Year 8 Discursive Writing Exemplar Responses: Felix Qiu

The Sweetest of Potatoes

The loud, repeated beeping of a timer filled the air as I helped my grandma lift a large pot of steamed sweet potatoes, freshly harvested just yesterday from our backyard. Unlike most neighbouring backyards, ours was filled with large green sweet potato leaves. 

The sound of the timer is a sort of breakfast call for my grandparents, but today we have cooked enough sweet potatoes for everyone to enjoy. My grandpa’s eternal frown disappears, and all of us only wash our hands for a fraction of a second as we excitedly grab a sweet potato from the shallow pot, including my dad, who always seems so serious. 

The sweet potato has become a central part of the daily’s diet, brought by my grandma who used to live on a sweet potato farm in China with her parents since childhood, before she moved to Australia. However, her love for this soft, purple-skinned vegetable never changed.

Sweet potatoes are important for many people around the world as a dietary staple. It is a source of carbohydrates, as well as many varied vitamins like Vitamin B. The consumption of sweet potatoes can be seen around the world. In South American countries for example, sweet potatoes have remained a very important part of their diet for thousands of years. In Asia, China is the world’s largest consumer of sweet potatoes – it is where the most sweet potato dishes originate. 

There are many types of sweet potatoes. These include the Korean sweet potato, which has a very high sugar content and is undoubtedly the sweetest type. There’s also the South American sweet potato, which many people say has a rich and slightly bitter taste. 

My grandma has many ideas on how the sweet potato is beneficial for your body, from helping with indigestion to affecting your appearance by giving you smoother skin and changing the natural balance of your body (in a good way). Sweet potato can be made into many things, like sweet potato noodles, sweet potato bread, and even a sweet potato sandwich where two halves of a sweet potato can hold other ingredients between them. 

No matter the nutritional or health benefits, or how you eat the sweet potato, my grandma’s love for sweet potatoes has brought the entire family together. We leave the large, shallow pot, once filled to the brim with these bulbous vegetables, without a single crumb. 

English Team Comment:

Creative nonfiction or ‘discursive writing’ (as NESA calls it in senior years), is a particularly difficult mode to write in, especially in your junior years! It’s difficult for students to take their real-life stories and write them onto the page in an engaging style and voice. Felix, a Year 8 student at Matrix Education, has done an amazing job of bringing readers through a story about his family’s food culture. Not only does Felix write in clear and moving prose, he also consistently ties the sweet potato motif to the importance of his family’s cultural traditions. This personal essay received full marks in the Year 8 Term 1 ‘Discursive Writing’ course’s mid-term assessment. 

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The Effect of Short-Form Content 

I’m on the train in the morning. It’s unusually quiet. I  look around and see most people with headphones on, glued to their phone. Some don’t notice when the next stop is announced, and others don’t notice when the doors open. A few kids on their way to school even miss their stop. I have to nudge my friend in the shoulder a few times to get his attention – we need to get off at our stop! He almost forgets to tap off his Opal card and almost walks into traffic, finger still scrolling through YouTube shorts. 

With the short-form content, it’s really easy to say to yourself “just one more video”. These short videos don’t seem to take too much of your time, so you keep scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. You don’t realise when it all snowballs into 30, 40 minutes, even an hour sometimes, when you just wanted a quick break. 

“It’s really obvious how the nature of these short, attention-grabbing videos is directly affecting our attention spans and daily life”, says Professor J. Chan at Chicago University. “In fact, our attention span decreased by nearly two minutes over the past 19 years.”

Because these short-form videos are so short, they need to be as attention-grabbing and entertaining as possible. This leads to instant entertainment – when we scroll through content, these videos give us exactly what we want. We’re so accustomed to instant entertainment from short videos that if it takes longer than eight-and-a-half seconds to give us what we want, we lose focus. That might sound like an exaggeration, but an experiment conducted last year showed that our average attention span only lasts eight-and-a-half seconds. That’s just behind the attention span of a goldfish, which sits at nine seconds.

In this experiment, the longest someone ever held their for was 47 seconds, which was a 103-second decrease from 19 years ago. Our average attention span decreased by 33%.

Short-form videos are really addictive. The length of the video makes it easy to consume at any moment; it’s really convenient. It’s also specifically made to give you only what you want, making it much more engaging. “The addictiveness of short-form social media relies on the principle that even if what you’re watching isn’t entertaining, the next one may be, keeping you scrolling,” adds Professor Chan. “It’s a bit like gambling”.

However, there’s a good side to short-form content as well. Given the short length of the videos, information is conveyed concisely and these videos get straight to the point. But sometimes, these videos might exaggerate the information or even the statistics to keep your attention. On average, 71% more people don’t fact-check information in the short-form medium. This means that unreliable information can spread easily. 

A good thing about short-form content is that it’s easily digestible so you can better understand information or an argument. It is also much less overwhelming than a full-length video essay on YouTube, for example.

Speaking of YouTube, my friend was watching a video which coincidentally spoke of short-form content addiction. It also spoke about how short-form content was increasingly being a priority for popular social media sites. Although the video explained the decrease of our attention spans, my mate found it crazy that anyone would have such a short attention span to be so oblivious of their own surroundings. This, ironically, was the same friend who had nearly missed his stop this morning.

English Team Comment:

Much like his personal essay on sweet potatoes and family traditions, Felix’s second piece – a feature article on the psychosocial effects of short-form video content – has an excellent structure. This feature article makes use of the narrow-wide-narrow creative nonfiction structure in a seamless way, especially as Felix starts and finishes his article with anecdotes. Throughout the ‘wider’ middle part of his feature article, Felix does a great job of constructing logos – he incorporates plenty of research and quotes from subject-matter experts, and includes a variety of statistics to strengthen his implicit argument. Within the final anecdote, he closes the loop of his informative storytelling with the motif of a YouTube short and the image of his friend nearly missing his bus stop. This feature article received full marks in the Year 8 Term 1 ‘Discursive Writing’ course’s final assessment.