Declan Robinson Spence
English 9F
Mrs. Stewart
November 8th 2010
Everyone knows that you should try to be truthful. However, sometimes it is not always that easy to tell the truth sometimes we lie. Reasons for lying could be we are afraid of the unknown, we are afraid of what others might think of us, we are afraid we will be found out or maybe we are trying to protect someone else’s feelings by lying to them. With these reasons one might say that it is easier to lie than to tell the truth. Perhaps it would be easier if we all just lied. There are advantages and disadvantages to telling the truth. An advantage to telling the truth is being able to talk about things without fear of ramifications. For example if you are in the Principal’s office and the Principal is asking you what happened and if you tell the truth then you are able to talk about it without fear of the ramifications. A disadvantage for being honest would be the ramifications if you saw your friend stealing and told the truth you might lose your friendship. Another disadvantage of telling the truth would be that you might say something one day and it might comeback to bite you. From these examples we can see that there are more disadvantages than advantages to being honest.
In contrast there are advantages and disadvantages to being dishonest. For example if you are in the principal’s office and they ask you about an incident and you lied about it and you make it convincing enough you appear honest and avoid facing ramifications. Another advantage is that if you know something about your friend but it might hurt their feelings then if you lie about it then you do not hurt your friend’s feelings like in April Raintree by Beatrice Cullenton when April les to Cheryl to avoid hurting her feelings. Another disadvantage of being dishonest would be that if you lie to somebody and then they find out you lied you might lose their friendship. A final advantage of lying is that if you