The Optional, Unscored Planning Questions

The essay gives you three perspectives on an issue and a prewriting page before the lined pages where you actually write. On that prewriting page sit planning questions, usually asking what each perspective gets right and what it misses. Nobody reads those pages for score. So why are they there? Because the single biggest jump in essay scoring is the move from summarizing opinions to analyzing them, and strengths-and-weaknesses questions are analysis in disguise. Answer them honestly and you have already done the hard thinking before your first sentence of the actual essay.

Here is the four-minute version. Read the three perspectives. For each one, jot a quick strength and a quick weakness, the specific reason it holds up and the specific place it breaks down. That is six short notes. Then look for your own view: maybe it agrees with one perspective's strength while dodging its weakness, or blends two. That move, placing your view in relation to the others, is your thesis. Your body paragraphs follow directly: one per perspective, built from the strength and weakness you already named, plus your own paragraph explaining why your view handles the issue better. The outline is done before the drafting clock really starts.

Because only the lined response pages go to the two readers, the prewriting page is a free scratchpad. Write fragments, cross things out, contradict yourself on the way to a better idea. None of that touches your score. What matters is that the thinking you do there shows up, cleaned up and organized, in the essay itself.