person or through some kind of medium. When I interact with more than one person, the interaction becomes not communication but something theatrical or political. I feel that I am playing a role, willingly or unwillingly, wearing a persona prepared by the circumstance I am in. Sometimes, people never hear me whatever I say or only hear me saying what they want to hear from me. Also, people act or talk differently when they are alone with me from when they are in a group, and it is in the former that they seem to be really frank and honest. I guess most people have the same kind of experience more or less. 

This impression may not be too personal or unfounded. One professor who studies phenomena happening on the Internet says, after an overview of an experiment in which students are assigned to talk in front of the webcam in their bedrooms and send the video message to YouTube every day, that, although people are showing their very personal sides and talk about personal matters in the virtual world, they are kind of playing a role, wearing a face which is very intimate but still made up to be shown to the public. If this applies to all the personal messages and posts on the web, strictly speaking, they are not really personal. Humans are social animals, and thus must be keenly aware, consciously or unconsciously, of the social side of the Internet. Furthermore, no one, including the sender of a message, can actually tell whether the person is really making a confession or not, since our minds are very complex. Therefore, the contents that seem to be personal might not be really personal.

It is difficult for me to conclude with certainty that email has made communication between people less personal because it is difficult to discern what is really going on in today’s communication. People interact in many ways and email is only a means of communication, which might not be so powerful as to make fundamental changes in our communication, while we all feel things are not really the same as before email was created. In any case, I would never try to contact the US President via email if I had to personally warn him.

TOEFL iBT, Independent Writing, A national curriculum for all children up until college

Writing Topic

Consider the following statement. The government should provide a national curriculum for all children up until college. Do you agree with this idea? Support your response by including specific reasons and examples.

 

 

☆Let’s Think

The word should is about ideal situations, so the discussion could be purely in theory as in we should not kill even for self-defense. The word should also means duty, so that the focus of the discussion can be about responsibility as in the government should support the disadvantaged.

 

☆Hints for Points

Agree:

１．higher level of general knowledge required today

２．to help avoid problems caused by extreme-specialization

 

Disagree:

1.    to protect university autonomy

2.    to promote creativity

 

             

☆Essay Structure

♦Sample essay structure in the case that you have two or three reasons to support your argument

【Introduction = Outline】　主張と理由の概略 

【Point 1】理由1の詳細 

【Point 2】理由2の詳細 

【Point 3 / Counterargument-treatment】理由3の詳細または反論の処理

【Conclusion = Wrap-up】結論 

 

♦Your Sample Essay Structure

【Introduction = Outline】

 

【Point 1】

 

【Point 2】

 

【Point 3 / Counterargument-treatment】

             

 

【Conclusion = Wrap-up】

 

 

 

☆Essay for Ideas and Expressions

While I believe that the officials in the ministry of education are conscientious and sincerely care about our children, the idea of the ministry preparing a learning standard up until college for all children and telling universities what to teach sounds unreal and, to be honest, creepy. I cannot agree with the statement that the government should provide a national curriculum for all children up until college.

 

It is true that almost half the children born in developed countries will go to university and most universities provide liberal arts, usually the first half of the college years being spent on the acquisition of the introductory level knowledge of a variety of disciplines prior to or in addition to major subjects, so that there might be an idea that we should have a national standard for the college learning. However, the idea touches the problem of how much the government should control. It would be an unnecessary intervention that the government should prepare a set of curriculum for those who have the ability to decide what they need to learn and how to handle what they have learned. Most middle school students may lack general knowledge and common sense, but college students are supposed to have them and this assumption should be respected. If there were such a government as tries to openly control the learning of the brightest people of the country, it would be the last entity that you would like to live under.

 

It is also impossible for the government, or anyone, to know what university students should learn. University is the place for voluntary pursuit of academic interest. It provides primordial environment for fact finding and creativity. It ought to be chaotic and unpredictable, the opposite of being under a management. A student majoring in literature would learn higher mathematics for fun and later become a competent manager, a student majoring in French literature would spend all four years reading all kinds of novels day and night to be an award-winning science and politics journalist because he has seen the limit of the reality depicted in fiction (a true story), a medical student who happened to be fascinated by Egyptology would work out a new approach to evolutionary anthropology by analyzing DNAs of old remains such as Egyptian mammies or Neanderthals (another true story), or a future leader of an IT giant company would take a calligraphy course and later draw on the skill in creating new machines, as in the well-known case of Steve Jobs. Let smart people study as they like, and something amazing would come out. It is ridiculous for the government to try to decide what students should get out of university education.

 

Last but not least, the goodness of a curriculum for all people up until college is questionable. The interests and abilities of people vary, and university education may have nothing to do with what many young people are trying to get out of life. After high school, some might want to work and others might want to gain skills at vocational schools even if they could go to university. There are still others just cannot stand studying. What college education helps develop is only a fraction of human activities. Setting a standard model of academic achievement for four more years for all people makes no sense. Moreover, the present national curriculum seems to be the enemy of joy of learning. Each child is born with a great capacity, I believe, but most elementary school children seem to find few subjects attractive, and after toiling all the way up to high school, most people develop a feeling of disgust towards studying. Moreover, even those who seem to like studying will forget most of what they learn at school in twenty years. This indicates that real learning seldom, if ever, takes place under the present curriculum. Even considering other factors such as teaching methods or the overall environment of education such as the academic achievement-oriented society, bad performance may well be attributed to bad materials, the class contents. The government should not extend the system that is not working.

 

A curriculum for all up until college under the guidance of the government is incoherent in its terms. It seems unnecessary and unrealistic, at best. For college autonomy and for the reality of present education, I disagree with the idea.

TOEFL iBT, Independent Writing, land usage - rewrite -

Writing Topic

Imagine that you have been given a large area of land to use however you wish. How would you choose to use this land?

☆Let’s Think

This is a hypothetical question with few conditions. It requires us to think about land usage. The word “land usage” often reminds you of investment and you might think of building condominiums on it and making a fortune by renting or selling them. However, I doubt if you can impress your raters with an essay based on this idea. Even if your idea is to use the money for philanthropy, the idea is still off the topic in that you do not tackle the core of the question: a good usage of a huge area of land, which is not just an object of investment but something that provides space, soil, ecological system, the atmosphere above it, life and joy of people, and many other good things that we can take advantage of.

To answer a hypothetical question with few specific conditions in the TOEFL independent writing section, it might be a safe strategy to stick to your specialty, the thing that you have a lot to write about to meet the minimum-300-word requirement. It would be easier to come up with a good idea if you think of the area that you know well and think if there is any good use of the land related to the area. You might ask yourself such questions as follows:

1.    What do you like or what are you interested in?

2.    What is the present situation?

3.    How would you use the land to change the present situation?

4.    How would you persuade readers to accept the idea?

In my humble case, the answers to these questions are as follows.

1.    What do you like or what are you interested in?   

I like crows.   

2.    What is the present situation?     

Most people hate crows.  

3.    How would you use the land to change the situation?

I would build a town for peaceful coexistence of crows and people.

4.    How would you persuade readers to accept the idea?

1)    By clearing up misunderstandings about crows

2)    By calling attention to the attractiveness of crows

3)    By arguing about the merits of making friends with crows 

☆Note

This question does not mention the cost. Therefore, you do not have to deal with it. You are dealing with a hypothetical question. This is the same as you do not care much about the inconsistency in fiction, for example, when you read a comic in which the main characters become smaller than oxygen molecules and still have no problem with breathing.

Now answer these questions, if you like.

1.    What do you like or what are you interested in?  

2.    What is the present situation?     

3.    How would you use the land to change the situation?

4.    How would you persuade readers to accept the idea?

e.g. By telling them who would benefit from the idea.

                                                                                              

☆Essay for Ideas and Expressions

There would be many wise or innovative uses of a large tract of land, but I would make it a town which is a test case for peaceful coexistence of people and jungle crows, a kind of crow, in my country Japan. No other birds are so stigmatized as crows, probably in Japan in particular. They are regarded as filthy garbage-eaters, spiteful punks, and the sign of death, yet, if observed carefully and without prejudice, they will turn out to be as likable as dolphins. In fact, some people even call them flying dogs.

Jungle crows are the big black birds often seen to be scattering the contents of garbage bags collected on the sidewalks of the cities in Japan. They used to live in forests and feed on dead animals on the ground. Development replaced trees with buildings and dead animals with garbage bags. They have been doing the same to survive, nesting on the power poles and eating food on the ground, but now humans are offended by their routine. Crows attack people only when they are near their young, and the worst thing they can do is to swoop from behind and kick, which they rarely actually do because they are afraid of humans. They remember the face of the person who attacked or threatened them and repeatedly retaliate, but think of their trauma and it is understandable that they do it for self-defense. The biggest stigma that crows bear is the image of death, which probably derives from their color. Surely they eat dead bodies but so do many other creatures, from bacteria to dogs. The fear of the color black is our problem, not theirs. In the eyes of humans on the ground crows on power lines are eerie dark spots in the sky, but seen from high above, they are precious pieces of life shining in purple and green. Incidentally, crows are much cleaner than other birds like chickens. They bathe a few times a day if possible.

Although loathed, crows are rather well known to be very smart, affectionate, and remarkable birds.　They store their food in hundred to several thousand places and remember them. They use their calls for their communication and use and, sometimes, make tools. Sometimes, their behavior cannot be explained by any other words but play. There are reports of crows repeatedly sliding down the slide or snow slope or hanging upside down from the power line. Also, jungle crows mimic many kinds of things such as human words or machine noises. They cherish their mates and babies. There are many reports that crows grieve the death of other crows. I myself know a jungle crow which missed its mate that suddenly disappeared for at least three years. One of the most striking things about crows is their eyes. As they can see ultraviolet like other birds, they can spot a piece of white bread on the snow field from high above. Now you might find this bird a little more interesting than before, if not wishing to make friends with it.

In my opinion, it is a shame that we do not have good relationships with jungle crows, these charming and interesting birds that happen to live closest to us, and here comes my model town for both jungle crows and humans. This town would have several parks full of tall trees to which the garbage jungle crows eat would be sent. Since jungle crows are originally from forests and tend to live where food is abundant, it can be easily expected that they would stay in the parks most of the time. Thus, they would never litter the streets. Moreover, they would be appreciated for their role as scavengers by taking away things people do not want to see lying on the ground such as a dead mouse. Also, the cost of waste incineration would be reduced and so would CO2 emissions. Humans can enter the parks and enjoy nature anytime except for crows’ breeding season. My wildest dream is to have crows participate in rescue operations. For their ability to fly a long distance and high cognitive level, not to mention the great eyesight, they could make good rescue crows. Of course to protect animal rights, only those that are willing and having the aptitude would be given the missions.

I once saw a jungle crow perched on a power line entertaining a dog down in a garage. The dog, wagging its tail and jumping around in the small space, looked quite happy to see its friend with wings. The scene reflected their positions in this world as one is confined and the other free. Crows could have been domesticated long ago since their cleverness must have been noticed by our ancestors, but they have not. I feel, with no offence to dogs, that crows know what dignity is and keep a distance from humans. They are hated but live proudly. They are sensitive enough to feel the pain of life, yet they won't give up on life and can do without such things as hope or dream or religion. Perhaps we could learn something important from them by living much closer to them than now.

(The information and ideas about crows included in this essay are taken from Karasu no Kyokasho by Hajime Matsubara)