TOEFL iBT Independent Writing Winter 2 Reading fiction is more enjoyable than watching movies.

Writing Topic

Consider the following statement. Reading fiction is more enjoyable than watching movies. Do you agree or disagree with this idea? Support your response by including specific reasons and examples.

 

☆Let’s Think

Complete the table below and ask each other the same questions.

 

	Reading fiction	Watching movies
Give examples of each art form. Explain them if necessary.
When and where do you enjoy fiction/movie?
Do you share the experience with others? How do you do it?
Which sense(s) do you use when you read fiction/watch movie?
What are the good things of the experience you have with each art form?

 

☆Hints for Points

Enjoying fiction

1.       You can use your imagination.

2.       Novels show what is going on inside humans.

3.       You will experience the author’s mind and learn their attitude, often reprograming your mind.

 

Enjoying movies

1.       Movies inspire you with picture and sound.

2.       Going to a theater to see a movie is a special experience.

3.       Movies will show you what is beyond your imagination.

 

☆Essay for Ideas and Expressions

Although there are common denominators in what is enjoyable across humans, what element of enjoyment appeals more than the others differs from person to person. Some especially like to see beautiful people, others are particular about great stories, and still others are just happy being with others. Therefore, it is difficult to decide whether reading fiction is more enjoyable than watching movies. Actually, the opposite might be true. Movies have many ingredients to make themselves worth spending time and money on while fiction books have a distinct quality to capture and mature our mind.

 

Movies are meant to be enjoyed at the theater. According to the filmmaker Michael Moore, watching a movie on the phone is like looking at a stamp of Monna Lisa. With the huge screen and the effective sound system, movie directors create a world where you experience the story as if you were a by-stander. Sharing the experience with others is another source of joy. It is in our DNA to feel comfortable when we work and play collectively, and since modern society hardly ever provides the opportunity, sharing the experience of watching the same movie with about hundred people is a positive way of satisfying our desire to congregate. The fusion of these experiences is what watching a movie provides.

 

Fiction and movies share at least two aspects. They have stories, and they inform us of human and society. One thing that I personally value fiction for is that it shows what is going on inside humans. It makes you feel as if you were in the character’s body and mind. For example, although I never enjoy others’ deaths, I find it remarkable how each art deals with death scenes. A movie depicts a death from the outside while fiction does if from the inside. If a man is battered to death in a movie, you see blood and a body and hear the last breath. In the same scene in a book, you feel the man’s physical pain and the release from it with the relaxation of the constrictor of his bladder in his last moment. In a suicide scene of a movie, you may see a husband and official tired from an affair, take pills, and in a few seconds, his head drops. In the case of a novel, the page is filled with the mental agony of the depressed, gentle individual and then his gradually dimming conscience, with the description of the last moment of its disappearance. Of course, the authors do not know exactly what happens when we are dying, but at least we can have a full internal experience of the death of a character when you read fiction.

 

Showing the internal world of a character is the exclusive territory of novels in general, but this is merely one of the ingredients that make up an entertainment. The difference in presenting a story between fiction and movies may give us an insight about the difference in the nature of enjoyment between the two forms of entertainment. Here is my humble comparison for this purpose between John Grisham’s novel, The Chamber, and the movie based on it. The original story is about a lawyer who tries to save his grandfather, who is sentenced to death for bombing a lawyer’s office that killed the lawyer’s twin sons and caused amputation of his legs, who dies a few years later. The fact is that there is a true bomber at large and that the old man was an accomplice who committed little crime. The layer suspects it, but the old man is not actively cooperative to his effort to avoid the execution and ends up in the gas chamber. In farewell, the old man tells his grandson that he had not known that there were children in the site, revealing that he feels guilty of letting children die and that for this sin, he is punishing himself. He also considers his grandson’s sorrow and says that at his old age with all the pain, dying is not a bad thing. When the execution starts, the lawyer dashes out of the jail and drives around town quietly, hating everything.

 

In the movie, the spiritual drama of a timid, fundamentally good-willed death row inmate in the original story is transformed into a repeated, transient regret of a bigoted Klan member who, although showing signs of humanity, clearly lacks integrity and has a violent property. He tries to survive while not telling on the true culprit out of his faith to KKK. Another sin, his killing of an unarmed black neighbor, is added to the plot, which saves the viewers’ sense of justice in seeing an uneducated man executed for a crime that he did not commit. Before the execution, a hug occurs, turning a Klan into a grandfather. In the scene of the execution, the lawyer also dashes out of the jail, but, instead of driving around town silently, he hugs another victim of the crime, the inmate’s daughter, whose life was ruined by the two crimes her father was involved in. Her story is treated as an important side story, and, in the last scene, she says something like the ghost may have gone. Added as a significant side story is a big KKK gathering scene, where the lawyer meets the real murderer, a notorious Klan leader, who in the original story hides himself except for a short visit to his old mate in jail right before the execution. The story of the movie is more complicated and thus closer to the reality than the original, and this makes the movie more dramatic than the original story. In this example, it seems that reading fiction is not necessarily more enjoyable than watching a movie. It can at least be said that the readers and the audience enjoy each form of art in its own effect.

 

As an introvert, I enjoy reading depictions of the character’s psyche, while as a human, who seeks solace in a crowd, I also enjoy watching movies in a theater. Thus, I especially enjoy movies with characters’ inner thoughts expressed as a narrative, combinations of fiction and movies. However, in general I think having all senses mesmerized by a good movie is more enjoyable than being absorbed in lines of a fiction book.

 

☆Sample Essay Structures

Sample A 【Thesis】 【About enjoying fiction】 【About enjoying movies】 【My choice & why】 【Conclusion】

Sample B 【Thesis】 【Good point 1】 【Good point 2】 【Good point of the other choice & Why I don’t care】 【Conclusion】

 

Your Sample Essay Structure

【Thesis】

【Point 1】

【Point 2】

【Point 3】

【Conclusion】