What is a hoax?-Kyra Watson

A hoax is deception meant to convince an audience of people that a false event or statement is actually true. The difference between this and literature is that literature is meant to be fictitious. It is not to be perceived as falsely real, even if it may have realistic qualities. In many instances, hoaxes are seen as credible because many communities want to believe in the impossible. These audiences of people are convinced that what is being said is true because it’s always more interesting to say that an impossible event occurred than to discredit the event altogether. An example of a hoax is one that recently passed. There was talk going around Facebook and other social media sites that Mars would be visible and nearly as close as the moon on August 27^th, 2015 and wouldn’t be as visible for another 200 years. Because it was such a rare phenomenon, a once in a lifetime experience some would say, many people easily believed it to be true when a photo-shopped picture was posted with “Mars” and the moon side by side in the sky. Had this story been posted in a novel or a similar work of literature, the readers would enjoy the fictitious story, yet would never quite believe it to be true.