Help with my essay?

xthrillakillax
Fri, 08 Jun 2012 23:27:25 +0000

Intro: You didn’t state your thesis clearly. Trim the unnecessary fluff and state your position explicitly. When you can’t think of a way to state your side, regurgitate the question. You also didn’t mention the types of examples you will be using. All it takes is one sentence to summarize your entire essay (e.g. “This is demonstrated in literature, historical events and current events.”)

Body paragraphs: You only used one example, the tortoise and hare. Since you mentioned Aesop’s writings, the second paragraph could have been easily your literature paragraph if you had mentioned literature in the topic sentence. You can cut the Harry Potter and Hercules part, that’s irrelevant if you’re going to be talking about Aesop. However you did an exceptional job of analyzing and relating the example to the thesis. However you only used one example when you should ideally be looking to use three. Two examples is the minimum if you’re really having a hard time thinking of something. Your conclusion is unnecessarily long; you just reworded what’s been said a bunch of times. You may have been trying to fill up the two pages but you could have cut down the conclusion to 2-3 sentences and use the extra time to write another body paragraph.

Overall: You used a lot of SAT words so that’s a plus but I hope you didn’t spend valuable time thinking of synonyms. If you’re just naturally good with words like that, then kudos to you. However you still have a lot of useless sentences that just reword what you wrote a few sentences ago. It may work in English class but SAT readers want to see solid examples that you effectively use to support your thesis. Get to the point and cut the fluff.

All of this may seem harsh but remember it’s constructive criticism. If I were an SAT grader I would give this essay a 3, mainly because your lack of a thesis and your use of only one example. A solid thesis is the easiest thing to improve and it would bump this up to a 4. On top of that, replacing the extraneous regurgitated sentences with substantiated examples would bump it up to a 5 or 6.