Read the assignment guidelines carefully. Highlight or underline important words and phrases in the instructions. Make sure that you fully understand what the instructor is asking you to do before you begin your outline. Ask for clarification if anything seems vague or confusing. Develop a topic. Although outlining a paper can help you to develop and organize your ideas, you may need to do some other prewriting exercises to get started. There are how to write an essay outline for college prewriting strategies that can help you to generate ideas for your paper. List all the ideas that come to mind (good or bad) and then look over the list you have made and group similar ideas together. Expand those lists by adding onto the list or by using another prewriting activity. Freewriting. Write nonstop for about 5-10 minutes. Write whatever comes to mind and don’t edit yourself. When you are done, review what you have written and highlight or underline the most useful information. Repeat the freewriting exercise using this information as a starting point. You can repeat this exercise multiple times to continue to refine and develop your ideas.
Clustering. Write your subject down on the center of a piece of paper and circle it. Then draw three or more lines extending from the circle. At the end of each of the lines you have drawn, write down a new idea that corresponds to your main idea. Then draw three or more lines from each of those new ideas, and write ideas that corresponds to those ideas. Continue developing your cluster until you feel that you have explored as many connections as you can. Questioning. On a piece of paper, write out “Who? ” Space the questions about two or three lines apart so that you can write your answers on these lines. Respond to each questions in as much detail as you can. This exercise will help develop your ideas and identify areas of your topic that you need to learn more about. Identify your purpose. Ask yourself what you want to accomplish with your paper. Are you writing this paper in order to persuade, entertain, enlighten, or something else?
Just make sure that your purpose is in line with what the assignment asks you to do. Look for keywords in the assignment guidelines to help you figure out what your purpose should be. Identify your audience. Think about who will read your paper. Identify the needs and expectations of your audience by considering what they do and do not know about your topic. Anticipate their reactions as well. How they might react to the information that you will be sharing with them? Will they be angry, sad, amused, or something else? Develop your thesis. Once you have developed your ideas and considered your purpose and audience, you should be ready to write a thesis statement. Effective thesis statements express the main focus of a paper and state an arguable claim. A thesis should not be more than one sentence in length. Make sure your thesis is arguable. Do not state facts or matters of taste. For example, something like "George Washington was the first president of the United States," would not be a good thesis because it states a fact. Likewise, "Die Hard is a great movie," would not work because it expresses a matter of taste. Make sure your thesis provides enough detail.
Just as with every five-paragraph essay you've written at school, your SAT essay should have an introduction, 2-3 body paragraphs (one paragraph for each argumentative technique you discuss), and a conclusion. Your thesis statement (which techniques you'll be analyzing in the essay) should go in both your introduction and your conclusion, with slightly different wording. And even if you're just discussing multiple examples of the same technique being used in the passage, you’ll still probably need two body paragraphs for organizational purposes. So how do you write an SAT essays in this five paragraph format? Write an essay in which you explain how Eric Klinenberg builds an argument to persuade his audience that Americans need to greatly reduce their reliance on air-conditioning. In your essay, analyze how Klinenberg 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. This article was generated with Essay Freelance Writers!
Be sure that your analysis focuses on the most relevant features of the passage. Your essay should not explain whether you agree with Klinenberg’s claims, but rather explain how Klinenberg builds an argument to persuade his audience. You can read the full text of the passage associated with the prompt (part of Practice Test 5) via our complete collection of official SAT essay prompts. In the following SAT essay format, I've broken down an SAT essay into introduction, example paragraphs, and conclusion. Since I'm writing in response to a specific prompt, some of the information and facts in the template will only be useful for answering this specific prompt (although you should feel free to look for and write about the argumentative techniques I discuss in any of your essays). When responding to any SAT question, however, you can and should use the same format and structure for your own essays. To help you out, I've bolded structural words and phrases in the below template. Begin with a statement that explains the central claim of the passage's argument; this statement should provide some context for what you’ll be discussing in the essay.
Read the assignment guidelines carefully. Highlight or underline important words and phrases in the instructions. Make sure that you fully understand what the instructor is asking you to do before you begin your outline. Ask for clarification if anything seems vague or confusing. Develop a topic. Although outlining a paper can help you to develop and organize your ideas, you may need to do some other prewriting exercises to get started. There are how to write an essay outline for college prewriting strategies that can help you to generate ideas for your paper. List all the ideas that come to mind (good or bad) and then look over the list you have made and group similar ideas together. Expand those lists by adding onto the list or by using another prewriting activity. Freewriting. Write nonstop for about 5-10 minutes. Write whatever comes to mind and don’t edit yourself. When you are done, review what you have written and highlight or underline the most useful information. Repeat the freewriting exercise using this information as a starting point. You can repeat this exercise multiple times to continue to refine and develop your ideas.
Clustering. Write your subject down on the center of a piece of paper and circle it. Then draw three or more lines extending from the circle. At the end of each of the lines you have drawn, write down a new idea that corresponds to your main idea. Then draw three or more lines from each of those new ideas, and write ideas that corresponds to those ideas. Continue developing your cluster until you feel that you have explored as many connections as you can. Questioning. On a piece of paper, write out “Who? ” Space the questions about two or three lines apart so that you can write your answers on these lines. Respond to each questions in as much detail as you can. This exercise will help develop your ideas and identify areas of your topic that you need to learn more about. Identify your purpose. Ask yourself what you want to accomplish with your paper. Are you writing this paper in order to persuade, entertain, enlighten, or something else?