Please Help With This Sat Essay

dchow08
Thu, 21 Feb 2008 18:02:17 +0000

I’m going to comment as I go along. Everything’s looking good until here:

“finally, during a ceremony in his town, he could no longer forbear the internal strife he had been enduring. before he died, he confessed to the public his sin that mortified the crowd, but lifted a dark, satanic anvil from his soul. because everyone had overestimated Dimmesdale virtue, he created a battle with himself filled with guilt that eventually led to his death.”

You stray from your thesis, that it’s better to be underrated(?). This is like a big summary with little analysis. Less summary and more support of your thesis is needed.

Your second body paragraph has a similar problem.

The main problem is that your essay doesn’t really answer the question. The question asks if it is better to be underrated or overrated. Your thesis was that developing a big reputation puts lots of pressure. Okay, so being overrated is bad, but what about underrated? And more importantly, which is better?

You never answered the question. Everything else was fine (although you needed to support your thesis better). Change your thesis so that it answers the question, and change your paragraphs and commentaries to reflect and support that thesis.