Should we wait for good things to come, or is destiny not something we can wait for?

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
1

Please grade my essay out of 12 and tell me what I should improve on. Thank you ;:wink:

We should not wait for good things to come, instead we should word hard to achieve our goals because destiny is in our own hands. We can not expect good things to happen if we don’t make them happen ourselves. Examples of people who have achieved favorable results by themselves are Martin Luther King Jr. and Akeelah from Akeelah and the Bee.

Martin Luther King Jr. did not sit around and hope that eventually white and black people would be treated equally. He became an activist for the African American Civil Rights movement. In fact, he was the leader of that movement. He led boycotts for public transportation and gave powerful and persuasive speeches about why African Americans deserve the same rights as white Americans. He did as much as he could to let his voice be heard and in the end, he achieved the results he wanted. African-Americans were more equal to white people than they were before. This change would have taken longer to occur if King had not taken matters into his own hands and gained racial equality for the Americans. King worked hard and achieved his goal, instead of waiting to see what the outcome would be.

Akeelah discovers that she has a talent for spelling. So she decides to enter the spelling bee and get tutored by Dr. Larabee, without her mother’s consent. She did not wait for someone to give her permission to show the world her talent, she entered the contest and found a tutor all by herself. Everyday, Akeelah studied hard to memorize the words from the dictionary. This hard work delivered favorable results because she finally won the annual spelling bee. This shows that if we want to be very good at something, then we have to work hard for it. We can not just wait and assume that one day we will become experts.

King achieved racial equality in America and Akeelah won the spelling bee. Both of them took destiny into their own hands, worked hard and got what they wanted. Waiting for good things to happen will only bring disappointment. So we need to make the good things happen ourselves.

2

Bump. So what do you think? Is it okay? What grade would you give it?

3

6, because this essay has faulty logic, You have a nice writing style and a good hang of how SAT essays are structured (your structure is on point) but your logic is severely flawed.

Your response to “should we wait for good things to come, or is destiny not something we can wait for?” was “no, we should not wait for good things to come, instead we should work hard to achieve our goals.”
Then you argued about why we should work hard to achieve our goals.

If you oppose the prompt, you should have answered with a few examples about how waiting for good things to come is bad, about some guy who waited all the time and never succeeded. Instead, you tried to prove how working hard is right by giving stories of successful people who were quick to the task.

Your only link to the prompt in both body paragraphs was a sentence that stated “if these people had sat around, they would have never succeeded.” (How do you know?) This stance is way too extreme, and it is not something you can assume directly.

Furthermore, your second example sounds very fabricated. You should probably state the significance of a few fake characters if you intend to tell lies (e.g, my sister, my dad, some random dude from the 16th century, etc). Who is Akeelah? Why is she so important? Who is Dr. Larabee? Also, the storyline is way too predictable.

4

^ not to be a smart-ass or anything, but the 2nd prompt is 100% a real movie. but you should’ve gone a little more indepth

well yeah, i’m no essay grader and I don’t necessarily get amazing grades on the essays I write (I have worse problems than you) but I agree with the post above.