<p>SO here is the question that came to me while I was writing a practice essay: can you use hypothetical situations like “suppose something happens…” and describe two(or more) actions that may be the outcome of the hypothetical situation as two argument surrounding the topic(i.e. two paragraphs, one out come per paragraph) as an effective argument? or does the argument have to be a solid real world things that happened at sometime somewhere?
of course I’m not saying that there is only hypothetical situations in the whole essay, there are some real examples that comes after the hypothesis is made but only takes up a small part of the essay it’s self, it’s there only to say that the out come is, well, real.
So can you have a really good scoring essay that has a hypothetical situations as a backbone structure to make your point? Because sometimes I find it really hard to argue by something that really happened.</p>
<p>Hypotheticals do not convince. Their job is to clarify.</p>
<p>If you don’t mind behaving a little cynically, and it’s all you have to argue with, then write as if your hypothetical events actually took place.</p>
<p>This is the kind of behavior that is supposed to be eliminated by the new SAT, but a lot of high-powered test takers continue to do it without thinking twice.</p>
<p>Suppose the Riemann hypothesis is true and then using that assumption, I somehow prove that every even positive integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes. Is that going to convince you that the Goldbach conjecture is true? Nope!</p>
<p>Likewise, I wouldn’t try to prove or assert claims in an essay topic by using hypothetical examples. True, there is the whole “make up a historical event or work of literature and pass it on as if it happened,” and it’ll work on the SAT essay if you assume it as real and use it to support your claim, but that won’t work in the real world.</p>
<p>Then tell me: what about using statistics to prove your point?
just assume that the statistic I’m giving is about right(give take 5% variances) </p>
<p>No one is going to mark you down for anything like a 5% variance. No one expects you to be perfect on a 25 minute essay. They’re not judging you by your facts. They are instead judging you based on structure, analysis, and the quality of the writing itself.</p>