Rate my SAT essay!

PeteSAT
Sun, 24 Apr 2005 21:34:38 +0000

I’d probably give your essay a 3. Here’s why…

You make several grammatical errors throughout the essay. You may think some of these things are picky, but they add up:
The first sentence is really two clauses, so they need to be separated by a period, a semicolon or a comma and a connecting word. In the third sentence, you use “where” in a way that does not refer to a specific place. "Where only refers to place. Instead, you could have said “Most people have aspirations in which their dream will be…” In the next sentence, you misuse the word “behold.” It should simply be “what the future may hold.” In the next sentence, you use the pronoun “your”, but you’ve been referring to “people”, not “you”, so it’s not parallel or consistent. “People on the outside look at what to be perfect people with perfect lives and idolize them for it…” doesn’t really make sense. I think what you meant was something like “People on the outside think that these public figure are perfect people with perfect lives and idolize them for it.” You misused the idiom for “hounded.” People are “hounded by”, not “hounded with.” You don’t need a comma between “In the play” and “Ragtime.” You can’t have a “numerous amount” of anything, because "amount refers to things that are not countable. (Think amount of traffic because traffic is uncountable, and number of cars, because cars are countable.) Better to say a “large number of events”, since events are countable. Same thing with “endless amount of novels.” It should be “endless number of novels.” As you can see, the grammatical errors add up.

The example you chose were not bad, but I’d like your paragraphs to be a little clearer and simpler, and in the case of celebrities, more specific. Remember, the essay readers are going to spend about 3 minutes on your essay, so you don’t want to be at all confusing.

Your first example gave a pretty good cause and effect argument: celebrities success can lead directly to bad consequences. However, in the second example, you didn’t show that the character’s success actually leads to the disastrous things that happen to him, so it doesn’t actually support your premise.

The whole last section of your second body paragraph (“Isn’t success just dandy…I don’t want to be trite”) is superfluous. It doesn’t add anything to your point.

Finally, your conclusion isn’t bad. You introduce the idea of perfection, which is fine, but you need to tie it back to the idea of success, which is the main point, after all.

I hope that helps.