Increase Your Score in 3 Minutes a Day by Randall McCutcheon

Author:Randall McCutcheon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2004-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Emotional Proof

You offer emotional proof when you “strike a chord” in your reader by appealing to a sense of patriotism, family, justice, or the like. Risks come with emotional appeals. The reader might think you are silly or superficial. The traditional advice to young writers has never been more true: show, don’t tell. Study this example from Molly Dunn, a student writing on the topic “Now is the time to rehumanize America.”

When I was a fifth grader at S.Y. Jackson Elementary School, my best friend Sarah was the typical nerd. One day, when the teacher was out of the room for a while, the class bully decided it would be fun to lock Sarah out of the classroom. As her best friend, I could not stand by and let this happen. I stood outside, locked out of the classroom with her. Sarah was so hurt by the bully’s actions that she was bawling. Then, one by one, my entire class came outside to stand with us. This experience was a lesson that I never would have received had I been attending school through my home computer. Sitting at a computer all day, a child might learn to read, write, and recite multiplication tables, but she will be estranged from the world of other children.

Do you think that Dunn’s story would “strike a chord” with most readers? What percentage of English teachers (the readers of the SAT essay) do you think were bullied at some time during their childhood? On the other hand, what if Dunn had written the following:

Bullies often hurt people’s feelings. They shouldn’t be allowed to pick on people. If we allow this brutish behavior to continue, it will make us less human.

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