Translating for the CollegeBoard

The CollegeBoard has published information on how their essays are graded. No offense, but their rhetoric is meaningless. By tomorrow, I will show you why.

Grading is based on 5 things. If you write something down, you’ll get a one. If you do the other 5 things, you’ll get a six. I believe the graders are human, and they can also make mistakes. They also can be swayed so that if you do a suizo job on one section, they may overlook your atrocious grammar.

Since this is a work in progress, I just want to leave you with what the 5 things (in my mind) for what grading is really based on:

Structure: Organization is important. The grader needs to know where you're going and how you will get there.

Point of View (with examples): If you are writing an essay you better have something meaningful to say. And then you better prove to the grader why it is meaningful. Remember to take examples from histroy, lit, current events, and science/philosophical ideas. Stay away from personal examples if you can.

Vocabulary: part of getting that perfect score means that you have a sophistication level that warrants acceptance into the college of your choice.

Sentence structure and style: hard to explain this one, but basically don't write every sentence in the same fashion. "Society needs this....society needs that...courage is good because..." Throw in some dependent clauses, use a semi-colon, a command, a rhetorical question, some parentheses, some dashes. Anything which proves that you control the writing. Otherwise you're just a tool.

Grammar and spelling error free: Do you have many mistakes? If so, you don't look like you can communicate with those folks at MyNumberOneCollege.

And you'll get a point for writing stuff down which is on topic.