By now you know all of the ingredients you should use and the template you should follow to write a great SAT essay. Next you need to learn the writing process that will empower you to put it all together into a top-score-worthy essay every time. Follow the five steps we describe next and you’ll be on your way to a 6.

The first thing you must do before you can even think about your essay is read the topic very carefully. Here’s the sample topic we will use throughout this section:

Make sure you understand the topic thoroughly by making it your own. To do that, use the two strategies we discussed in the Ingredients section:

That’s it. One step down, four more to go.

Your position is that you agree with the statement that “failure can lead to success by teaching important lessons that help us avoid repeating mistakes in the future.” Terrific.

Brainstorming, or thinking up examples to support your position, is the crucial next step. Plenty of SAT-takers will succumb to the temptation to plunge straight from Step 1 into writing the essay (Step 4). Skipping the brainstorming session will leave you with an opinion on the topic but with no clearly thought-out examples to prove your point. You’ll write the first thing that comes to mind, and your essay will probably derail. So even though you feel the time pressure, don’t skip brainstorming.

Brainstorming seems simple. You just close your eyes and scrunch up your face and THINK REALLY HARD until you come up with some examples. But, in practice, brainstorming while staring at a blank page under time pressure can be intimidating and frustrating. To make brainstorming less daunting and more productive, we’ve got two strategies to suggest:

The best examples you can generate to support your SAT essay topic will come from a variety of sources such as science, history, politics, art, literature, business, and personal experience. So, brainstorm a list split up by category. Here’s the list we brainstormed for the topic, “There’s no success like failure.”

Let’s say you took three minutes and came up with a list of eight categories like ours, and you got examples for five of them. That’s still great. That means your next step is to choose the top three of your five potential examples.

If you want to put in the time, you could also do some brainstorming ahead of time. Brainstorming ahead of time can be a great method, because it gives you time to do more than just brainstorm. You can actually prepare examples for each of the seven categories we’ve brainstormed above in our chart. You could, for instance, read up about various scientists, learning about their successes, their failures, the impact of their discoveries (positive and negative), and memorize dates, events, and other facts.

The risk inherent in planning ahead is that you can get stuck with a topic on the SAT in which all your knowledge about scientists just isn’t applicable. But while this is somewhat of a risk, since the SAT essay topics are so broad, you can often massage your examples to fit. Preparing ahead of time will pay off if you develop a few examples that you know a lot about for the essay. But it could backfire if it winds up that you absolutely cannot use the examples you prepared. Then you’ll have to resort to thinking up examples on the spot. If you don’t want to risk wasting time preparing ahead of time, don’t. It’s up to you.

When you go through your brainstormed and pre-prepared examples to decide which three you should actually use, you need to keep three things in mind:

The first two reasons are pretty straightforward: Specificity and variety in your examples will help you write the strongest essay. The point about controversy is a bit more subtle. Staying away from very controversial examples ensures that you won’t accidentally offend or annoy your grader, who might then be more inclined to lower your grade. For instance, the 9/11 example from our brainstormed list should be cut. The event just is too full of unresolved issues to serve as a suitable essay topic, and the last thing you want to do is upset or offend anyone.

Here’s another example. Let’s say that you’re not so certain if that story about James Joyce being a singer is even really true, and that you think lots of people might go for the babies walking example. That would mean you decide to keep the examples about the Constitution, Google, and the story of Rod Johnson. What if instead of referring to Rod Johnson as your enterprising uncle, you portray him as a businessman you read about in an esteemed publication recently? Transform your personal experience and make it seem like an actual example from current events. The SAT essay graders care much more about how well you write and how intelligently you can use examples to back up your position than they care about the truth of what you say in examples drawn from personal experience.

That means you’ve narrowed down your brainstormed topics to the top three. Next up: Outlining.

After brainstorming comes the essay writing step that students tend to dread most—writing an outline. So we’re here to encourage you to embrace the outline. Love the outline! Live the outline! At the very least, write the outline. On fast food essays like the SAT essay, which rewards standard conformity much more than it does creativity, organizing your ideas in outline form and then sticking to that outline is crucial. Though you may feel that you’re wasting your time, we guarantee that the four or five minutes that you invest in writing an outline will definitely be paid back when you write the essay.

Since your outline is a kind of bare-bones “map” of your essay, the outline should follow our Universal SAT Essay Template. Here’s a summary of the template:

As you write the outline, remember that conveying your ideas clearly matters at this stage. Your outline need not be articulate or even comprehensible to anyone other than you. Your outline must contain all the essential raw material that will become your thesis statement, topic sentences, and concluding statement when you write your essay.

As you sketch out your outline, consider where you want each example to go. We suggest that you put what you consider to be your strongest example first, followed by the second strongest, and then the least strong. We suggest this because the essay is a timed section, and if for some reason you run out of time and can only fit two example paragraphs between your intro and conclusion, they might as well be your best two examples. Here’s a sample outline we’ve written based on the topic and examples we have already discussed. Notice that we’ve placed our examples in strongest to weakest order starting in paragraph 2.

Your outline does not have to be written in complete sentences. Notice how in the example above we drop verbs and write in a note-taking style. Feel free to write just enough to convey to yourself what you need to be able to follow during the actual writing of your essay. Once you have the outline down on paper, writing the essay becomes more a job of polishing language and ideas than creating them from scratch.

Writing the essay consists of filling out your ideas by following your outline and plugging in what’s missing. That adds up to only about ten more sentences than what you’ve jotted down in your outline, which should already contain a basic version of your thesis statement, one topic sentence for each of your three examples, and a conclusion statement that ties everything together. All together your essay should be about fifteen to twenty sentences long.

As you write, keep these three facets of your essay in mind:

Following your outline will make sure you stick to the Universal SAT Essay Template. That means organization shouldn’t be a problem.

As far as development goes, you should make sure that every sentence in the essay serves the greater goal of proving your thesis statement as well as the more immediate purpose of building on the supporting examples you present in the intro and in each example paragraph’s topic sentence. You should also make sure that you are specific with your examples: give dates, describe events in detail, and so on.

By clarity, we mean the simplicity of the language that you use. That involves spelling and grammar, but it also means focusing on varying sentence length and structure as well as including a few well-placed vocabulary words that you definitely know how to use correctly.

Do not break from your outline. Never pause for a digression or drop in a fact or detail that’s not entirely relevant to your essay’s thesis statement. You’re serving fast food, and fast food always sticks to the core ingredients and the universal recipe.

If you’re running out of time before finishing the intro, all three example paragraphs, and the conclusion, there’s still hope. Here’s what you should do: Drop one of your example paragraphs. You can still get a decent score, possibly a 4 or 5, with just two. Three examples is definitely the strongest and safest way to go, but if you just can’t get through three, take your two best examples and go with them. Just be sure to include an introduction and a conclusion in every SAT essay.

Here is an example of a complete SAT essay. It’s based strictly on the outline we built in step 3 of our Five Steps to a 6, with a focus on clear simple language and the occasional drop of special sauce.

In the Practice Essay section at the end of this chapter, we provide analysis to explain more fully why we think this essay deserves a 6. For now, it’s time to move on to the final step of our Five Steps to a 6—proofing your essay.

Proofing your essay means reading through your finished essay to correct mistakes or to clear up words that are difficult to read. If you don’t have two minutes after you’ve finished writing the essay (step 4), spend whatever time you do have left proofing. Read over your essay and search for rough writing, bad transitions, grammatical errors, repetitive sentence structure, and all that special sauce stuff. The SAT explicitly says that handwriting will not affect your grade, but you should also be on the lookout for instances in which bad handwriting makes it look as if you’ve made a grammatical or spelling mistake.

If you’re running out of time and you have to skip a step, proofing is the step to drop. Proofing is important, but it’s the only one of the Five Steps to a 6 that isn’t absolutely crucial.