Hi, this is my first post on this website. Anyways, I just finished writing an essay and it was on last month’s October 2015 current SAT test. I used it to practice. Mind if you please grade my essay and give me results very quick? Like my weak parts, my need-to-improve parts, vague parts, etc… please include my score out of 6 please! Thank you!
PROMPT: Today many young people spend their time developing one special talent. But such devotion to a single special ability or skill, whether in the arts, in sports, or in any other area, may not be a good idea. While the challenge of becoming an expert is exciting and can lead to extraordinary rewards, narrowly focusing one’s efforts limits new experiences and meaningful interactions with people who have other interests.
ASSINGMENT: Should young people focus their efforts on developing just one talent? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.
My Essay:
In college, there are always major and minor courses. In the common-day workplace, there are professions which people can work as. People work on mainly one thing, such as a surgeon, but a surgeon is a surgeon, and he or she cannot work on another profession, too. But what if young people had their efforts focused on many dispersed talents? When young people grow up, they will not be very skilled at whatever profession they choose to go to work as. Thus young people should focus their efforts on developing just one talent.
Focusing one’s efforts on developing many talents may be very troublesome, which can be seen from the past life of my cousin, Jennifer, in high school. Although my cousin is currently in a high-ranking college with business as her major, she was also talented in many things, so her high school life was very scattered with many diverse talents she liked to put effort to. She put effort to every single talent every single day, subtracting out the precious time she could have used to put some more effort into doing her homework and studying academic work. For example, one of her talents was swimming. She loved swimming and had to swim every day after school. However, she also had other talents she wanted to work on. Including all the other talents and schoolwork and also swimming, her time was very tight and she literally slept at 2 AM every day, but still received grades like Bs and Cs for her classes. Tired of this, she wanted to do something. She knew something was wrong but didn’t know. After a while later, she finally knew what was wrong. She needed to cut out on some of her talents. Although she was very sad about this, she cut out on some things like swimming. Having a lighter loud and more time to study academic work, her grades went up. She decided to focus on business, one of her academic talents she excelled at. From this, she learned that she should focus her efforts on developing just if not one, only a few.
Today, I focus my efforts on developing just only one of my talents, and I learned it first-hand. When I was small, I loved to do many things, hobbies and talents alike. Later, as I grew a little bit older, I liked to focus my efforts on one of my talents, playing the piano. But then, as I grew older by another one or two years, I started change and liked to focus my efforts on most of my talents. By then, my list of talents were enormous. I had talents such as ping-pong, basketball, soccer, piano, on and on and on. I grew older, and along with it, more talents to focus on. But last year, the change was starting to be evident. I wasn’t doing well on any of my talents, and my grades were not as well as I expected. My grades went down, and even more drastically the progress on my talents accelerated downwards alarmingly. I was scared by then. What had happened? Why was I in this sticky situation? Then I learned - I shouldn’t have focused on that many talents, for I was getting stressed out. I quickly loosened reigns on some talents that weren’t that necessary for me, like most of my sports. In the end, I chose to focus all my efforts on my greatest talent, piano. My grades went back up to an A, and progress on my piano-playing accelerated skywards. I learned from this experiment head-on that young people like me should focus their efforts on developing just one talent.
Looking back at what I have written so far, I have gave a first-hand experience of what I learned after my failure and an experience from my own cousin after her own failure. However, the main thing learned in both examples were evident - young people should focus their efforts on developing just one talent. If my cousin and I had not learned this lesson at all, ever, my cousin probably wouldn’t be in such a high-ranking college, and I wouldn’t be here writing this essay.
Also, I have question. Am I allowed to write this much on the test?? I wrote on the computer, so I probably wrote more than I need on the test and probably don’t have enough time to write this much… anyways, thanks.