The Ethics of Embellishment
By SAM ALTMAN ‘26 and JINMIN LEE ‘26
At Exeter, for the first two years of your career (at least), you’ll spend your time writing stories purely based on a short scene from your own life. Exonians understand that embellishment, at the very least, is a common tactic for narratives. The real question is whether we should create entirely new situations, conflicts, and characters in our English class. We present reasons why students should make up stories and then provide counterarguments questioning the ethics of creating entirely new stories.
Although it may seem morally suspect at first, there are strong reasons why students should make stories for their English narratives. Firstly, there is the issue of Exonians wanting to achieve the best grades they can. Especially by lower or upper year, almost no one has fresh stories that they haven’t already used. It is strictly against the rules to resubmit a narrative you’ve already written, so students are often left floundering, trying to think of new moments of their lives that are worthy of an interesting story. Your next thought might be, “What exactly does ‘worthy’ mean?” While you could assume that students could write about the simplest aspects of their day-to-day life, it’s extraordinarily difficult to get a good grade on a topic that doesn’t have built-in drama. If you’re just writing about that one time you went to your grandma’s house, it’s technically possible to make it a fantastic narrative, but it would be far easier if you wrote about hot-ballooning in Turkey (even if you didn’t actually go). However, if you were allowed to simply invent a story, you could move past any writer’s block and get back to using your creativity.
New topics, settings, and characters allow you to practice with new writing styles. It’s easy to get stuck in your old tropes, expressions, and character arcs. Still, if you can place your imagination in a completely new environment, you can develop new versatility that will serve you well (better, some might say) throughout your writing career.
It’s also worth noting that laying out the deepest parts of your personal life on a page can be taxing for Exonians. People quickly realize that it’s far easier to craft a meaningful narrative when it’s based on an inherently meaningful topic. So, even those unwilling to invent new stories will draw from the more dramatic (or traumatic) parts of their lives. Over time, some students could feel resentful, as if they’ve revealed too much, or had to think about certain periods in their lives they didn’t want to think about, or that they’ve “sold their soul for the English grade,” as it’s said colloquially. But unless you’re a spectacular writer or have a ridiculous amount of time to come up with good topics, this flaw is pretty much ingrained into the Exeter English narrative system. We should care about this aspect because we don’t want young writers to feel like they have to have a crazy story to tell or an intricate family history to write a good piece. It should be about the writing itself.
As for the case against creating stories to such an extent, students should not entirely make up English narrative stories because doing so harms students’ characters and actively hurts their writing ability: ethically, students shouldn’t be incentivized to make up stories for some materialistic gain; students’ writing will actively deteriorate; and students’ self-worth will be undermined.
Firstly, students shouldn’t create entirely new stories on principle for some materialistic gain. English teachers make clear expectations, stating that students should use real events. The Merriam-Webster dictionary’s definition of a “narrative” is “a way of presenting or understanding a situation or series of events that reflects and promotes a particular point of view or a set of values.” A piece of writing that doesn’t include any real events in the first place cannot, by definition, be a narrative. Narratives reflect how a student remembers an event that happened, not a fictional world. Thus, presenting a completely made-up story as a “narrative” would be deceptive at worst and disingenuous at best, and students all intuitively understand this. Lying for a better grade is immoral and uproots the educational environment at Exeter, which is built on trust. Learning should lie on a foundation of a sincere desire and curiosity to learn, and treating education as a means to a materialistic end harms Exeter’s integrity and promotes the degeneration of moral character. A good-willed student acting in the spirit of non-sibi would not want to use any means to get ahead of classmates.
Secondly, it is a matter of making better stories. We cannot falsely assume that making up stories will lead to better grades and performance. But when you write about something you’ve actually experienced, you can reference your memory to ground the writing in a real event. This visualization allows for much more vivid details. Creating a story from scratch is akin to drawing a still-life painting without a reference object or image; without a connection to a real event, there is no way to ground feelings, minute actions, and constant thoughts that are crucial to narratives. Without an element of truth in their writing, students will create narratives that feel hyperbolic and almost fantastical, which the Exeter English department consistently pushes back on. English teachers won’t reward students for creating stories because every well-seasoned teacher (and even a prep) will be astute enough to feel the fakeness in one’s story.
Thirdly, making up stories harms a student’s self-worth. By creating stories, students implicitly tell themselves that their own experiences are not good enough for writing. They deny their life events as insignificant instead of finding joy and value in learning more about themselves. This mindset is akin to kids looking at other “successful” people on social media with luxuries and considering themselves as somehow lesser. Students will be drawn to creating highly stimulating events and will thus reckon their own experiences as “weaker” or “boring.” This devastating attitude will deter them from finding meaning in the “smaller” yet important moments of their lives. As page 16 of Exeter’s Courses of Instruction states, “The teaching of English at Exeter is shaped by the conviction that language is the essential means of gaining self-knowledge.” Allowing students to make up stories creates a world where students believe their own lives don’t have enough merit to be explored thoroughly.
In the end, there’s not really any way for an instructor to tell if you’ve made your narrative up. Thus, under a purely consequentialist lens, it might make sense to create an entirely new story. However, for one’s self-growth, moral integrity, and even authentic quality, it might be worth questioning how truthful you’re being the next time you write an English narrative.