Hi,
I’m currently trying to prep for the January SAT, in which I’m going to give the essay. I need someone to grade a response I’ve written to a sample prompt from the Baron SAT book. Would someone be so kind to grade my response, so I can see what I need to improve on from here?
This is the link with the prompt and my response: http://imgur.com/a/BgJBk
Am I not allowed to post Imgur links?
http://“imgur”.com/a/BgJBk
(Remove apostrophes when posting link to address bar).
I have no idea what the SAT rubric is, so I cannot grade, but I can comment. The semicolon in the first sentence is so wrong, I would have to take points off. The use of “insinuate” in the third paragraph is wrong; you probably mean indicate or imply. You have repeated words and misspellings. Did you look at your own piece before linking? As far as substance is concerned, I think you hit the prompt quite well, albeit mechanically, but I will yield to the opinions of those with more experience in what the graders of SAT essays are looking for.
Oh … CC does not like links, but your use of apostrophes was [obvi] successful. Points for creativity.
On first read, I’d say you’ve got the right idea of what the readers will be looking for. You handled the statistical evidence well, and your point about diction was good also. Your own sentence structure, organization and diction were good, although you could have improved it if you used ‘support’ for ‘back up’, ‘use’ for ‘usage’ or ‘utilize’ and ‘finally’ for ‘lastly’. I think your essay slows down and came close to becoming a summary of the prompt in the section that dealt with statistics. It included many more quotes than necessary to make your point. That time could have been better spent discussing more specifics about ethos of the writer, the audience, the structure and progression of ideas in the passage, and the writer’s decision not to deal with the faults of fossil fuels, the politics of the situation, or the arguments against wind energy.
I noticed your answer met the criteria listed in the prompt, but did not discuss other rhetorical topics that were not mentioned there. Perhaps, you could study an introduction to rhetoric to get ideas about additional topics for discussion. Your scores for reading and writing would be high. Analysis might be slightly lower. I’m thinking a total score in the area of 18 - 20 of 24.