Please help me out by grading my essay! :)

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
1

<p>BlueBook Practice Test #2's prompt:
"Do changes that make our lives easier not necessarily make them better?"</p>

<p>There are myriad varieties of change. Some make our lives more difficult, while some offer to ease our hardships. However, changes that appear to make our lives easier do not always make our lives better. History and literature are filled with anecdotes that affirm that technology, the definition of which is "something that makes it easier for us to perform a task," sometimes make life more arduous or simply worse.</p>

<p>Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote and published a list of his Transcendental maxims. He said that "the man who gains the coach loses the use of his feet," basically meaning that what one does not use will deteriorate, weaken, and eventually become useless. This applies to modern times as well. We all use cars to transport us to our destinations, and this is a part of the growing obesity problem. Our bodies get weaker, though cars are convenient and make our lives easier. However, becoming weaker certainly indicates the opposite of our lives' becoming "better."</p>

<p>Before the Civil War that tore the United States apart, slavery was dwindling around the beginning of the 19th century. Eli Whitney wanted to improve the lives of those who were still slaves, so he invented the cotton gin, a quick, efficacious way to separate the seed from the fiber. However, this had the opposite effect. Now that cotton was so efficiently able to be produced, most southern plantation owners purchased more slaves to do a greater amount of work. Human chattels operated the gins at all hours to produce a steady flow of cash for their masters. Slaves' lives were infinitely worsened by technology that made their work easier.</p>

<p>In Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, the protagonist, Yossarian, is an officer of a bomber squadron. Recruited mens' duties were supposed to be alleviated by the opportunity of aviation school because pilots and bombers would not have to face the enemy directly. However, Yossarian and his fellow aviators find that this is not the case. They have to fly through dangerous bursts of flak (anti-aircraft fire), and they have to do it often, as their commanding officer relentlessly raises the number of combat missions that they have to fly. The World War II aviators may have thought that piloting would be easier than infantry duties, but they discovered that aviation had its fair share of danger and peril as well. The introduction of bomber plans did not change soldiers' lives for the better.</p>

<p>Technology's very definition may be "something that makes our tasks easier," but what is omitted is that it does not always make our lives better. History and literature provide plenty of examples that show when technology even ends up filling our lives with more travails. Changes that supposedly make our lives easier do not always make them better.</p>

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<p>If you doubt that I finished this in 25 minutes, you are right to do so. But I am more concerned with quality because it's easy to practice completing the essay faster but not as easy to improve its quality.</p>

<p>Thanks in advance for your help! :)</p>

2

<p>pretty good.
10/12</p>

3

<p>12/12</p>

<p>Your thesis has awkward wording, but otherwise that's definitely a 12.</p>

4

<p>I'd cut the first two sentences. They're pretty much warming-up sentences, and this is a short enough piece that you should begin with your main point, which means sentence 3. Having said that, though, I don't know how these essays are graded, so it may be that those two sentences are there for other reasons.</p>

<p>I wonder, though, whether you're performing a bit of sleight of hand here: you're defining technology as something that makes tasks easier, and equating that with making our lives easier, but then you acknowledge that technology can make our lives more arduous; something that makes our lives more arduous can hardly be said to make them easier, can it? Or are you arguing that, having made our lives easier by the adoption of new technology, we immediately go out and find new ways to make our lives harder again, so there is no such thing as something that makes our lives easier when you get right down to it? (Your second and third examples address people who are subject to someone else's authority and decisions about adopting technology. I have an easier time with the idea that there is no such thing as something that makes our lives easier because <em>someone else</em> will just go make them harder again.)</p>

<p>I would have approached it from a different direction: is difficulty itself something that can improve lives? Certainly at least some Roman Catholics believe so: vows of poverty, for example, mean foregoing things that can make lives easier but receiving in turn some kinds of spiritual words -- do you remember that bit about camels and needles' eyes? The novel "Captains Courageous" is about a rich and spoiled boy who falls overboard and is rescued by fishermen, who introduce him to a much more arduous life than he has ever lived and who teach him the value of hard work. And I'm sure that the people who actually are grading the SATs are very familiar with the argument that ready access to the internet, texting, graphing calculators, etc., has encouraged all kinds of problems in your generation that never existed in mine (they may be less familiar with the argument that being deprived of all those sorts of technology led to all kinds of problems in my generation that never existed in yours :) ). That is not to say that you should have done it the way I would have done it. I'm just suggesting one of what I'm sure are many approaches.</p>

<p>And can you give me a hint as to where Emerson said that? It's a good quote, and I'd like to use it in something I'm writing, and it's the sort of writing for which footnotes are expected. (I'll understand if you've seen it somewhere and don't know where it comes from, but if you happen to know ....) Thank you.</p>

5

<p>Thanks for the feedback, everyone. :) All constructive criticism is very welcome.</p>

<p>Nontraditional, my English class studied Transcendentalism for a while in the past year. It was on a worksheet that my teacher gave us, but I Googled it and came up with the original essay containing the quote at [url=<a href="http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm%5DSelf-Reliance%5B/url"&gt;http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm]Self-Reliance[/url&lt;/a&gt;] .</p>