SAT Rubric: Analysis
The official SAT scoring guide looks complicated, but we’ll break it down for you! Graders will evaluate your essay in three main areas: Reading, Analysis, and Writing. Let’s take a closer look at how you can earn a high Analysis score.
The response offers an insightful analysis of the source text and demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of the analytical task.
- The response offers a thorough, well-considered evaluation of the author’s use of evidence, reasoning, and/or stylistic and persuasive elements, and/or feature(s) of the student’s own choosing.
- The response contains relevant, sufficient, and strategically chosen support for claim(s) or point(s) made.
- The response focuses consistently on those features of the text that are most relevant to addressing the task.
Explain how the author builds a persuasive argument, and back up your analysis with evidence from the text.
Write three body paragraphs, each focusing on how the author uses one particular strategy to persuade the audience. For each strategy you analyze:
- Provide textual evidence (quotes or paraphrases) to show how the strategy is used.
- Explain how the strategy impacts the audience and helps build the author’s argument.
Example
Here’s an example of how to analyze a strategy in one of your body paragraphs.
In this case, a writer explains how the author Richard Schiffman uses anecdotes, or personal stories, to persuade his audience that Americans need to work fewer hours.
- Find specific examples of the strategy to use as textual evidence.
Text: “Why We Should Work Less” by Richard Schiffman
Strategy: anecdotes
Evidence from the Text: “Recently a friend confided over dinner that her job was ‘killing’ her. . . . Like many nowadays, she takes her work home with her, which has taken a toll on her personal life, health and sleep.”
- Ask yourself the questions below to analyze how this example helps convince the audience.
| How does this example impact the audience? | The audience feels sorry for Schiffman’s overworked friend. |
| How does this help build the author’s argument? | The audience becomes more convinced that long hours negatively impact individuals’ lives. |
- Put your textual evidence and analysis together in a body paragraph to explain how the author uses this strategy.
Here’s part of an example body paragraph:
Schiffman opens his article with an anecdote as evidence of the personal cost of long working hours. In this story, Schiffman recounts how his friend feels that her job is “killing her” and is close to quitting. This opening immediately frames the seriousness of the problem Schiffman is describing: even dream jobs are making highly motivated workers miserable, and long working hours are to blame. By providing specific, personal evidence, Schiffman appeals to his audience’s empathy and helps them picture how long hours negatively affect individuals’ lives.
- When you’re choosing strategies to analyze, look for ones that repeat across the text. These strategies are likely to be important to the argument.
- Don’t try to explain everything the author does in the text—on test day, you won’t have time! It’s better to analyze a couple of strategies in depth than to explain a lot of different features less thoroughly.
- Schiffman, Richard. “Why We Should Work Less.” Adapted by The College Board. The SAT with Essay: Practice Essay #9, collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/sat-practice-test-9-essay.pdf. Originally published in The Washington Post, Jan. 2012.
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