One of the criteria that are judged during the SAT writing portion is the length of the essay. There are many people who took the test that find it hard to make it to the satisfactory length that markers are expecting. This is usually anywhere between 3-5 well-organized paragraphs. Most test-takers will then proceed and write about anything and everything they can think about the prompt. The marker does not want to read about stuff that is irrelevant to the prompt and will start to drift away from the essay as a whole. Many people have this type problem: rambling.
Rambling is a lengthy writing style that includes long-winded materials that is essentially unimportant to the writing at all. There are several reasons why people do this. These include:
1) To fill up the page, so it looks like the writer has much important information to say.
2) Unorganized. The writer believes that what they wrote is essential, but unintentionally actually made his essay worse.
There are several ways that you can prevent yourself from rambling during your essays, and each of these ways includes better organization during your outlining and writing stages.
1) Have a clean outline during your brainstorming stage. Remember to organize it in such a way that you can understand exactly what you need to write about when you get around to writing the actual essay. Having an outline besides you prevents you from straying away from the main point too far, since you know what must come afterwards.
2) During the writing process, follow this set-up to prevent yourself from rambling.
- State your supporting argument in the first part of the paragraph.
- If you have an example, give a brief description of what happened. Take only a maximum of two sentences.
- Don’t go too deep into your example. The marker is not interested in your life story, but a reason for why you chose that example. Right after you said what happened in the example, you must state the importance of it. If the importance is too far away from the example, the marker might forget what the initial example is.
By following these suggestions, you may prevent yourself from rambling too much in your essays. In the types of writing situations such as the SAT, the markers are more looking towards how well you can organize your thoughts into a satisfactory length essay, than how much you can write in 30 minutes. An important note to remember is that longer doesn’t always mean better.
Looking to do the PSAT? We can help with PSAT Prep
This article was written for you by Samuel, one of the tutors with TestPrep Academy.