share, what with my birthing you and feeding you and canceling that trip to
Sacramento with my great-aunt Claire—who is now dead, by the way—so that I
could watch your soccer game, then so be it. I will do the dishes. You go enjoy
some television. Be sure to turn up the volume so you’re not disturbed by the
clattering plates and stifled sobbing.”
Here are a couple examples of this sense of the word “optional”: “Blinking is optional.” “Breathing is optional.”
—Samantha
Doing the dishes isn’t really optional, and neither is the Essay. The truth is
that the college admissions process is a competition, and choosing not to write
the Essay puts a big, old LAZY stamp on your application. So, you still need to
write it. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that the Essay isn’t really as tough as it looks. So let’s dive
in.
NOT WHAT IS SAID, BUT HOW IT’S SAID
In the Evidenced-Based Reading and Writing Tests, you were asked questions
about the meaning of certain passages: What is the point of a certain phrase or
sentence? How does it relate to the main idea of the paragraph? Which piece of
evidence best supports the author’s argument? Are you sure the author said this,
or did she really say that?
On the Essay, you will again be given a passage (and you’ll again need to be
on the lookout for “evidence”), but the thrust of your job is different. Instead of
searching for the meaning, you are searching for the ways in which the author
communicates the meaning.
The deal here is that the Evil Testing Serpent wants you to analyze the
passage by discussing the evidence, the reasoning, and the rhetorical elements of
the writing. Your job is to describe how the argument is built, how the evidence
is used in the service of the argument, and how rhetorical devices make the
writing more persuasive.
The best part about the new SAT Essay is that you don’t have to provide your own ideas; you just analyze the ones in the passage. Well,I guess that could be a bad thing if you’re one of those people who likes to talk about themselves nonstop.
—SamanthaRead the following (made-up) passage by (made-up) author Camilla
Fizzlethwaite—it’s on a topic that the SAT would probably never cover
(hyacinths), but it’ll show by example what we mean.