need help on the essay - dec 4th

Wood5440
Sun, 28 Nov 2010 00:34:07 +0000

The scoring rubric for essay graders specifies “effectively and insightfully develops a point of view on the subject and demonstrates outstanding critical thinking”. Consider the depth of your analysis. Outline the major points that the examples are intended to support. What do you get?
The same idea in other words…Your examples are presented in depth, but how much of the writing ties the example to the topic? How many different relevant points and sub-points ABOUT KNOWLEDGE are contained within such long examples?
Put the “three examples and get out with a zinger” formula on the back burner for a moment and look at how much you actually said about the topic.
I’ve read many posts on this site about how easy it is to write an essay using the five paragraph form, but they miss an important point: the form is just a form. It’s like an application form…sure you can fill in the blanks and it will look good from a distance. If you can spell and write legibly you will get an average result. But if you want a superior result, you have to pay attention to what you say when you fill in the blanks. The form by itself won’t help you with that. That comes from what ETS calls your “developed ability”, which means the knowledge, skill and wisdom you have incorporated into your thinking throughout your lifetime. You have to apply that to the topic before you start filling in the blanks on the form.
So, the essay is long, well-written from a grammar and usage point of view. The vocab is adequate for a good score (“exemplified by examples” is redundant). The intro and conclusion are clearly straight out of the 10 million (also redundant) ‘How To Write an SAT Essay’ books. An introduction introduces the subject and main idea of your essay, but it also introduces YOU to the reader. What does your intro tell me about you? It tells me you are reciting an answer and don’t really care much about your topic. And your conclusion tells me you could have written a much more thoughtful essay if you had given yourself a chance.
What do I mean? Your zinger, “Knowledge is power”, could have been the key to a much better analysis of the topic. Power to do what? Go back to your first example.How, specifically, did knowledge give Quinones power? How many times and in how many ways did knowledge make a difference in his story? Where did the knowledge come from? The answers to these questions are what make his example relevant to the topic and change that paragraph from ‘here is a man whose example says SOMETHING about how knowledge can improve an individual’s life’ to ‘here is a man whose example at this point and this point and again at this point illustrates THREE SPECIFIC WAYS knowledge empowers an individual to improve his life’. To which essay would you give the higher score?