WRITING

Overview of the Writing Section

The Writing Section includes four parts:  the Essay, Identifying Sentence Errors, Improving Sentences, and Improving Paragraphs.

The Essay

The (Needlessly) Dreaded Essay

by Dr. Preston Coleman

To begin, remember this: you can write well, you just don’t know it! Years of having your every written word analyzed and judged have probably left you with little confidence in your writing skills.

Just look at it this way. Writing is little more than putting your thoughts on paper. How you put them there will determine how well you do on the SAT essay.

I’ve graded the SAT essay and am familiar with what scorers are taught to look for. I’ve also graded well over 10,000 high school and GED essays for the State of Georgia and the University of Georgia, so I’m uniquely qualified to lead you through the process of writing an essay that will get a high score.

What I won’t do is teach you to “beat” the SAT Essay Section. You don’t want to go through life “beating” or “cheating”–you want to learn a skill that you can apply to make a better future for yourself.

You have 25 minutes to write your essay. You have two blank pages to work with, but don’t assume you have to fill both pages; your essay will be graded based on the quality of your expression, not the quantity of words. Here’s what the College Board has to say about the SAT essay:

The essay gives you an opportunity to show how effectively you can develop and express ideas. You should, therefore, take care to develop your point of view, present your ideas logically and clearly, and use language precisely.

To do well on the essay, all you have to do is think of three steps in a clear plan. The scorer will give you marks for a number of things, but they all add up to these three:

FOCUS–focus clearly on a specific main idea, and then develop that idea with a slear and logical organization…

FORM–organize your idea into 2 to 4 supporting paragraphs that each focus clearly on one aspect of that idea. Finally…

FLAIR–breathe life into your essay with effective, precise language including a varied and precise vocabulary, interesting sayings, relevant examples, vivid descriptions, illustrative analogies, varied sentence structures and the like.

1. Let’s start with FOCUS. Suppose the SAT prompt asks you to discuss some issue that’s important in your community or society. The worst thing you can do is just start writing without a plan. If you do that, you’ll probably wind up saying more than one thing and saying it poorly.

So, the first step is to fix in your mind on exactly what you want to say. Don’t overthink what you want to say; don’t wonder what others would say or what the grader might think. Just say exactly what you believe as clearly as you can.

For example, the prompt may ask you to discuss laws that ban smoking, like the laws that have been passed by many cities and by some businesses and colleges. Spend the first few minutes of your time deciding exactly what you want to say, and putting that into a clear, well-focused statement.

Here’s a good example: “I believe that smoking should not be allowed in public places, but should be allowed in private homes and businesses.” This is clear and focused; there’s no wiggle room, no ambiguity. You could focus even farther by saying that smoking should be allowed in public and private places. Or, you could say the opposite, that smoking should not be allowed in either public or private places.

Whatever the prompt, be absolutely sure you know exactly what you want to say before you start writing. That’s your focus. Your main idea must be clearly focused, and so should the subpoints that support that main idea. That leads us to the form your essay will take.

2. Next comes FORM. You want to support your main idea with some clearly structured, clearly organized subpoints. Why do you believe what you believe? Why should someone else believe the same way?

Step two is to organize your main idea into clear and focused paragraphs. Two to four paragraphs in the body of your speech would be appropriate; many suggest three, but not every idea fits neatly into three paragraphs. Each paragraph should flesh out one well-focused subpoint.

For instance, the statement above could be organized into two paragraphs: why smoking should be banned in public places, and why smoking should be allowed in private homes and businesses. Or, it might fit well into four paragraphs: the pros and cons for banning smoking in public places, and the pros and cons of allowing smoking in private homes and businesses. Keep in mind that you have 25 minutes to complete the essay, so keep it short and simple—two body paragraphs with an introduction and conclusion is ideal.

Do you see how a little bit of thought and planning will help your ideas fall into a clean structure?

Now all you need to do is fill these paragraphs with support—beliefs, facts, examples, and the like. You should know that the people who grade the SAT do not grade the accuracy of your support. They also don’t grade whether they agree with you. Say what you really believe–that makes for good writing. And if you don’t have facts and statistics at hand, approximate them as best you can.

So, let’s use the two paragraph structure outlined above. It’s a good idea to make a list of support on your test booklet (not on the two pages you’ll write the essay on, however!) Under reasons why smoking should be banned in public places, your list might include things like this:

1. Smoking causes cancer and other diseases. Millions of Americans have died from smoking.

2. There’s no way to keep your smoke from escaping into the air around you.

3. One person’s smoke can be breathed into another person’s lungs. This kind of smoke also causes cancer.

4. No one has the right to risk giving another person cancer or any other disease.

5. The government should protect the rights of non-smokers by banning smoking in public places.

Now, you may not know how many people die from smoking (it’s around 400,000 per year in the US alone!) You may not know a list of diseases that smoking can cause (lip, mouth, throat, lung, and bladder cancer; emphysema; chronic bronchitis.) You may not know how dangerous “second-hand” smoke (smoke that comes from another person’s tobacco or from their lungs) can be. But you do know the basic facts, and with a little thought, you can put them in a logical order to support your idea.

Your second paragraph might start with a list like this:

1. Public places are owned by everyone in common, but private property isn’t.

2. The government has the right to regulate what happens in public.

3. The government doesn’t have the right to tell us what to do in our own homes and businesses.

4. The Constitution guarantees us freedom from the government.

5. People have a choice whether or not they come into our private homes and businesses.

6. Whether smoking is allowed in private should be up to the owners of a home or business.

Maybe you’re not an expert on the history of private property rights, but you do know that your parent(s) or guardian(s) have the right to do what they want to in their own homes. You may not be an expert on the Constitution, but you do know it gives us freedom from the government. There’s no need to mention the Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights; just write about freedom and privacy to the best of your ability.

Don’t expect to just write down a list of reasons like those above, either. You might start in the middle (“No one has the right to give another person cancer,” or “The Constitution guarantees us freedom from the government.”) Then, those ideas might trigger other ideas in your mind. Let your natural reasoning skills brainstorm the details that support your main idea, and remember, you’re allowed to guess and even make up things like statistics and facts. These won’t be graded if you’re wrong!

3. Now for FLAIR. It’s time to actually write your essay, and you want to stand out from the hundreds of other essays the person grading your essay will be reading. Just use the simple format you were taught in English class: Introduction, Body, and Conclusion. Plug your main idea and the subpoints that start each paragraph into that classic format, or form.

In  the Introduction, you want to state your main idea as clearly as possible. In the Body, you want to flesh out those paragraphs with any details you can think of. In the Conclusion, you want to repeat your main idea and try to say something that’s memorable. This leads us to the ways you can breathe life into your essay. This is called animation; we’ll call it adding some FLAIR.

Animating your essay simply means adding something interesting like sayings, examples, descriptions and analogies.

The most important parts of your essay to animate are the Introduction and the Conclusion. The person scoring your essay will form an impression right from the start; that’s why you want to put something interesting and memorable in the Introduction. The last thing the scorer reads will have the most impact on the score you get; that’s why you want to put something interesting and memorable in the Conclusion.

Now, using the issue developed above, how could you grab the interest and attention of the reader?

One way would be to use a vivid description, like this: “Imagine that a loved one is laying in the hospital dying slowly of lung cancer. Her skin is pale and her eyes are dark and sad. You know she never smoked, but she worked as a bus driver, and she had to breathe other people’s tobacco smoke almost every day.” Now the reader isn’t just reading some reasons that support an opinion; he or she is involved in someone’s life and its tragic ending.

You might use a famous saying as well. For example, “Your rights end where my nose begins.” That’s a well-known saying that gets right at the heart of the issue you’re discussing. It would make a great final sentence in your essay!

If you put that description in your Introduction, and that famous saying in your Conclusion, your essay will be much more interesting and memorable than if you simply wrote a boring list of reasons, like the lists above.

Animation is critical in the Introduction and the Conclusion of your essay. The Body of your essay, of course, can also have animation. In the first paragraph of your Body, for example, you could compare second-hand smoke to stray bullets. No one thinks people should be allowed to fire bullets into a crowd! That’s a powerful analogy.

In the second paragraph of your body, you could use an example. The government isn’t allowed to tell us what to do with our guns in our own homes and businesses, for example–that’s the Second Amendment. If the government allows you to do what you want with something as dangerous as a gun in your own home, why wouldn’t it let you do what you want with a cigarette or cigar?

You don’t have to use all four of these–sayings, examples, descriptions, and analogies. Also, there are other ways to animate an essay, like using two sentences that rhyme. In an essay on physical fitness, a student of mine once wrote, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away, but a Twinkie at night makes your jeans too tight.” That was years ago, yet it sticks in my mind like glue. (“Sticks like glue” is an analogy, by the way!)

Using song lyrics, quotes from a movie or famous person, some poetry, or the like will animate any part of your essay effectively.

Once you’ve written your SAT essay, you should still have time to improve it, to add even more flair. There are three good ways to enhance anything you’ve written, which I’ll call the the Two V’s, the Two S’s, and the Two E’s.

The first thing to do is to look for places in the essay where you can improve the vocabulary. Word choice is essential to clear thinking and writing, and it can also help add some flair. You want to use vivid descriptions and a variety of words.

The Two Vs are vivid and varied. Reread your essay and ask, “Can I make any descriptions more vivid? Can I use a wider variety of words?” Then plug in better words where you can.

In the smoking essay, you might have found by rereading that you used the same words over and over. For example, you might have written the phrase “private property” five or six times. To improve the essay, change that phrase where you can: “private homes and businesses,” or “our homes and personal property,” or “our homes and businesses.” This sounds simple, but it makes your writing sound fresher and more intelligent.

Or, you might have left out a lot of useful adjectives, or descriptive words, that would liven up your essay. Instead of “rights,” you might talk about “cherished rights” or “God-given rights” or “constitutional rights.” Instead of “effects” or “risks” of smoking, you might talk about the ”horrific effects of smoking” or “the avoidable risks of smoking.”

The Two S’s are sentence structure. Let me demonstrate something: What if all your sentences sound alike? What if they are all about the same length? What effect will that have on the reader? It gets boring pretty quickly. Nobody wants to read short, similar sentences. That’s why this paragraph sucks!

So what you want to do is make sure your sentences have varying lengths and structures, like the sentences you read at Cafe2400. There may be some short phrases, but these are usually followed by longer, more sophisticated sentences that give a natural rhythm and flow to an essay. Short phrases can be impactful. That impact, however, is lost if every sentence is the same length.

Sentence length is important, but so is structure. What if every sentence you wrote was long and involved, with half a dozen punctuation marks and way too many clauses, so that reading one sentence is like getting lost on a winding country road with no road signs or stop lights, lost and frustrated and confused, until finally, after you’ve forgotten the beginning of the endless sentence, you’re just dying to reach the end… Did you see how confusing that sentence became by the end?

Some sentences should be short and punchy: “Your rights end where my nose begins.” Others should be longer and have more complex sentence structures: “According to the Second Amendment, Americans have the right to keep and bear arms, but that right is regulated to protect the public; shouldn’t smoking in public also be regulated to protect the public?”

You can join clauses with commas or semi-colons, or you can break overly long and complicated sentences into shorter ones by adding periods. Whatever you do, don’t write a long list of similar-sounding sentences; that will bore the person grading your essay and make you look bad.

The Two Es are editing and erasing, and they come last in the process. You want to do everything you can to improve your essay. Sometimes that means adding something in, and sometimes that means taking something out. Let’s start with erasing. Simply put, you want to erase any ideas that are irrelevant, poorly written, or confusing. Remember: some of your best writing is done with an eraser!

Next comes editing. The Two V’s and the Two S’s are all about adding things to your essay that will make it clearer and more powerful. Go back over the essay and see what more you can do to improve it. When I write, I wind up changing hundreds of little things that make the whole piece clearer and easier to read. You should do the same, even if it means adding or taking out a punctuation mark here and there, or changing a word to a more vivid descriptive word.

The entire process of writing a great essay can be summed up with a few easy-to-remember elements: First, you’ll focus and form your essay as you make a plan, and then you’ll add flair. As you write the essay, you’ll use a varied and vivid vocabulary within sentence structures that combine short, punchy sentences with longer, more complicated ones. Lastly, you’ll edit and erase to make your essay the best it can be.

With enough practice (I’d recommend at least three practice essays,) you’ll be well on your way to writing a great essay. You can practice on your own using prompts chosen by the College Board right here.

Identifying Sentence Errors, Improving Sentences, & Improving Paragraphs

 

Finding Flaws

by Michael D. Davis

If only we were as good at identifying flaws in written English as we were at identifying flaws in each other!!

Well, the good news is that I can help you with the Identifying Sentence Errors part. The other would be a skill better left undeveloped! The folks at ETS are experts at generating sentences that look perfectly fine, but have some minor error in them. Yes, they’ll throw you an occasional bone and give you a sentence that looks like it was written by a six-year-old. Those are easy. The killer is when they give you a perfectly normal sounding sentence that has a mistake in it.

The problem with this section is rooted in the fact that the vast majority of us speak differently from the way we write. No one, for example, says “It is I.”  This, however, is correct English, even though we all say “It’s me.”  

Here’s an example from an actual test:

The union (A) insisted on an increase in (B) their  (C) members’ starting pay, and threatened to call a strike if the company  (D)refused to meet the demand. (E) No error. 

Everthing seems ok, right? If I were to say this to you, you would not think there was anything wrong with it. However, the answer is (B) their. Why?  Because “Union” is a singular noun. So their needs to be replaced with its.

There is a large number of nouns that we think of as plural when they are actually singular (such as each, every, any, everyone, anyone, anybody, and on and on). Notice that previous sentence! Some might want to correct me and say, “There are a large number of nouns. . .” That would be incorrect because the subject is number of nouns, not just nouns. Number is singular.

Another thing to beware of is that the test writers also love to give sentences that have no errors, but nonetheless just don’t sound right. Again, this is rooted in the fact that we speak very differently from the way we write. Sometimes a correctly written sentence seems wrong because it’s not the way we would say it! This is basically the same problem as mentioned above, but from a different angle.

Here’s a good example:

The young fish (A) were very tiny, yet each of (B) them ate many times (C) its own (D) weight in solid food every day. (E)No error.

Many students will be tempted to go with (C), thinking it should be their instead of its. Its, however, is absolutely correct! So the answer is (E).

Two other parts of the Writing section that basically test the same aforementioned skills, just in different ways, are Improving Sentences and Improving Paragraphs. I always start with the sentence error section first because once you have the skills for this, you also basically have what you need for the other two. Improving Sentences is closely related to Identifying Sentence Errors, in that both require you to recognize grammatical flaws. The only difference is that in the Improving Sentences section, there’s an extra step:  you not only have to find what’s wrong, but you also replace it with the correction, if one needs to be made at all. Improving Paragraphs then takes it to another level—not only will you need to recognize grammatical errors, but you’ll also have to fix the sentence in such a way that it is correct in and of itself and also in context with surrounding sentences. The root of all of these, however, is being able to recognize a number of basic errors.

I have a lot of resources for this section and I’ve put together a list of about thirty of the most common grammatical errors. All of these mistakes will be found on this section at some point or another—some types of errors appear over and over again, some once or twice. We’ll learn all of them, but will focus on the errors that the test writers tend to emphasize.

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