To write a tasty SAT essay, you’ve got to know the necessary ingredients: The different grades of 1–6 are based on the quality of your essay in four fundamental categories.

Now you know your customers, and you know what they want. We’ll spend the rest of this chapter teaching you precisely how to give it to them.

SAT essay topics are always broad. Really, really, really broad. We’re talking “the big questions of life” broad. A typical SAT essay topic gives you a statement that addresses ideas like the concept of justice, the definition of success, the importance of learning from mistakes.

The broad nature of SAT topics means you’ll never be forced to write about topical or controversial issues of politics, culture, or society (unless you want to; we’ll talk about whether you should want to a little later). But the broadness of the topics also means that with a little thought you can come up with plenty of examples to support your position on the topic.

Philosophers take years to write tomes on the topics of justice or success. On the SAT, you get 25 minutes. Given these time constraints, the key to writing a great SAT essay is taking a strong position on an extremely broad topic. You need to select your position strategically. A solid position on two strategies:

It’s time to learn how to take a stand. Here’s a sample topic:

Rephrase the prompt in your own words and make it more specific. If you rephrase the statement “There is no success like failure,” you might come up with a sentence like “Failure can lead to success by teaching important lessons that help us avoid repeating mistakes in the future.”

In addition to narrowing down the focus of the broad original topic, putting the SAT essay question in your own words makes it easier for you to take a position confidently, since you’ll be proving your own statement rather than the more obscure version put forth by the SAT.

Agree or disagree. When you choose an argument for a paper in school, you often have to strain yourself to look for something original, something subtle. Not here. Not on the 25-minute fast food essay. Once you’ve rephrased the topic, agree with it or disagree. It’s that simple.

You may have qualms or otherwise “sophisticated” thoughts at this point. You may be thinking, “I could argue the ‘agree’ side pretty well, but I’m not sure that I 100 percent believe in the agree side because. . . .” Drop those thoughts. Remember, you’re not going to have a week to write this essay. You need to keep it simple. Agree or disagree, then come up with the examples that support your simple stand.

To make an SAT essay really shine, you’ve got to load it up with excellent examples. Just coming up with any three examples that fit a basic position on a broad topic is not gonna cut it. But there are two things that do make excellent SAT examples stand out from the crowd:

Good examples discuss specific events, dates, or measurable changes over time. Another way to put this is, you have to be able to talk about things that have happened in detail.

Let’s say you’re trying to think of examples to support the position that “learning the lessons taught by failure is a sure route to success.” Perhaps you come up with the example of the American army during the Revolutionary War, which learned from its failures in the early years of the war how it needed to fight the British. Awesome! That’s a potentially great example. To make it actually great, though, you have to be able to say more than just, “The American army learned from its mistakes and then defeated the British Redcoats.” You need to be specific: Give dates, mention people, battles, tactics. If you use the experience of the American Army in the Revolutionary War as an example, you might mention the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which officially granted the Americans independence and gave the United States all lands east of the Mississippi River.

Just as bricks hold up a building, such detailed facts support an argument. There are literally millions of good, potential examples for every position you might choose. You need to choose examples that you know a lot about in order to be specific. Knowing a lot about an example means you know more than just the basic facts. You need to be able to use all the detailed facts about your example, such as dates and events, to show how your example proves your argument.

Knowing that the Americans defeated the British in 1783 is the start of a great example, but you must show specifically how the American victory proves the argument that “there’s no success like failure.” What failures on the part of the British government and army led to the Americans’ success? (Morale issues, leadership differences, inadequate soldiers and supplies, the Battle of Yorktown, and so on.) The one-two punch of a solid example and details that use the example to prove your argument make the difference between a good SAT essay example and a great one.

The other crucial thing about SAT essay examples is how much ground they cover. Sure, you could come up with three examples from your personal life about how you learned from failure. But you’re much more likely to impress the grader and write a better essay if you use a broad range of examples from different areas: history, art, politics, literature, science, and so on. That means when you’re thinking up examples, you should consider as wide a variety as possible, as long as all of your examples remain closely tied to proving your argument.

To prove the position that “there’s no success like failure,” you might choose one example from history, literature, and business or current events. Here are three examples that you might choose from those three areas:

A broad array of examples like those will provide a more solid and defensible position than three examples drawn from personal experience or from just one or two areas.

The SAT essay tests how well you write. The examples you choose to support your argument and your development of those examples is a big part of how well you write. But there’s no SAT rule or law that says that the examples you use to support your arguments have to be true.

That does not mean you should make up examples from history or bend facts into falsehoods. Instead, it means you can take examples drawn from your personal experience or your own knowledge and present them as examples from current events, art, literature, business, or almost any other topic. For instance, let’s say your Aunt Edna started a business selling chocolate-covered pretzels on the street in New York City. She started the business because she noticed that her friends and neighbors were sick and tired of the dull, flavorless New York City pretzels offered at other stands, many of which had gone out of business due to lack of demand. Her chocolate-covered pretzel business became a success based on her competitors’ failures. Turn that example into an article you recently read in your local newspaper, and you’ve transformed your personal knowledge into a much more credible and impressive example about success and failure in business. It’s certainly better to use universal examples based on facts and events that your grader might recognize. If you’re in a bind, however, remember that you can bend the truth a bit and use your personal knowledge and experience to generate examples that prove your argument.

No matter what topic you end up writing about, the organization of your essay should be the same. That’s right, the same. If you’re asked to write about whether “there’s no success like failure” or about the merits of the phrase “progress always comes at a cost,” the structure of your essay should be almost identical. The SAT is looking for those standard ingredients, and the structure we’re about to explain will make sure those ingredients stand out in your essay.

So what’s this magical essay structure? Well, it’s back to the trusty fast food analogy: A good SAT essay is a lot like a triple-decker burger.

No matter what the topic is, what you feel about it, or which examples you choose, you should always follow this five-paragraph structure on your SAT essay. The first and last paragraphs are your essay’s introduction and conclusion; each of the middle three paragraphs discusses an example that supports and illustrates your argument. That’s it.

Just as important as the organization of your entire essay is the organization within each of the five paragraphs. Let’s take a closer look at each paragraph next.

The introduction to an SAT essay has to do three things:

To accomplish these three goals, you need three to four sentences in your introduction. These three to four sentences will convey your thesis statement and the overall map of your essay to the grader.

The thesis statement is the first sentence of your essay. It identifies where you stand on the topic and should pull the grader into the essay. A good thesis statement is strong, clear, and definitive. A good thesis statement for the essay topic, “There’s no success like failure,” is

This thesis statement conveys the writer’s position on the topic boldly and clearly. In only a few words, it carves out the position that the essay will take on the very broad, vague topic: learning from failure yields success.

After the thesis statement, the rest of the first paragraph should serve as a kind of summary of the examples you will use to support your position on the topic. Explain and describe your three examples to make it clear how they fit into your argument. It’s usually best to give each example its own sentence. Here’s an example:

Three sentences, three examples. The grader knows exactly what to expect from your essay now and is ready to dive in.

Each of your three-example paragraphs should follow this basic format:

For now we’re just going to show you one “meat” paragraph. As we continue through the chapter, you’ll see several more, some that are good, some that are bad. This one is good:

The best meat paragraphs on the SAT essay are specific. The SAT’s essay directions say it loud and clear: “Be specific.” In its topic sentence, this paragraph states that the United States is one of the great examples of “a success achieved by studying and learning from failures.” It then uses the specific example of the Articles of Confederation, the Annapolis convention, and the Constitution to prove its position. It’s specific throughout and even includes a few dates.

Transitions Between Meat Paragraphs: Your first meat paragraph dives right into its thesis statement, but the second and third meat paragraphs need transitions. The simplest way to build these transitions is to use words like another and finally. That means your second meat paragraph should start with a transitional phrase such as, “Another example . . .”

A slightly more sophisticated way to build transitions is to choose examples from different sources, such as from history and business. If the first paragraph is about a political instance of learning from failure and the second is from business, make that fact your transition: “As in politics, learning from failure is a means to gaining success in business as well. Take the case of. . . .”

The conclusion of your essay should accomplish two main goals:

To accomplish these two goals, your conclusion should contain three to four sentences.

The recap is a one-sentence summary of what you’ve already argued. As in the thesis statement, the recap should be straightforward, bold, and declarative. By “broadening” your argument, we mean that you should attempt to link your specific examples to wider fields, such as politics, business, and art. Here’s a recap example:

The last two or three sentences of the essay should take the argument you just recapped and push it a little further. One of the best ways to push your argument further is to look to the future and think about what would happen if the position that you’ve taken in your essay could be applied on a broader scale. Here’s an example:

The bottom bun wraps up the entire SAT essay. And there you have it! If you follow the template we just provided, and break down the essay into its core ingredients, your SAT essay will be strong, clear, and easy to write.

To make sure you really get the essay organization, the following chart sums it all up. Here’s the SAT essay outline you should use, no matter what topic you get or what position you take:

Taking a clear position and defending it with solid, detailed examples is a strong start to a successful SAT essay. But the SAT-graders also care about the mechanics of your writing, which we call your “command of language.” Think of your command of language as your fast food essay’s Special Sauce—it’s the sprinkling of perfect word choice, grammar, sentence structure, and spelling that must ooze through your entire essay. An SAT essay with a clear position and strong examples won’t get a perfect score without the Special Sauce, so pay close attention to these three facets of your essay (the actual SAT essay-grading guidelines mention them specifically):

Did you notice how dull that entire last paragraph became after the first two sentences? That’s because every one of those sentences not only started in the same way but also all had the same straight-ahead plodding rhythm.

Now go back and look at the earlier sample meat paragraph on the Constitution. Notice how the various sentences start differently and also have different internal rhythms. These variations in sentence structure keep the writing vibrant and interesting. Focus on changing the structure of your sentences as you write the essay. You don’t have to invert every clause, but you should be careful not to let a few sentences in a row follow the same exact structure. You’ve got to mix it up. Here’s the boring first paragraph of this section rewritten with varied sentence structure:

Much easier to read and far less repetitive, right?

One great way to vary your sentence structure while increasing the logical flow of your essay is to use transitions. Transitions are the words that provide the context necessary to help readers understand the flow of your argument. They’re words, phrases, or sentences that take readers gently by the hand, leading them through your essay. Here are some different kinds of transitions you can use to spice up your sentence structure:

Sometimes students think writing long complicated sentences will impress teachers. Maybe, but it won’t impress SAT essay-graders. Keep your sentences short and simple. Complex sentences are difficult to understand, and your SAT essays should be as clear and easy to read as possible.

We could fill an entire book with rules about creating simple and succinct prose. Instead, we give you two handy rules to simplify the sentences that you write on the SAT essay:

Those rules are certainly not foolproof, but abiding by them will keep you from filling your SAT essay with overly complex sentences and will ultimately make your essay easier to understand.

When students see that “word choice” plays a part in their essay score, they think it means that they have to use tons of sophisticated vocabulary words in order to score well. That belief is wrong and potentially damaging to your SAT essay score. If you strain to put big fancy words into your essay, you’re bound to end up misusing those words. And misusing a sophisticated word is a worse offense than not using one at all.

Word choice doesn’t mean that you have to go for the big word every time. It means you should go for the proper word, the best word, the word that makes your essay as clear as possible. Let’s look at part of the paragraph about the Constitution:

This is 6-level writing, but it isn’t teeming with five-syllable words. What the passage does is use every single word correctly. When it does reach for an uncommon word, like beacon, it uses the word appropriately and effectively. Now that’s good word choice.

So don’t try to use a word unless you know what it means. Don’t go throwing around tough words in the hope that you’re going to use it correctly and impress your reader. The likelihood is that you’re going to use the word incorrectly and give the grader a bad impression. Instead, keep it simple and stick to words you know well.

A few grammar or spelling mistakes sprinkled throughout your essay will not destroy your score. The SAT understands that you’re bound to make minor mistakes in a rushed 25-minute essay.

Graders are instructed to look out for patterns of errors. If a grader sees that your punctuation is consistently wrong, that your spelling of familiar words is often incorrect, or that you write run-on sentences again and again, that’s when your score will suffer.

You need to be able to write solid grammatical sentences to score well on the essay. As for learning the grammar, well, you’re in luck. We cover all the important grammar you need to know in “Beat Identifying Sentence Errors” and “Beat Improving Sentences.”