The SAT Prep Black Book(130)
6. Finish the first paragraph with a sentence that gives a strong introduction to your examples.
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!
7. Begin the second paragraph with a general statement that introduces your first example.
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.
8. In 3-5 sentences, tell the story that goes with your first example.
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.
9. Use a sentence or two to relate the story of your first example 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!
10. Repeat these steps for the third paragraph with your second example.
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.
11. Repeat the steps for the fourth paragraph with your third example.
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.
12. Begin the final paragraph with a sentence that relates all of your examples back to the thesis.
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.
13. Finish the essay with a sentence that rephrases the first sentence in the essay.
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.
Conclusion
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.
An Analysis Of Top-Scoring SAT Essays From The Blue Book
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.
The Essay From Page 120 Of The Blue Book
Length