HSC · Persuasive Writing
Persuasive Writing: Is artificial intelligence creating…
HSC Persuasive Writing essay scoring 75%: Is artificial intelligence creating more opportunities than problems for society? Real talk, is AI really…
Is artificial intelligence creating more opportunities than problems for society?
Real talk, is AI really creating more opportunities than problems to our society? The way I see it, I would say a lot of people in this generation would say so. Younger kids, adolescents, and even older generations use AI for everything now. I even bet more than half of the people in this class use Ai. Some may say they never have, but Ai is everywhere, it pretty hard to get away from it. People are using Ai without even realising it. Ai has become a part of people’s everyday routine. I can’t lie, Ai can be really useful, they can basically do everything for us, research, doing our daily tasks and work, managing our home and lifestyle, and especially for learning. However, behind all of these good things Ai can do for us, Ai has created more problems than opportunities to our society. Ai has created major problems to our society by eroding trust through spreading false information, weakening the critical thinking of humans, especially the economic and environmental strains.
For the past years Ai has made it possible to create deepfakes and generate false information causing harm more than good to many generations. For example, generating fake representations of real people or events. Anyone who spends anytime on the internet will know the huge numbers of images, audio and video freely accessible mainly to advertise Ai. While some uses of deepfakes are done for innocent fun, others use this advantage to spread false information. Fake content has caused havoc and panic in the middle of pandemics, causing chaos in share markets. Criminals have been taking advantage of the technology to conduct misinformation campaigns, committing fraud, as well as even bringing down an organisation or even a government. Another important issue is the potential of Ai to breach security, facilitate identity theft, fraud and promote scams, as well as other crime. Once an Ai developer has such information it is a small step to create multiple versions of that person. These deepfakes can be used to get access to health data, bank accounts, and other important documents and information. Ai can also expose children and teens to harmful content. The eSafety survey found 20% of children and teens reported potentially harmful or inappropriate interactions with Ai tools. With Ai being everywhere now, it is harder to prevent the use of it. Although people see Ai as their friend, Ai has created a mass of alleged murder suicide allegation, mainly ChatGPT, the most used Ai tools worldwide. One example is from the CIO article, when in August this year, the New York Post reported ChatGPT may have fuelled the delusions of a former Yahoo manager to actually think his own mother was a chinse spy trying to kill him. This led the man to kill his own mother and himself after months of interactions with the chatbot, whom he called bobby. Not so friendly after all, isn’t it? Yeah, I must say, our generation might be cooked chat.
HSC · Discursive Writing
Discursive Writing: “You go to class and discuss famous…
HSC Discursive Writing essay scoring 92.5%: The Fatal Misfortune of the Familiar “Habit is a great deadener.” — Samuel Beckett The first beep, you move.…
The Fatal Misfortune of the Familiar
“Habit is a great deadener.”
— Samuel Beckett
The first beep, you move.
Pulse monitor. Or maybe blood pressure.
The piercing oscillation ought to capture your attention. After all, that's what the alarm is designed for. Action.
The second time, you glance up. Assess the situation. Ringing reverberates in your mind until the frequency is deemed ultimately unurgent.
The third time, you choose not to look up at all. The vibratory waves intertwine themselves within the threadbare blankets tossed over the hospital bed, indistinct now from the hum of flickering fluorescent lighting and nurses’ sneakers scuffing against the linoleum floor.
This time, someone died. The signal was missed.
Alarm fatigue is a real-life phenomenon amongst healthcare professionals: the effect of sensory overload in a hospital that leads to a desensitisation towards auditory alerts. Constant, non-action monitor alarms lead clinicians to ignore emergencies. The boy cries wolf over and over, yet, at some point, the village stops gathering.
“Alarm fatigue” is a medical term that rarely escapes the industry, but its mechanics, I suspect, are already intimate to you. You’ve been subjected to a noise long enough that your mind ceased to register it as a signal. Not through cold-hearted cruelty or conscious abdication, but through the insidious arithmetic of repetition.
We have done to the world’s most tumultuous crises precisely what clinicians do to telemetry alarms: recalibrated our threshold for what constitutes an emergency until the genuinely catastrophic no longer qualifies. Suffering, it would appear, has a shelf life.
HSC · Discursive Writing
Discursive Writing: The darkest nights produce the…
HSC Discursive Writing essay scoring 70%: The sterile, saccharine scent of the room permeated my body, coating my essence with an eternal mark; the…
The sterile, saccharine scent of the room permeated my body, coating my essence with an eternal mark; the incessant beeping of the machines attached to me never ceased. The tube tethered my head to the machine, eradicating any sense of freedom I had left. The days bled into one another, the memories dissolving like ink into water, providing a faint sense of assurance against the impending doom. They say the darkest nights produce the brightest stars. I had yet to find out.
HSC · Discursive Writing
Discursive Writing: The darkest nights produce the…
HSC Discursive Writing essay scoring 72.5%: The sterile, saccharine scent of the room permeated my body, coating my essence with an eternal mark; the…
The sterile, saccharine scent of the room permeated my body, coating my essence with an eternal mark; the incessant beeping of the machines attached to me never ceased. The tube tethered my head to the machine, eradicating any sense of freedom I had left. The days bled into one another, the memories dissolving like ink into water, providing a faint sense of assurance against the impending doom. They say the darkest nights produce the brightest stars. I had yet to find out.
HSC · Discursive Writing
Discursive Writing: “Words are never neutral – they are…
HSC Discursive Writing essay scoring 92.5%: "Primum Non Nocere" — Hippocrates "First, do no harm." As writers, we often labour under the delusion that…
"Primum Non Nocere" — Hippocrates
"First, do no harm." As writers, we often labour under the delusion that our memories, hopes and aspirations are ours alone to command. But the scalpel trembles for days, maybe years, learning what not to touch. Are words ever truly neutral? They arrive laden with the reader's history and beliefs, a conversation you didn't know you had started. Before the first incision comes the first fear: that your true voice, exposed on the page, will be the very thing the reader rejects. I knew this fear at fourteen, fuelled by the anime I rewatched and the fanfiction I wrote at 2am, pouring my obsessions into nonsensical world-building, a newspaper editor by day, a vigilante by night, convinced that intensity alone was proof of authenticity. It wasn't. The scalpel was already in my hand. I just hadn't learned the first oath yet.
Foreign Body
HSC · Imaginative Writing
Imaginative Writing: In the middle of the night, around…
HSC Imaginative Writing essay scoring 87.5%: The bird does not wake me. Four notes, spaced through the dark like an unfinished thought. At first, I…
The bird does not wake me.
Four notes, spaced through the dark like an unfinished thought. At first, I treated them as coincidence, something incidental. I lay listlessly under the heat of the blanket, turning my gaze away from the window.
But the sound returns.
Not urgently. Not insistently. Simply again.
And it is this “again” that begins to matter.
Because anticipation is not yet hope. It is only the body learning patterns before meaning arrives. I find myself beginning to expect the song before it happens, as if the night has developed a rhythm that I have unconsciously agreed to participate in. In that waiting, something subtle forms. Not comfort, but attention. The night is no longer continuous; it is divided with expectation. By the third time I listen, I am awake before it arrives.
It has been like this for a week now. Or maybe longer. Time has become unreliable in this house, it is measured less in days and more in what does or doesn’t happen. The kettle not boiling. The phone is not ringing. The empty chair at the kitchen table that no one has moved, as if shifting it might confirm something none of us are ready to say aloud.
And then there is the bird.
Four notes.
Always coming around four am, when the night's shadow has enveloped the city streets and suburban neighbourhoods. It’s not loud enough to startle you, yet too distinct to ignore. There is something deliberate in its repetition, and I lay in the dark awake, listening for something that has not yet happened.
I start to wait for it. And then, four notes. And something inside me starts to settle.
HSC · Imaginative Writing
Imaginative Writing: Part A: Imaginative Response (15…
HSC Imaginative Writing essay scoring 72.5%: The béké does not know this island. He has no eyes for this place. What this island remembers, no…
The béké does not know this island. He has no eyes for this place. What this island remembers, no Englishman’s forgetting can undo - not even his, who named it the false superstition of a degraded people. I have served this house long before he learn its name.
Beneath the verdure of Granbois, the Obeah stones hold what no doctrine could supplant - bearing nothing but an untold Gospel the coloniser refused to receive.
I have known my doudou since she was nothing but breath and need, before England had decided what she was worth.
My fingers press into the soil. The earth here give back what you put in.
It do not lie.
It do not dress itself in what it is not.
A beetle turn itself against a gnarled root, veining deeper into the soil. I watch it for a moment. It is drawn into something that does not welcome it - still it go.
Birdsong lifts, lacing the once steady breeze with something not right.
It come to me first. Not by sight, but in the way the vetiver turn wrong, bending where it should stand.
The ground know his step; it take his weight, with patience.
Without pardon.
I still my hands. Dark with soil.
He halts at the garden’s edge. I know before I look - the vetiver told me. The ground said so.
My eyes find him before I decide to look.
HSC · Imaginative Writing
Imaginative Writing: Part A: Imaginative Response (15…
HSC Imaginative Writing essay scoring 60%: The béké does not know this island. He has no eyes for this place. What this island remembers, no…
The béké does not know this island. He has no eyes for this place. What this island remembers, no Englishman’s forgetting can undo - not even his, who named it the false superstition of a degraded people. I have served this house long before he learn its name.
Beneath the verdure of Granbois, the Obeah stones hold what no doctrine could supplant - bearing nothing but an untold Gospel the coloniser refused to receive.
I have known my doudou since she was nothing but breath and need, before England had decided what she was worth.
My fingers press into the soil.
HSC · Imaginative Writing
Imaginative Writing: Part A: Imaginative Response (15…
HSC Imaginative Writing essay scoring 72.5%: The béké does not know this island. He has no eyes for this place. What this island remembers, no…
The béké does not know this island. He has no eyes for this place. What this island remembers, no Englishman’s forgetting can undo - not even his, who named it the forged superstition of a degraded people. I have served this house long before he learned its name.
Beneath the saturated verdure of Granbois, the Obeah stones hold what no doctrine could displace - bearing nothing but an untold Gospel the coloniser refused to receive.
I have known my doudou since she was nothing but breath and need, before England had decided what she was worth.
My fingers press into the soil.
A beetle turns itself against a gnarled root, veining deeper into the soil. I watch it for a moment. It is drawn into something that does not welcome it - yet it persists.
Birdsong lifts, lacing the once steady breeze with something unholy.
Wind surges with an untamed fury, threading through the island, infecting the air with the stench of vetiver.
HSC · Imaginative Writing
Imaginative Writing: Part A: Imaginative Response (15…
HSC Imaginative Writing essay scoring 77.5%: The beke does not know this island. Not truly. What this place holds lies stamped into what he has long…
The beke does not know this island. Not truly. What this place holds lies stamped into what he has long dismissed as forged superstition — a primordial knowing, patient and unconfirmable, persisting amongst the belittled obeah stones, bearing testament to an untold Gospel the coloniser refused to receive.
I have served this house long before he learned its name. I have known my doudou since she was nothing but breath and need, before England had decided what she was worth.
The island knows what approaches. Granbois presses close — the trees leaning inward, the air thickening, the ground holding what it knows beneath its surface. His arrival here was not a welcome. It was a confirmation from something older than his orderly God. The fire was always going to come. Not the fire of Coulibri, not yet — but what precedes it: the slow accumulation of a man who carries destruction and mistakes it for authority. A stark division between the foreign and the rooted is now forged into the woman suspended between both, surrendered to an irreversible dissolution of what was divinely decreed as hers.
The parrot stops first.
That is how I know. One moment its call threads through the upper branches — and then nothing. A held breath. The garden does not go quiet when the wind drops. It goes quiet when something moves against it.
I do not look up. I hear the grass bend in the wrong direction, the particular weight of a man who walks as though the ground has agreed in advance to receive him. The air shifts. Vetiver rises — sharp, buried-sweet — and beneath it something else entirely. Something arrived from elsewhere.
He stops.
I keep my hands in the soil.
HSC · Discursive Writing
Discursive Writing: Task (20 marks) “She likes to read,…
HSC Discursive Writing essay scoring 65%: Diverse texts offer some of the best sources of insight. I often find myself diving through these doorways…
Diverse texts offer some of the best sources of insight. I often find myself diving through these doorways into alternate worlds, reading until my eyes grow weary, my mind enlightened with a widening landscape of ideas and viewpoints, and a depth of understanding that keeps unfolding. Reading broadens our perspective by acting as a mirror to one’s emotions, values, and behaviours, allowing people to explore different perspectives without risk.
HSC · Imaginative Writing
Imaginative Writing: Part a) Use the image provided to…
HSC Imaginative Writing essay scoring 92.5%: ‘For Those Who’ve Come Across The Seas’ The envelope sat on his kitchen table. Its corners worn soft, its…
‘For Those Who’ve Come Across The Seas’
The envelope sat on his kitchen table. Its corners worn soft, its edges frayed like old prayers. Afternoon light filtered through the venetian blinds, stripping the linoleum where his slippers had worn a path between the kettle and sink, the same shuffling path his father had worn in their cramped Saigon apartment. The handwriting was unmistakable, his cousin Hieu's careful script.
"Thân gửi Long, Dear Long,
Chúng tôi viết thư này để nhờ bạn giúp đỡ." We are writing to ask for your help.
The amount pressed against his retinas like a brand. Five digits that meant both everything and nothing. A deposit for a house he'd never own, a lifetime of rice and fish sauce, a sum that seemed impossible to a man who'd once arrived with a plastic bag of documents and salt-stained clothes. Long had the ability to sketch out the footsteps of his family’s future entry into Australia on his fingertips.
His chest constricted, muscle memory of counting coins in supermarket aisles. The office ties hanging in his wardrobe seemed to mock him, silk nooses of respectability that couldn't quite choke out the taste of saltwater.
Something tumbled from the envelope. A small wooden water buffalo, intricately carved, no larger than his thumb.
***
HSC · Writer's Statement
Writer's Statement: Question: Evaluate how your study of…
HSC Writer's Statement essay scoring 85%: In employing figurative language throughout my imaginative composition, I sought to convey the emotional…
In employing figurative language throughout my imaginative composition, I sought to convey the emotional disconnection & quiet persistence of individuals confined within an urban environment. This creative choice was deeply influenced by my study of Nam Le’s Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice, which demonstrated how figurative detail can bridge emotional distance & evoke the lingering effects of memory and trauma. Le’s ability to intertwine sensory description with complex emotion guided my own approach to crafting imagery that allowed readers to experience isolation not as absence, but as texture, something felt within the rhythm of the city itself.
HSC · Imaginative Writing
Imaginative Writing: Write an imaginative or discursive…
HSC Imaginative Writing essay scoring 90%: “The agony of an Untold Story" The question sat in the margin of my exercise book, boxed twice in red. My…
“The agony of an Untold Story"
The question sat in the margin of my exercise book, boxed twice in red. My pencil hovered, then the phone lit up with a number I didn’t recognise. Private caller. I let it purr out once. Twice. On the third ring I answered, because in maths you eventually have to substitute something in. “Is this the patient’s next-of-kin? This is Ambulance.”. Every variable changed value.
The floor moved first—no, the room—no, me—and then I was in the back of a truck that felt like a bright, stainless-steel stomach, swallowing us whole. The lights smeared the street into red and blue fractions. A paramedic tightened a strap near my knee, her hands quick and practised. “I’ll give you fifty bucks if you can guess what sport I play,” she said, eyes on the road mirror. My mouth worked without me. “Cricket?” She grinned. “Paintball. Paint gun. No one’s ever guessed it.” The way she said ever stretched, like she had asked on many midnights, like many sons and daughters had ridden this same length of lino, watching the city get chopped into red and blue slices. The siren wound up—skein of sound, a rip-saw—and then, somehow, I lost it. It was on, but my ears had a wall. The noise was outside the problem set.