Please check w/ my essay

QuantMech
Wed, 06 Aug 2008 11:07:21 +0000

I’ll reply in more detail later, but here is a quick comment: It is perfectly acceptable for you to refer to the literature of your own country in the essay, even if the authors and their books are largely unknown in the US. In fact, it would be a definite advantage!

After the essay-scorers have read the 37,685th essay that refers to The Scarlet Letter and The Great Gatsby, they will welcome the change! Most educated Americans are quite interested in the literature of foreign countries, so they would enjoy the material in your essay that is new to them. In the essay, you could provide the relevant background information about the characters and plot of the book(s), to make the connection to the essay topic clearer for the reader. In case you do not know this, the scorers of SAT essays are not supposed to consider the accuracy of facts in the essay (odd, but true). So, the scorers do not need to be familiar with the example you cite, because they do not need to evaluate your comments for accuracy, just for writing quality.

Also, I’d advise you to stay away from adages in English. The one about the book normally goes, “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” Here’s the problem: The adage might sound fresh to you, because you haven’t heard it thousands of times. (I enjoy adages in the foreign languages I know, because they are new to me.) But, to the scorers, the adages will seem trite and over-used. They won’t be of any benefit. If there is an adage in your own country that does not have a common English counterpart, that’s in an entirely different category, and it would be a definite plus to use it, translated.