Essay in response to SAT prompt

topboy
Sun, 03 Sep 2006 23:15:02 +0000

I think this essay is a solid 10. The argument is clearly stated and nicely developed through the various examples. There are also negligible grammatical errors. Most importantly though, your essay is very well organized. You’ve clearly stated your three examples and elaborated on them correspondingly. From my experience, organization is perhaps the most important determinant of the score, and the fact that your essay has such a solid structure should warrant the essay a 10. Nevertheless, the essay still needs some improvements. By directly stating your specific examples in your introduction, you’ve drastically narrowed down the scope of your argument. That is to say, just because the man who lives in poverty, the girl with cancer, and the boy who had his vacation cut short are all in their current situations caused by factors beyond their control does not mean that most people are limited to the choices they make. In other words, your arguments are too narrow to conclude something as general as: people are indeed limited to the choices they make. Although it is almost impossible to come up with examples that are comprehensive enough to respond to a prompt within 25 minutes, there are a few changes that you can make to broaden your specific examples to better connect to the prompt. Instead of mentioning a very narrow case like the man living in poverty, you can say that we limited in the choices we can make through economic factors. Then for the topic sentence of that body paragraph, you can use your example of poverty to reinforce the impact of economic factors. This way, you can draw a more persuasive argument such as economic influences by citing the specific example of the man in poverty to respond to the prompt.