Journal According to Jack Noonan

Dear Diary,

Patrick was actually dead ! He was fine this afternoon... When we received the phone call from Mary that Patrick was dead, we immediately rushed to the scene. The doctor found out that Patrick was being hit by a club hard on the back of his head. When I asked Mary some questions, Mary seems to be uncooperative. I suspect that Mary was trying to cover up something. If there was a fight going on, Patrick would have struggled and would draw out his gun. I suspect that someone he knew killed him with a blow on the back of his head when he was not noticing and that could be Mary. Mary wanted us to eat the lamb leg. There must be a reason to it but I am not sure what it was. The shape of the lamb leg is just like a club and that can be the weapon used to kill Patrick. I am going to have a talk with Mary again to see if my suspicion was right.

Jack Noonan

The Lady or the Tiger?

The man approached the door on the right without hesitation, trusting that the princess would point him to the door which stood a lady behind it. He took in a deep breath and opened the door. He looked up and saw a lady emerge from the darkness. He turned back happily to look at the princess and saw that her face shows a shocked expression. The king’s face turned red with anger and immediately left the arena. Then, a priest, followed by a band of choristers, and dancing maidens blowing joyous airs on golden horns and treading an epithalamia measure, advanced to where the pair stood, side by side, and the wedding was promptly and cheerily solemnized. Then the gay brass bells rang forth their merry peals, the people shouted glad hurrahs.
At the end of the marriage ceremony, the man went to the palace to thank the princess for guiding him to the door which stood a lady behind so that he would not get eaten by the tiger. He overheard a conversation going on between the king and the princess. “I thought the door on the right stood a tiger behind? What happened?" the princess asked the king. The king sighed and replied," I knew you would know where the tiger and lady were and would tell your lover where the lady was so I made a quick swap secretly before people started to enter the arena... I did not know you would actually want to point to the door which stood a tiger behind..." When the man heard the conversation, he was shocked beyond words. He left the palace angrily and swore that he would never return to the palace again. The man, together with his newly married wife, led a happy and peaceful life thereafter.

Composition/Short-Story

Few weeks back, our class did a narrative essay. We were supposed to write between 350 words and 500 words. We were given 3 prompts and a picture. I chose the first prompt and wrote a essay based on it. After my teacher had marked it, he gave some remarks. He said that I have an unclear story logic, vague descriptions, repetitive phrasings and inconsistent verb tense. I would try to improve in those areas and try to make sure it would not happen again. Recently, we just had a composition test and I hope that I can get good grades.
My teacher also said that a short story does not always need to have a moral lesson and not always be about a serious subject. A short story need not have a proper plot and the language used will not always be of a high order. My teacher said that a good short story must compel reader's attention from start to finish, must have a meaning that goes beyond the story itself and must affect the reader at the level of his innermost feelings.

Comprehension

Our teacher had taught us more about comprehension this few weeks. Comprehensions in secondary school is definitely more difficult than the ones in primary school. There are different types of questions, they are direct question, inferential question, own words question, language use question, vocabulary question and comparative question. I find them all very difficult especially the comparative question and inferential question. I did rather bad in my first comprehension. I only manage to score 12 out of 25. Recently, we did another comprehension. I hope that I would score better than the previous comprehension.

There are some golden rules our teacher taught us when doing comprehension. Always read the question carefully, use the wording of the question to take you to the part of the text where the answer is, do not copy whole blocks of text, hoping that somewhere it contains the correct information and use only the relevant part of the passage. When doing comparative question, we must be specific and the information given must not be vague.