SAT Prep Black Book: The Most Effective SAT Strategies Ever Published (49 page)

This process is an effective way to organize your thoughts and write a response that closely imitates known high-scoring essays. Feel free to use it or adapt it to fit the situation—but make sure any adaptations you make are still in line with the
rules for the SAT Essay in this book.

You only have 25 minutes to plan and write an essay. If you kill just 5 minutes day-dreaming or panicking, you’ve wasted twenty percent of your time! Do NOT let time get away from you here. Remember that it’s crucial to fill as much of the given space as possible, because the single largest factor in your score will be the length of the essay.
So plan to hit the ground running.

Before you can write this essay, you have to know what you’re going to be saying. It sounds simplistic, but you need to focus yourself before you can make effective, efficient use of your time.

This one-word answer will often simply be “yes,” “no,” or “maybe,” but it could just as easily be anything else. Remember that there is no correct answer to an SAT Essay question—you can’t get this step wrong. The goal is simply to focus your mind on the point you’re trying to make in your essay.

Remember that the SAT scorers don’t care whether the examples that illustrate your position are factually true or false, or whether they’re academic or personal. All they care about is whether you can put together ANY example at all that would support your point.

So if you decide to make these examples up out of thin air, then be sure the relationship between the examples and your position is clear and direct. Don’t invent an example that’s only vaguely related to your answer. This is a blank check—come up with something relevant. It will make your score higher, and make the rest of your writing easier.

In general, test-takers seem to have an easier time using personal examples than academic ones. But if academic examples are what come to mind more naturally for you, then feel free to use them—just make sure they’re relevant (if they’re not, feel free to change the facts until they are).

The SAT scorers aren’t big on subtlety. Start your essay with a flat statement of the point you intend to prove. (For examples of top-scoring essays that did this, see pages 123, 197, and 200 of
the College Board book
The Official SAT Study Guide
.)  Refer to your one-word answer in Step 2 if you’ve forgotten what you were trying to say.

At this point, we’re really just trying to add some length to the essay. If you know what your examples are likely to be, then feel free to refer to them. If you’re not so sure, then just expand on the thesis a little.

Make the last sentence in the first paragraph a simple transitional sentence that introduces the examples you thought of in Step 3. To finish the imaginary first paragraph that we started in Step 6, we might write a sentence like

Three episodes from my personal experience serve as compelling examples of this fact.

See? Nothing too fancy. At this point, you’re finished with the first paragraph—the groundwork has been done, and the hardest part of the essay is behind you!

This first sentence of the second paragraph serves to introduce your first example. Make it something general. See the sample essay on page 200 of the College Board
publication
The Official SAT Study Guide
for an example—the first sentence of its second paragraph is
Sometimes deception occurs in the form of white lies
, and then the rest of the first paragraph is a (probably made-up) example from the author’s life in which deception took the form of a white lie.

In the middle of the second paragraph you’ll insert the story that goes with your first example. Don’t draw any lessons or anything at this point—just set the stage and explain what happened. Make sure the story is clearly relevant to the thesis.

Now that you’ve told the story, you need to re-connect it to the first sentence you wrote so you can close out this paragraph and move on. So write one or two sentences in which you point out the
way the examples demonstrate the thesis—and make sure it really relates to the first sentence in your essay!

The first example is out of the way. Now you’ll just go through the second example in the same way, and that will provide your third paragraph.

Remember, we’re just cranking out paragraphs that illustrate our main point. Don’t forget to relate everything back to the main point at the end.

At this point you’re starting to close the essay, so you want to wrap everything up. The first sentence of your last paragraph is going to put your three examples back into the context of the main point you’re trying to make.

The last thing that remains is to cap off your essay with a sentence that re-establishes the main point of your essay. Of course, you probably don’t want to use the exact same wording that you used in Step 4, but you do want to make roughly the same point with this sentence that you made in Step 4.

Believe it or not, this simple process will help you crank out winning essays with just a little bit of practice. You’ll notice that it doesn’t give you much room to be creative, but creativity isn’t the point. All we want is a reliable, predictable way to get a top score every time.

You’ve probably also noticed that this formula is very repetitive—it restates the main point of the essay often. Don’t let that bother you. The readers go through your essays so quickly that they won’t even notice you banging them over the head with the same point. And besides, as the high-scoring sample essays in the Blue Book demonstrate, this is the way the SAT rewards you for writing anyway.

Now that you’ve seen that the SAT
Essay doesn’t reward the same kind of writing that you’re expected to do in school, let’s take a look at the multiple-choice questions on the Writing section. You’ll see that they don’t necessarily reward the same things that your teachers in school reward, just as the type of essay-writing you do for high school also turned out to be bad for the SAT. In fact, this is a common theme that you’ll observe in all question types as we proceed.

              Since there are a wide variety of ways to address the SAT Essay while still respecting the rules and patterns, I think one of the best ways that we can see what a top-scoring SAT Essay really does is to analyze the four SAT Essays in the Blue Book that are provided as examples of the “perfect” SAT Essay. These essays appear on pages 120, 123, 197, and 200 in the Blue Book.

This essay is provided with the original handwriting, and it takes up all of both pages, which is typical for an SAT Essay that receives a score of 6 out of 6.

There is no real thesis statement in this essay, with the arguable exception of the last two sentences in the entire essay (“So is perfectionism a vice or a virtue? It depends on whom you are talking to”). This is very abnormal for an SAT Essay that scores a 6 out of 6. It shows that SAT Essays can succeed without having a thesis statement clearly articulated in the first paragraph, even though the majority of top-scoring essays do have clear theses.

This essay has no real structure, which is also abnormal for a top-scoring SAT Essay. Most of them use a variation of the 5-paragraph format as I explained earlier, but this essay demonstrates that it’s possible to score high with a loose narrative structure.

The examples in this essay are purely personal, and might even be made up. This is something we regularly see in top-scoring SAT Essays.

All of the words in this essay are used appropriately, which is normal in a top-scoring SAT Essay. The words are fairly basic, which is also normal in a top-scoring SAT Essay. The only long word
s in the essay are “dumbfounded” and “perfectionism,” which aren’t very advanced.

The grammar in this essay is okay but not great, with several noticeable mistakes, including the use of “which” instead of “that,” switching from “one” to “his or her” in a sentence, and incorrectly using an apostrophe in a word that’s not a possessive or a contraction, among other things. It’s very normal to see that top-scoring SAT Essays occasionally have a few mistakes like this.

This essay is presented in a standardized handwriting font, so we can’t see exactly how long it was in the actual test booklet. But we can compare it to the other essays in the Blue Book and see that it’s among the longest in there, which suggests that it probably filled up most or all of the allotted two pages on test day.

The first sentence in this essay is a direct reaction to the prompt, and a clear thesis statement that the rest of the essay will support. This is the way that I recommend you begin your own SAT Essay, because a large percentage of the top-scoring SAT Essays I’ve seen have used this kind of opening.

This essay uses what we might call a modified 5-paragraph format. It includes very obvious introductory and concluding paragraphs, but the four paragraphs in the middle provide an extended historical example with a lot of “howevers” in them, rather than providing a series of unrelated examples.
Overall, it’s fairly typical for what we’ll see from top-scoring SAT Essays, though the example paragraphs in other top-scoring essays tend to be unrelated to one another.

As I just noted, this essay uses an extended analysis of a single historical event. It’s common to see top-scoring SAT Essays draw their examples from history, but a large portion of top-scoring SAT Essays also draw their examples from other types of sources.

The words in this essay are very well-chosen and perhaps a little more advanced than they will tend to be in most top-scoring SAT Essays.
Still, the only really advanced words in the essay are “embryo” and “ameliorated.”

For the most part, the grammar in the essay is quite sound. There are a couple of missing commas, but nothing major. Like the vocabulary, the grammar is probably slightly above-average relative to most other SAT Essays, even ones that would score a 6 out of 6.

This essay is provided in the original handwriting, so we can see that it takes up both pages available in the test booklet. This is typical for top-scoring SAT Essays.

The first sentence of the essay is a direct response to the prompt and also a clear thesis for the rest of the essay. This is very common in SAT Essays that score a 6 out of 6.

This essay uses a slight variation on the typical 5-paragraph format that we’ll find in most top-scoring SAT Essays, because it only uses two example paragraphs instead of 3. Remember that the number and type of examples don’t really matter; all that matters is that the examples are relevant and that the essay takes up both pages.

Two examples are included—one historical, and one literary. This is a common thing to see in top-scoring SAT Essays, though we also see plenty of top-scoring SAT Essays that avoid historical or literary examples. There’s also a one-sentence mention of Enron in the last paragraph, but it’s so short I wouldn’t be surprised if the graders didn’t even see it.

The vocabulary in this essay is pretty unremarkable, with the exception of the words “protagonist” and “mendacity.”

The sentences in this essay are fairly simple and straightforward. This is pretty typical for top-scoring SAT Essays: nothing remarkable in terms of grammar or sentence structure, but the sentences are generally well-executed.

The essay is presented in a standardized handwriting font, so we can’t see exactly how much of the two pages in the test booklet it would have taken up. But if we compare it to other essays in the Blue Book we can see that it’s pretty long compared to them, which is a rule for scoring high on the SAT Essay.

The first sentence of the entire essay is its thesis, but this thesis is a little bit more grammatically complex than many of the thesis statements we’ll see in top-scoring SAT Essays.

This essay uses a structure that’s closer to the classic 5-paragraph structure typical of many top-scoring SAT Essays: introduction paragraph, three example paragraphs, and conclusion paragraph. In this case, the last example paragraph is more of a list of hypotheticals than a single episode.

The examples in this essay are all personal, and sound like they might also have been made up. Remember that the SAT Essay-graders don’t care if your examples are academic or personal, or even if they’re factually accurate. All the graders care about is whether your examples would support your thesis if they were true.

All of the words in this essay are pretty basic, but they’re used properly. This is typical for top-scoring SAT Essays.

The last sentence of the essay is grammatically incorrect (the word “a” needs to be removed), but otherwise the essay is free of errors. It’s normal to see an SAT Essay receive a perfect score like this one did even if it contains a couple of small grammatical mistakes.

We’ve just analyzed the four SAT Essays from the Blue Book that each scored 6 out of 6. Looking at the evidence like this makes it clear that most of the SAT Essay-writing advice out there has no basis in reality. The only consistent feature in all top-scoring essays is their length. Essays that use personal examples can make perfect scores, just like essays with more academic examples. The basic 5-paragraph format, or some variation of it, will be found in most top-scoring SAT Essays. Top-scoring essays typically don’t demonstrate advanced vocabularies or flawless grammar.

So the next time somebody tries to tell you differently (and people will), have them look at the actual top-scoring essays in the Blue Book :)