Please Help With This Sat Essay

csandra1219
Thu, 21 Feb 2008 17:46:03 +0000

please give me a grade (1-6) or any suggestions!!

prompt: is it better to be underrated or overrated?
{when people believe you to be a greater person than you really are, it surmounts to pressure put on you that can be burdensome. literary work, such as the scarlet letter and jude the obscure, are examples of how people’s potentials and skills were overestimated, and they thus ended up with deteriorating and hurt souls.}
[arthur dimmesdale was a priest for a very puritanistic town in the novel, the scarlet letter. to the townspeople, he was seen as a godsend, and a holy power to look up to. however, he was struggling with himself because he had been hiding a sinful secret: he had an illegitimate child. he felt like a hypocrite and, more and more, condemned himself as sacreligious. for penitence, Dimmesdale whipped and cut himself every night. 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.]
[similar to dimmesdales situation was jude fawleys, from hardy’s work, jude the obscure. since jude was young, he had dreamed and imagined of a life filled with scholars, universities, novels, and eager students/ this innate, didactic, and urbane nature jude possessed impressed the rustic people in his town. they all had high expectations for him to over come his impoverished economic state and become a university teacher. however, jude learned that no school would offer him an education for free. so, when jude calculated that, with the job he currently held, he could not even train to become a scholar for several years, he was overcome with a sense of failure. he had failed to make his family and friends proud, and he had failed himself. he became an alcoholic, had unprecedented marriages, was constantly fired from jobs, and was pretty much blacklisted. because his fellow supporters had overrated his potential at success, and had overlooked his uncontrollable circumstances, such as money, jude became someone no one would have been proud of.]