<p>I've been getting 10's on the past two practice essays, probably because I felt there was a considerable time crunch and I had spent WAY too much time fattening up my first body paragraph with lots of nice explanation and so my 2nd body paragraph was rather underdeveloped, leaving no time for a third body paragraph and a very meager conclusion. oh well. maybe it wasnt THAT bad because my lit teacher read it and entered it into some essay contest and I won o_0. aha.</p>
<p>I got an 11 essay but 800 Writing. Does anyone know how that works?</p>
<p>It was my first time taking the SAT. My essay wasn't great, but it filled both pages completely and used some good examples from science and history. I can't help thinking the grading for this is pretty arbitrary, so I can't imagine that colleges will care that much how high the writing score is.</p>
<p>calicollegegirl, would you mind posting up your essay? It would a lot. Thanks.</p>
<p>Also i was just wondering in general, how should we write the essay so that it connects with the thesis and doesn't all seem like a a quick summary of a historical event or a book?</p>
<p>Conclusion! It should somehow answer the question.</p>
<p>i hate it when people resort to talking about either catcher in the rye or the great Gatsby!</p>
<p>Donnasaur - I've seen that many times on sample essays and agree with you completely. </p>
<p>I got a 11 but my prompter was unclear about when we started, so I wasn't sure how much time I had left. I barely re-read my intro was time was called. I took about a minute and a half to come up with my four paragraph essay format/ideas. </p>
<p>My essay wasn't all that great, but I have a sneaking suspicion that because I made some slightly controversial claims in my essay, the graders gave me an extra or negative point. I said something along the lines that Mother Teresa's work could have been more effective than it was, and that the scientific method is more effective than prayer has ever been proven (this is of course out of context, rating a spiritual activity in scientific terms). <em>sigh</em> Hopefully I'll come up with something better next time.</p>
<p>Personally, although it does depend on how large/expansive or small/compact your handwriting is, no matter how concise you can try and be with your words, an essay less than 1 1/2 pages written is hardly enough to contain well-developed body paragraphs, let alone three if you choose to do a five paragraph essay. I don't think essay graders look to length but the development of the paragraph, which is directly correlated to length. I have heard from teachers, however, that a study on AP graders shows that graders tend to give higher scores to essays that are easy to read, that is, that are written in relatively neat handwriting.</p>