<p>To begin, I should say that I agree with your teacher about the fundamental criticism of your essay. The content of what you say is far more important than the number of paragraphs you employ. You should understand, especially if you continue to explore the College Confidential site (which I think is a good idea), that a good deal of the advice that you are given about how to write an essay is inaccurate or limited in its application. The advice academic hacker gives, for example, suggest how to write one specific kind of essay following one specific form. Academic hacker can tell you what he recommends as the best form for you to follow, but does not help when it comes to content, and as I and your teacher have said, content is more important than form. I will come back to this topic at the end of my criticism, but let’s first take a look at the content that you have and how it relates to the kind of content that an SAT reader will be looking for.</p>
<p>One of the strengths of your essay is that it contains a fair amount of very specific detail. Your first paragraph, for example, gives the names of Supreme Court cases, the names of the people involved in the controversy, the details of what the major case was about (more or less), even the number of blocks that Linda Brown had to walk to her school. All of this makes your writing more concrete and vivid, and specific details like these can impress a reader if they are not only specific but also relevant to the point you’re trying to make. </p>
<p>That said, I should point out that including specific details that are not relevant to the major point you’re trying to make is a mistake, especially in a timed essay like the SAT.</p>
<p>I should also point out that there are multiple kinds of thinking, and the recall of specific details like the ones in your essay represents only one kind. The details you include are what psychologists call “declarative knowledge” and are the product of memory recall. In most essays this kind of information is used to support major points that you as the writer wish to assert. Those major points themselves are the product of a different kind of thinking. This thinking can be called “critical thinking”. Critical thinking, in my opinion, is harder to do. Rather than memorizing facts and recalling them, critical thinking requires that you understand an idea and that you determine what that idea means to you. In order to do that, you have to relate that idea to other ideas, you evaluate the truth of the idea, its importance, its implications for the future and for other people. This kind of thinking involves causes and effects, conditions and consequences, making inferences, evaluating evidence, looking at the idea from points of view other than your own, analysis and synthesis of ideas and considering hypotheticals. All of these are thinking procedures. They are thinking jobs that you do that can be done a right way or a wrong way. They can be learned and they can be practiced and your ability to do these thinking jobs can grow and get stronger over time.</p>
<p>As an SAT reader, I evaluate many things about your essay. At the lower levels, I evaluate whether or not you know how to write complete sentences, if you can organize a basic essay and give it a clear structure, if your spelling and grammar follow the basic rules of the language, and if you can include more than one basic idea into an essay. At the higher levels, I am going to assume that you do all that well and I will start to look at whether or not you use appropriate vocabulary and if you can develop an idea. By’ develop’, I mean think about that idea critically. I’m looking to see how many of those critical thinking jobs you’ve learned to do and how well you’ve learned to do them.</p>
<p>Now it’s time to go back and look at your essay specifically and I’ll try to show you what I mean. Let’s begin by looking at your topic sentence.</p>
<p>“Several examples from recent history clearly demonstrate that the world is advancing in a good way.”</p>
<p>You’ve chosen to tell me, “that the world is advancing in a good way.” You then offer three examples of ‘good’ advances. I’m going to ask you some questions: what is so good about them? Why are they good? Who are they good for? Are there any people that these advances are not good for? What were the causes of these advances? What were the results? Why hadn’t they happened earlier? What would’ve happened if they had not been made? How were they brought about? What obstacles had to be overcome? What price had to be paid? What remains to be done?</p>
<p>Of course any good writer knows that they have to limit what they say to the amount of time and space they have allotted, and in the SAT you have very little of either. That’s why it’s important to limit your topic, to make it specific enough that you can discuss it adequately in no more than two pages of writing and 25 min. of time. I hope you can see that “the world is advancing in a good way” is a pretty broad topic. It covers art, science, politics, human rights, economics, etc. over the entire globe. On the other hand, one can look at your examples and see that all three examples refer to events within the United States during the 1960s and all three examples deal with improving the lives of people who are poor and in the minority. With that in mind, a more specific and limited topic sentence would have incorporated those details to say where and how the advancements you cite have occurred.</p>
<p>All of this is to say that your topic sentence is very important and should be focused on the specific ideas that you intend to present. It shouldn’t necessarily list those ideas, but it should help the reader get their mind set for dealing with the exact kinds of things you intend to discuss, in this case the recognition within the United States of the need for the advancement of civil rights of minorities.</p>
<p>now let’s look at your three body paragraphs. Can you tell me what each individual paragraph says that the other two paragraphs do not say? What I’m getting at here is do you think that each paragraph repeats the same basic idea or do you think each paragraph contributes its own individual idea to the larger idea contained in your topic sentence? If you still don’t understand, then consider this: did your essay use three examples to make the same point 3 times, or did it make three different related points that each discusses a slightly different facet of your topic sentence?</p>
<p>If you think that each example makes a slightly different point, think of a single sentence that tells what that point is. That would be the topic sentence of that paragraph, and the three paragraph topic sentences would represent three separate ideas which work together to develop the single main idea of your essay. I think you can see that an essay that uses its examples to illustrate multiple ideas is superior to an essay that uses examples to illustrate the same idea multiple times.</p>
<p>Now that we’ve looked at your topic sentence, and at the development of that topic sentence in each of your paragraphs, let’s look at your conclusion. After listing the three examples you cited in support of your main idea, you conclude with this:</p>
<p>“Without important changes for the better our world would be less of a good place to live in. Changing the world for the better is an important thing all of us should take part at for better lives for our families and our communities.”</p>
<p>Can you read this conclusion now and come up with a list of questions like the questions I asked about your opening statement? Can you use the answer to some of those questions, the most important ones in your opinion, to provide specifics for inclusion into your closing? Let me give you a hint. Use the basic questions that journalists are trained to ask. They are the questions that all critical thinkers should learn to ask: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?</p>
<p>Well, I think that’s enough for now. I think your teacher has put their finger on the exact point where you need to improve the most. There are some grammatical errors in the essay, but those are easily fixed. Getting into the habit of being a critical thinker is the big job. I think which is included in this essay indicates that you’re off to a good start.</p>