Essays

“Because society allows humorists to say things that other people cannot or will not say, de Botton sees humorists as serving a vital function in society.”

In class last week, we read many sample essays for the prompt we had on monday about if humorists serve a vital function in society or not. We read two and had to score each one. Most of the people in my section gave the one a low-ish  score and the other one a high score. The first one was written with beautiful diction, including French words I did not even understand. The style was so beautiful and the structure was really nice as well. When we heard that it was actually a few numbers lower than what we gave it we were all stunned. How could such a well written essay not get a higher score? If that one that I thought was so good, I would never be able to write something like that got so much lower than I expected, then what’s going to happen to mine on the AP test? When we got the explanation of why it got lower than expected, it all started to make a little more sense. The essay included a few examples that were not relevant to the ideas presented. It was a bit of a stretch. The whole essay was based off of two examples, so if one of them was sub par, then it brought the whole essay down. It really hit me that day that of course diction matters, but the ideas behind it are way more important. No matter how you say it, what matters is that you do say it.