Can someone please grade my essay :)

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
1

<p>Assignment: Are widely held views often wrong, or are such views more likely to be correct? </p>

<p>------A scientist once delineated in a public lecture that the Earth is not a vast continent floating on an endless ocean, but a sphere that orbits around the sun. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady got up angrily and said: “What you have told us is all hogwash. The world is a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave her only a smile before he replied, “What is the tortoise standing on?” </p>

<p>------Today, the idea of a flat plate on a back of a giant tortoise seems rather ridiculous, but the propensity of people to support the widely held beliefs of the multitude is quite common. It is because conventional wisdom often comes from a larger source of information that has the ability to make people more pliant. The old lady’s idea was presumably dictated by the Old Church’s doctrines of the shape of Earth which were devoid of any scientific evidence and logical reasoning. As soon as people started logically approaching the issue by posing down-to-earth questions, and showing scientific methods about the sphericity of Earth, the scientist’s idea proved correct, leaving millions of people flabbergasted.</p>

<p>------However, authorities, like the Old Church in the past, aren’t the only possible influential sources that can shape people’s minds. In Ray Bradbury’s classic novel Fahrenheit 451, the dystopian society ardently believes that books are pernicious to people because they follow the government’s view, rather than independently assessing the situation and, subsequently, burns all the books. Many people are oblivious to the importance of these books and blindly follow what the society tells them to do. However, the main protagonist, Guy Montag, gains consciousness of these misdeeds and becomes steadfast in his effort to preserve the books. In this case, only through logical reasoning was Montag able to assess what is “good” and what is “bad” and, therefore, preserve the education in the society.</p>

<p>------Both the famous scientist and Montag do not accept everything as unequivocally true. They show cleverness and intellectual autonomy in assessing the beliefs that the majority unquestionably considers true. As shown in the aforementioned examples, widely held views are often wrong because they lack awareness, scientific evidence, and logical thinking. Hence, it is always important to question the veracity of the ubiquitous beliefs and carefully think before embracing them.</p>

2

<p>Your biggest weakness is in establishing your view. While you somewhat reference your position on the topic throughout your writing, I could only find a firm declaration of your opinion in the last two sentences of the essay. You won’t receive a very high score without explicitly writing a thesis in your introductory paragraph because these readers have a maximum of 2-3 minutes to read each essay, so if your thesis is at the very end, they might not even get to it.</p>

<p>I like the evidence, but please address the prompt. If you don’t develop your argument around the prompt, then your essay is not worth much at all. Yes, yes, you do suggest that widely held views are incorrect at brief moments, but I keep getting the sense that you want to argue that logical approaches to a topic are better than other methods.</p>

<p>My last concern, very minor in comparison to the other two issues I mentioned, is your sentence structure. At times, you have sentences that are dangerously close to run-ons. For instance:

Holy cow, that is one behemoth of a sentence. Break that hefty thing into smaller pieces; it will make your writing far clearer and stronger.</p>

<p>Now for the happy stuff:

  1. Your vocabulary is excellent. While I didn’t see it to be an issue in this essay, be careful not to use words incorrectly.
  2. Solid length. If you can write all of that in ~25 minutes and on two pages, bravo.
  3. Your essay has a very smooth flow to it. The coherency is impressive for something crafted in ~25 minutes.</p>
3

<p>Thank you so much for the excellent advice. Next time I’ll surely adapt your changes. Also I would like to know what exactly did you mean by your last remark “…be careful not to use words incorrectly.” Is there any particular wrong word choice in the essay? English is not my native language so I’m little apprehensive about the words I choose in expressing my ideas.</p>

4

<p>You use all of the vocabulary correctly in this essay (more power to you!). I just wanted to caution you to be careful so as not to misuse any words accidentally.</p>