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| UIL READY WRITING CONTEST |
| SAMPLE READY WRITING TOPICS |
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INVITATIONAL A
Topic I
“Along with responsible newspapers we must have responsible readers. No matter how conscientiously the publisher and his associates perform their work, they can only do half the job. Readers must do the rest. The fountain serves no useful purpose if the horse refuses to drink.”
— Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, address to the Newspaper Publishers Association, October 4, 1955
Topic II
“Human beings can survive in the polluted cage of technological civilization, but in adapting to such conditions, we may sacrifice much of our humanness....”
— Rene Dubose, Life, July 28, 1970
INVITATIONAL B
Topic I
“Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power.”
— George Bernard Shaw, Days with Bernard Shaw, 1951
Topic II
“Boiled down to one word, the most important difference between the early American and his counterpart is awareness. Living then was a vital experience; today we often exist in a dreamlike, mechanical world where we seem to have very little role to play in our own lives.”
— Eric Sloan, The Seasons of America, 1958
DISTRICT I
Topic I
“The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion – these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.”
— Jerome S. Bruner, The Process of Education, 1960
Topic II
“If there ever was in the history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal, an enemy whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and really universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism.”
— Fidel Castro, International Cultural Congress, January 12, 1968
DISTRICT 2
Topic I
“I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving also something of their virtues.”
— Somerset Maughan, quoted by Ted Morgan, Simon and Schuster, 1980
Topic II
“Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did today, of my obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold Relief Societies – though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar, which by and by I shall have the manhood to withhold.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Self-Reliance
REGIONAL
Topic I
“Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness. Our life is frittered away by detail. An honest man has hardly need to count more than his ten fingers, or in extreme cases he may add his ten toes, and lump the rest. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds. Simplify, simplify.”
— Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), Where I Lived and What I Lived For
Topic II
“A boy is in the parlor what the pit is in the play-house; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him; he does not court you. But the man is as it were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with éclat* he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account.”
* éclat – a brilliant or conspicuous success or display
— Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), Self-Reliance
STATE
Topic I
“[O]bserve that in all the propaganda of the ecologists – amidst all their appeals to nature and pleas for ‘harmony with nature’ – there is no discussion of man's needs and the requirements of his survival. Man is treated as if he were an unnatural phenomenon. Man cannot survive in the kind of state of nature that the ecologists envision – i.e., on the level of sea urchins or polar bears....
In order to survive, man has to discover and produce everything he needs, which means that he has to alter his background and adapt it to his needs. Nature has not equipped him for adapting himself to his background in the manner of animals. From the most primitive cultures to the most advanced cultures, man has had to manufacture things; his well-being depends on his success at production. The lowest human tribe cannot survive without the alleged source of pollution: fire. It is not merely symbolic that fire was the property of the gods which Prometheus* brought to man. The ecologists are new vultures swarming to extinguish that fire.”
*a Titan who is chained and tortured by Zeus for stealing fire from heaven and giving it to mankind
— Ayn Rand, “The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” from Return of the Primitive, 1971
Topic II
“Pugnacity, rivalry, vainglory, love of booty, fear, suspicion, anger, desire for freedom from the conventions and restrictions of peace, love of power and hatred of oppression, opportunity for novel displays, love of home and soil, attachment to one's people and to the altar and the hearth, courage, loyalty, opportunity to make a name, money or a career, affection, piety to ancestors and ancestral gods – all of these things and many more make up the war-like force. To suppose there is some one unchanging native force which generates war is as naïve as the usual assumption that our enemy is actuated* solely by the meaner of the tendencies named and we only by the nobler.”
* actuate – to move to action
— John Dewey, (1859-1952), Human Nature and Conduct, II, 3
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