Web of Lies

Stephanie Ericsson categorizes the lies humans tell properly. I think it is human nature to tell lies. We tell them for a number of reasons in which Ericsson listed for her readers. This essay makes you more aware of the lies that we consider very small and insignificant, to lies that are rather quite big, and even to the lies that we trick ourselves into believing.

            Two other types of lies that Ericsson does not mention in her essay are broken promises and plagiarism. A broken promise is when you tell someone you are going to do something when you have no intention of actually doing it. An example of a broken promise would be if I didn't go to a show that my friend is in even though I told her I would be there. I had no intention of actually going to the show, but I just told her I would so she wouldn't feel bad.

Plagiarism is another type of lie. Whenever someone copies another person’s exact words and ideas it is plagiarism. An example of this would be if Suzy decided to copy and paste a paragraph that she got offline into her essay without citing the source. By not citing the paragraph, Suzy is lying that it was all her work.

Ericsson wrote this essay to explain the different types of lies that people of all ages tell in their everyday lives. This essay was published because it makes people think about the lies that they have told all throughout their lives. It also makes them think how they can stop saying those types of lies in the future.

I liked that she gave examples in her essay when describing the different types of lies. The examples she gave in her essay were very relatable. She gave readers’ a better understanding of what each particular category of lies means. I also liked that before each of her explanations, Ericsson quoted a scholar who discussed that type of lie. This gave readers an even better ability to grasp the meaning of the lie.

I disliked that Ericsson did not explain in her essay why people lie in the first place. Ericsson gave many examples of people who have lied. Even though these examples were very helpful in understanding the meaning of the type of lie, it never explained why these people decided to lie and be deceitful from the very beginning. If Ericsson explained this in her essay it would have made it much stronger.