About the Essay Section

Inside the SAT Essay writing   Description from the College Board including quick facts, sample questions, and video
  • SAT Essay Section:  50 min. timed essay writing responding to one writing prompt.
  • The Essay prompt will be from a reading selec­tion of between 650 and 750 words — about the length of one of the longer passages on the Reading Test.
  • All of your work on the Essay will center on your ability to understand, analyze, and explain your analysis of this passage. You won’t be asked to agree or disagree with a position on a topic or to write about your personal experience.
  • Inside the Essay section  Description from the College Board including quick facts, sample questions, and video.
  • Sample Essay questions.
  • Essay Section Scoring Guide  Learn how your essay will be scored
  • Scoring rubric  from the College Board's About the SAT Essay

Helpful Sites

Practice and get feedback:

Other sites:
 Picture
Under the Essay tab, choose from the writing prompts.
Click on Signal Check or Turn In to receive feedback on what you wrote.

Practice Prompts from the College Board

  • Arctic National Wildlife Refuge:   Write an essay in which you explain how Jimmy Carter builds an argument to persuade his audience that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge should not be developed for industry.
  • Martin Luther King: Beyond Vietnam: a time to break the silence   Write an essay in which you explain how Martin Luther King Jr. builds an argument to persuade his audience that American involvement in the Vietnam War is unjust.
  • The Digital Parent Trap:   Write an essay in which you explain how Eliana Dockterman builds an argument to persuade her audience that there are benefits to early exposure to technology.
  • Let There Be Dark: Write an essay in which you explain how Paul Bogard builds an argument to persuade his audience that natural darkness should be preserved. This  prompt includes scored sample entries.
  • Why Literature Matters:  Write an essay in which you explain how Dana Gioia builds an argument to persuade his audience that the decline of reading in America will have a negative effect on society. This  prompt includes scored sample entries.

What to Write in Your Essay

from the College Board's About the SAT Essay at https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/official-sat-study-guide-about-essay.pdf

Each prompt's directions will be worded as:
Write an essay in which you explain how [the author] builds an argument to persuade [her/his] audience that [whatever the author is trying to argue for]. In your essay, analyze how [the author] uses one or more of the features listed in the box above (or features of your own choice) to strengthen the logic and persuasiveness of his argument. Be sure that your analysis focuses on the most relevant features of the passage.
Your essay should not explain whether you agree with [the author]’s claims, but rather explain how [the author] builds an argument to persuade [her/his] audience.

By asking you to focus on how the author of the passage “builds an argu­ment to persuade an audience,” the Essay prompt is pushing you into a rhetorical analysis. Your analysis is focused on matters related to the art and craft of writing, and not, strictly speaking, the informational content of the passage. In this rhetorical analysis, you’re pay­ing attention to how the author uses particular techniques and elements to make his or her writing more convincing, persuasive, and powerful; your discussion should focus on what the author does, why he or she does it, and what effect this is likely to have on readers. You’ll definitely want to capture some of the main ideas and key details of the passage in your analysis, but your main task is not to summarize that information but rather to assess its contribution to the argument.
 
Evidence, Reasoning, and Stylistic and Persuasive Elements
The Essay directions advise you to think about how the author uses evidence, reasoning, and stylistic and persuasive elements to develop his or her argument. These are cornerstones to much argumentative writing, so we should examine briefly what we mean by each of these.

  1. Evidence is information and ideas that the author uses to support a claim. Evidence takes many forms, and the forms vary depending on the kind of argument the author is writing and the nature of the point the author is try­ing to make. Evidence can come in the form of facts, statistics, quotations from (other) experts, the results of experiments or other research, examples, and the like. The author of any given passage may use some of these or rely on other kinds of sources entirely. It’ll be up to you to figure out what consti­tutes evidence in a particular passage and how the author uses it to support his or her claims. Your analysis of an author’s use of evidence can take many forms, depending on the particular passage in question. You may end up pointing out that the author relies (perhaps too much) on one kind of evidence or another — or on little or no evidence at all, likely weakening the argument’s effectiveness. You may instead or in addition point to specific cases in which the author’s choice of evidence was particularly effective in supporting a claim or point. Other approaches are possible as well.
  2. Reasoning is the connective tissue that holds an argument together. It’s the “thinking” — the logic, the analysis — that develops the argument and ties the claim and evidence together. Reasoning plays a stronger role in some texts than in others. Some authors are very careful about making their thought processes clear so that readers can follow and critique them. In other cases, texts rely less heavily on logic. Your analysis of an author’s use of reasoning can take a number of differ­ent approaches. You may decide to discuss how the author uses (or fails to use) clear, logical reasoning to draw a connection between a claim and the evidence supporting that claim. You may also or instead choose to evaluate the impact that particular aspects of the author’s reasoning (e.g., unstated assumptions) have on how convincing the argument is. Other approaches are possible as well.
  3. Stylistic and persuasive elements are rhetorical techniques that an author might bring to bear in order to enhance the power of his or her argument. An author could make use of appeals, such as to the audience’s fears or sense of honor, or employ particularly vivid descriptive language to create a mood of anticipation or anxiety, or use one or more of any number of other such devices. There’s no definitive list of these techniques, and you don’t have to know them all by heart or by name to be able to get strong scores on the Essay. The key thing here is to be on the lookout for ways in which the author attempts to influence the audience, sometimes by using something other than a strictly logical, rational approach. Your analysis of the author’s use of stylistic and persuasive elements can fol­low a number of paths. You may point out instances in which the author uses such devices and evaluate their role or their effectiveness in convincing an audience to action. You may also or in addition analyze and evaluate the varying extent to which logic and emotion contribute to the persuasiveness of the text. Other approaches are possible as well.
 
Successful responses do not need to cover each of these three categories. In fact, it’s generally bet­ter to focus your essay on a few points that are well made than attempt to check off a long list of rhetorical elements. You can also choose to discuss some aspect of the passage that doesn’t fit neatly into one of the three categories but that plays an important part in how the author builds the argument. Your analysis should be selective. That is, you should focus your attention on those features of the passage that you feel make the biggest contribution to the persuasive power of the passage. While 50 minutes is a fair amount of time, it’s not enough to write about everything that’s going on in the passage. Pick and choose what you analyze.
 
Not Explaining Whether You Agree with the Author’s Claims
Your main purpose in the Essay is rhetorical. That is, you should focus your analysis on how the author attempts to persuade an audience through such techniques as citing evidence, using reasoning, and employing various stylistic and persuasive techniques. Your main goal is not to show why or whether you agree or disagree with the points the author makes. This can be hard. We all have opinions and the urge to share them. You’ve also probably done a lot of writing in which you’ve argued for one position or another. What’s more, it can be tough to stay emotionally detached if you read something that you either strongly agree or strongly disagree with. Nevertheless, such detachment is something we all have to demonstrate at times, and it’s a skill that post-secondary instructors will expect you to be able to make use of routinely. It’s also an important general reading skill. If you make your own judgments too early while reading, you’re likely to miss something that the author says and maybe even distort the text’s message to fit your own preconceptions. Being able to differentiate your own views from those of others is a critical academic and life skill, and it’s something that the SAT Essay will — indirectly — call on you to do.
 
It’s a slightly different case, though, when you feel that the passage on the Essay isn’t particularly effective or persuasive. Here, you’re on somewhat safer ground, as you’re still thinking and analyzing rhetorically — still focusing on the art and craft of writing, only this time on one or more ways that you feel the author is failing to make a strong point. It’s okay to fault the author in this sense, but be sure to make clear what you think the author’s intent probably was. You could point out, for instance, that the author’s description seems too idealized to be truly believable or that the author gives too much attention to anecdotes instead of solid evidence, but you should still devote your main effort to what the author does do and what the author intends to accomplish (even if he or she sometimes misses the mark.

Helpful to Know

Terms to Know

  • Anecdote – a short account of a particular incident or event, especially of an amusing or interesting nature. 
  • Argument – a claim or assertion supported by evidence. 
  • Call to action – a direction to the audience (readers) on what to do once they have been convinced of the position/opinion. 
  • Emotional Appeal- targets the emotions of the reader to create some kind of connection with the writer. 
  • Evidence – the support a writer offers as proof to convince the reader that his or her reasoning is correct. 
  • Focus – the central idea around which a piece of writing revolves.  
  • Hyperbole- obvious and intentional exaggeration. 
  • Logical Appeal- strategic use of logic, claims, and evidence to convince an audience of a certain point. 
  • Position – a stance or viewpoint on an issue. In persuasive writing, you may be in favor of (pro) or against (con) a particular topic. 
  • Purpose – a goal that a piece of writing intends to accomplish. 
  • Rhetorical Questioning- where a question is asked more to make a point rather than elicit an answer.
  • Sequencing- the following of one thing after another. 
  • Thesis statement – a sentence that states the topic and focus of the response and the writer’s position on the topic. 
  • Transition- words and phrases that connect ideas and paragraphs so the work flows smoothly from one idea to another. 
  • Word Choice- a writer’s selection of words, also known as author’s craft .