Here’s the essay I wrote for a practice test. I got twelve with the e-rater but I’ve basically understood that it gives 12 for anything that’s long enough.
Essay Prompt
Think carefully about the information presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.People’s lives are the result of the choices they make—or fail to make. The path one takes in life is not arbitrary. Choices and their consequences determine the course of every person’s life. All people, whatever their circumstances, make the choices on which their lives depend.
Assignment:
Are people’s lives the result of the choices they make? 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:
Choice is what defines us and the lives we live. In other words, Life is like a huge sheet of paper with hundreds of thousands of dots on it; our choices influence how we choose to connect those dots from start to finish, from birth to death. Since there are so many different possible combinations, the individual choices we make differentiate each of us from one another.
Exploring literary examples for substantiating evidence, one comes across “Fasting Feasting”, by Anita Desai. In this novel the reader is exposed to Indian culture and the lives that typical, decorous Indian women were supposed to live in traditional Indian society. However, the protagonist of the narrative, Uma, chooses to deviate from the norm, by eschewing propriety and indulging in her true whims and fancies. She ignores her parents’ demands, and that is what allows her to, temporarily at least, catch glimpses of the “tantalising inner world” she so wishes to explore. That being said, this novel also allows to explore the opposite end of the spectrum. As the prompt rightly states, the choices one fails to make may be as impactful as the ones they do make. Take Anamika for example. She was the perfect Indian girl. She was beautiful, she had excellent grades and she was extremely adroit at cooking; to top it off, she was even accepted by Oxford. But the decision she failed to make was to actually go to University and live the life she deserved. After all, society decreed it suitable for an Indian women to stay in India and get married first. And she wasn’t going to question Society.
In addition this notion of choices setting a path for you is omnipresent in today’s society. Everybody can choose to live a normal life, get a day job, het married and carry on with their life. That is a choice in and within itself. However, there are certain people who decide to change their lives by taking executive decisions. Edward Snowden comes to mind at this moment. Let it be known that Snowden was a brave man- brave enough to be the first person to expose the inhumane reconnaissance activities that were being conducted by the NSA(National Security Agency). He showed the world that not only in US, but around the world, thousands of people’s privacies were being invaded, illegally of course. However, he undertook this courageous task knowing the potential ramifications. He had to leave America, knowing that the government would try him as a criminal and is know taking asylum in Russia. This decision that Snowden made altered the balance of his life; and the important thing to note is that any decision that he makes everyday, no matter how small, will continue to shape his life, constructing out this undulating and constantly changing path that makes life so interesting and unique for each and every person.
I cannot stress enough that choices are made or not made everywhere. In fact the decision to make a choice is funnily enough a choice in itself. Every little decision we make takes us a little further on our journey and every decision we take makes our lives a little more different from the ones around us. Therefore, we should make these decisions wisely, because once we make one, there’s no going back.
Thanks 