I keep hearing the claim that the legitimacy of secession from the U.S. was “settled at Appomattox,” and I wanted to say a few words about why I think that makes little sense.

To begin with, let me stress that I think that modern talk of secession is both foolish and pretty obviously empty posturing, whether it’s some liberals talking that way during the Bush Administration or some conservatives talking that way during the Obama Administration. America has profited tremendously from American union, both in terms of wealth and in terms of liberty from threats both foreign and domestic. It has profited tremendously in terms of national greatness, for those who care about such things, as I sense many conservatives and some liberals do. And its unity has greatly helped the world, especially but not only during World War II and the Cold War.

I doubt that even a fraction of those who on occasion talk in favor of secession are really willing to abandon the benefits of union. I’m confident that they should not, under current circumstances or circumstances remotely like our current ones. In principle, I agree that some sufficiently grave threats to liberty or security may justify secession — if we’re talking about historical locales, think Philadelphia 1776 or Yorktown 1781 — but we’re extremely far from that, especially reckoning the liberty, security, wealth, and greatness costs of disunion. Today, secession is politically a total nonstarter, and for very good reasons.

But at the same time, surely this must be a judgment based on how we see the world today, not based on what happened 144 years ago. A matter is “settled” by political decision only so long as the political decision commands the adherence of the polity. If in 2065 Alaska, California, Hawaii, or Texas (just to consider some examples) assert a right to secede, the argument that “in 1865, the victorious Union government concluded that no state has a right to secede in opposition to the wishes of the Union, so therefore you lack such a right” will have precisely the weight that the Americans of 2065 will choose to give it — which should be very little.

And beyond that, even if there is some precedent of some sort properly set by the Civil War (and I continue to disagree that there is), any such precedent can’t tell us much about consensual secession. The talk I occasionally hear of secession (again, talk that I think is not really serious) is not about departure in the face of military opposition — it’s about creating a political sentiment in some place in favor of seceding, and a political sentiment in the rest of the country in favor of allowing the secession. The results of a bloody civil war tell us nothing about the propriety of a Velvet Divorce.

Appomattox might well have a continuing effect (as does Philadephia) on the psyche of today’s Americans, and of future Americans. Its immediate effect also deeply influenced the economic structure of the nation, and the political structure of the nation’s political institutions; I suspect this also makes future secession less likely. 

But that’s not a “settlement” of the secession question for the centuries. And there can be and should be no such settlement. “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” So the present is different from the past, and the future from the present. Poetic allusions to a peace treaty resolving one particular conflict can’t tell us what is right to do in our country today.

Know Your Ingredients

To write a tasty SAT essay, you’ve got to know the necessary ingredients: The different grades of 1 to 6 are based on the quality of your essay in four fundamental categories.

1. Positioning: The strength and clarity of your stance on the given topic.
2. Examples: The relevance and development of the examples you use to support your argument.
3. Organization: The organization of each of your paragraphs and of your essay overall.
4. Command of Language: Sentence construction, grammar, and word choice.

Now you know your customers, and you know what they want. We’ll spend the rest of this chapter teaching you precisely how to give it to them.

1. Positioning

SAT essay topics are always broad. Really, really, really broad. We’re talking “the big questions of life” broad. A typical SAT essay topic gives you a statement that addresses ideas like the concept of justice, the definition of success, the importance of learning from mistakes.

The broad nature of SAT topics means you’ll never be forced to write about topical or controversial issues of politics, culture, or society (unless you want to; we’ll talk about whether you should want to a little later). But the broadness of the topics also means that with a little thought you can come up with plenty of examples to support your position on the topic.

Philosophers take years to write tomes on the topics of justice or success. On the SAT, you get 25 minutes. Given these time constraints, the key to writing a great SAT essay is taking a strong position on an extremely broad topic. You need to select your position strategically. To do this, follow a two-step strategy:

• Rephrase the prompt.
• Choose your position.

It’s time to learn how to take a stand. Here’s a sample essay topic for the SAT:

Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.

“It is a mistake to suppose that men succeed through success; they much oftener succeed through failures. Precept, study, advice, and example could never have taught them so well as failure has done.”

—Samuel Smiles, Scottish author (1812-1904)

Assignment:

Is there truly no success like failure? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.

Rephrase the Prompt

Rephrase the prompt in your own words and make it more specific. If you rephrase the statement “Is there truly no success like failure?” you might come up with a sentence like “Can failure can lead to success by teaching important lessons that help us avoid repeating mistakes in the future?”

In addition to narrowing down the focus of the broad original topic, putting the SAT essay question in your own words makes it easier for you to take a position confidently, since you’ll be proving your own statement rather than the more obscure version put forth by the SAT.

Choose Your Position

Agree or disagree. When you choose an argument for a paper in school, you often have to strain yourself to look for something original, something subtle. Not here. Not on the 25-minute fast food essay. Once you’ve rephrased the topic, agree with it or disagree. It’s that simple.

You may have qualms or otherwise “sophisticated” thoughts at this point. You may be thinking, “I could argue the ‘agree’ side pretty well, but I’m not sure that I 100 percent believe in the agree side because. . . .” Drop those thoughts. Remember, you’re not going to have a week to write this essay. You need to keep it simple. Agree or disagree, then come up with the examples that support your simple stand.

2. Examples

To make an SAT essay really shine, you’ve got to load it up with excellent examples. Just coming up with any three examples that fit a basic position on a broad topic is not gonna cut it. But there are two things that do make excellent SAT examples stand out from the crowd:

• Specific examples
• Variety of examples

Specific Examples

Good examples discuss specific events, dates, or measurable changes over time. Another way to put this is, you have to be able to talk about things that have happened in detail.

Let’s say you’re trying to think of examples to support the position that “learning the lessons taught by failure is a sure route to success.” Perhaps you come up with the example of the American army during the Revolutionary War, which learned from its failures in the early years of the war how it needed to fight the British. Awesome! That’s a potentially great example. To make it actually great, though, you have to be able to say more than just, “The American army learned from its mistakes and then defeated the British Redcoats.” You need to be specific: Give dates, mention people, battles, tactics. If you use the experience of the American Army in the Revolutionary War as an example, you might mention the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, which officially granted the Americans independence and gave the United States all lands east of the Mississippi River.

Just as bricks hold up a building, such detailed facts support an argument. There are literally millions of good, potential examples for every position you might choose. You need to choose examples that you know a lot about in order to be specific. Knowing a lot about an example means you know more than just the basic facts. You need to be able to use all the detailed facts about your example, such as dates and events, to show how your example proves your argument.

Knowing that the Americans defeated the British in 1783 is the start of a great example, but you must show specifically how the American victory proves the argument that “there’s no success like failure.” What failures on the part of the British government and army led to the Americans’ success? (Morale issues, leadership differences, inadequate soldiers and supplies, the Battle of Yorktown, and so on.) The one-two punch of a solid example and details that use the example to prove your argument make the difference between a good SAT essay example and a great one.

Variety of Examples

The other crucial thing about SAT essay examples is how much ground they cover. Sure, you could come up with three examples from your personal life about how you learned from failure. But you’re much more likely to impress the grader and write a better essay if you use a broad range of examples from different areas: history, art, politics, literature, science, and so on. That means when you’re thinking up examples, you should consider as wide a variety as possible, as long as all of your examples remain closely tied to proving your argument.

To prove the position that “there’s no success like failure,” you might choose one example from history, literature, and business or current events. Here are three examples that you might choose from those three areas:

History: The Americans’ victory over the British in the Revolutionary War.

Literature: Dickens’s success in writing about the working class based on his years spent in poverty as a child laborer.

Business or Current Events: The JetBlue airline succeeding by learning from the mistakes of its competitors.

A broad array of examples like those will provide a more solid and defensible position than three examples drawn from personal experience or from just one or two areas.

A NOTE ON TRUTHFULNESS IN EXAMPLES

The SAT essay tests how well you write. The examples you choose to support your argument and your development of those examples is a big part of how well you write. But there’s no SAT rule or law that says that the examples you use to support your arguments have to be true.

That does not mean you should make up examples from history or bend facts into falsehoods. Instead, it means you can take examples drawn from your personal experience or your own knowledge and present them as examples from current events, art, literature, business, or almost any other topic. For instance, let’s say your Aunt Edna started a business selling chocolate-covered pretzels on the street in New York City. She started the business because she noticed that her friends and neighbors were sick and tired of the dull, flavorless New York City pretzels offered at other stands, many of which had gone out of business due to lack of demand. Her chocolate-covered pretzel business became a success based on her competitors’ failures. Turn that example into an article you recently read in your local newspaper, and you’ve transformed your personal knowledge into a much more credible and impressive example about success and failure in business. It’s certainly better to use universal examples based on facts and events that your grader might recognize. If you’re in a bind, however, remember that you can bend the truth a bit and use your personal knowledge and experience to generate examples that prove your argument.

3. Organization

No matter what topic you end up writing about, the organization of your essay should be the same. That’s right, the same. If you’re asked to write about whether “there’s no success like failure” or about the merits of the phrase “progress always comes at a cost,” the structure of your essay should be almost identical. The SAT is looking for those standard ingredients, and the structure we’re about to explain will make sure those ingredients stand out in your essay.

So what’s this magical essay structure? Well, it’s back to the trusty fast food analogy: A good SAT essay is a lot like a triple-decker burger.

Just as important as the organization of your entire essay is the organization within each of the five paragraphs. Let’s take a closer look at each paragraph next.

The Top Bun: Introduction

The introduction to an SAT essay has to do three things:

• Grab the grader’s attention.
• Explain your position on the topic clearly and concisely.
• Transition the grader smoothly into your three examples.

To accomplish these three goals, you need three to four sentences in your introduction. These three to four sentences will convey your thesis statement and the overall map of your essay to the grader.

THE THESIS STATEMENT:

The thesis statement is the first sentence of your essay. It identifies where you stand on the topic and should pull the grader into the essay. A good thesis statement is strong, clear, and definitive. A good thesis statement for the essay topic, “Is there truly no success like failure?” is:

Learning from the lessons taught by failure is a sure route to success.

This thesis statement conveys the writer’s position on the topic boldly and clearly. In only a few words, it carves out the position that the essay will take on the very broad, vague topic: learning from failure yields success.

THE ESSAY SUMMARY:

After the thesis statement, the rest of the first paragraph should serve as a kind of summary of the examples you will use to support your position on the topic. Explain and describe your three examples to make it clear how they fit into your argument. It’s usually best to give each example its own sentence. Here’s an example:

The United States of America can be seen as a success that emerged from failure: by learning from the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation, the founding fathers were able to create theConstitution, the document on which America is built. Google Inc., the popular Internet search engine, is another example of a success that arose from learning from failure, though in this case Google learned from the failures of its competitors. Another example that shows how success can arise from failure is the story of Rod Johnson, who started a recruiting firm that rose out of the ashes of Johnson’s personal experience of being laid off.

Three sentences, three examples. The grader knows exactly what to expect from your essay now and is ready to dive in.

The Meat: Three-Example Paragraphs

Each of your three-example paragraphs should follow this basic format:

Four to five sentences long.

The first sentence should be the topic sentence, which serves as the thesis statement of the paragraph. It explains what your example is and places it within the context of your argument.The next three to four sentences are for developing your example. In these sentences you show through specific, concrete discussion of facts and situations just how your example supports your essay thesis statement.

For now we’re just going to show you one “meat” paragraph. As we continue through the chapter, you’ll see several more, some that are good, some that are bad. This one is good:

The United States, the first great democracy of the modern world, is also one of the best examples of a success achieved by studying and learning from earlier failures. After just five years of living under the Articles of Confederation, which established the United States of America as a single country for the first time, the states realized that they needed a new document and a new, more powerful government. In 1786, the Annapolis convention was convened. The result, three years later, was the Constitution, which created a more powerful central government while also maintaining the integrity of the states. By learning from the failure of the Articles, the founding fathers created the founding document of a country that has become both the most powerful country in the world and a beacon of democracy.

The best meat paragraphs on the SAT essay are specific. The SAT’s essay directions say it loud and clear: “Be specific.” In its topic sentence, this paragraph states that the United States is one of the great examples of “a success achieved by studying and learning from failures.” It then uses the specific example of the Articles of Confederation, the Annapolis convention, and the Constitution to prove its position. It’s specific throughout and even includes a few dates.

TRANSITIONS BETWEEN MEAT PARAGRAPHS:

Your first meat paragraph dives right into its thesis statement, but the second and third meat paragraphs need transitions. The simplest way to build these transitions is to use words like another and finally. That means your second meat paragraph should start with a transitional phrase such as, “Another example . . .”

A slightly more sophisticated way to build transitions is to choose examples from different sources, such as from history and business. If the first paragraph is about a political instance of learning from failure and the second is from business, make that fact your transition: “As in politics, learning from failure is a means to gaining success in business as well. Take the case of. . . .”

The Bottom Bun: Conclusion

The conclusion of your essay should accomplish two main goals:

• Recap your argument while broadening it a bit.
• Expand your position. Look to the future.

To accomplish these two goals, your conclusion should contain three to four sentences.

RECAP YOUR ARGUMENT:

The recap is a one-sentence summary of what you’ve already argued. As in the thesis statement, the recap should be straightforward, bold, and declarative. By “broadening” your argument, we mean that you should attempt to link your specific examples to wider fields, such as politics, business, and art. Here’s a recap example:

The examples of the Constitution, Rod Johnson, and Google make it clear that in the realms of politics and business, the greatest successes arise from careful considerations of the lessons of failure.

EXPAND ON YOUR POSITION:

The last two or three sentences of the essay should take the argument you just recapped and push it a little further. One of the best ways to push your argument further is to look to the future and think about what would happen if the position that you’ve taken in your essay could be applied on a broader scale. Here’s an example:

Failure is often seen as embarrassing, something to be denied and hidden. But as the examples of the U.S. Constitution, Google, and Rod Johnson prove, if an individual, organization, or even a nation is strong enough to face and study its failure, then that failure can become a powerful teacher. As the examples of history and business demonstrate, if everyone had the courage and insight to view failure as a surefire way to learn from mistakes, success would be easier to achieve.

The bottom bun wraps up the entire SAT essay. And there you have it! If you follow the template we just provided, and break down the essay into its core ingredients, your SAT essay will be strong, clear, and easy to write.

The Universal SAT Essay Template

To make sure you really get the essay organization, the following chart sums it all up. Here’s the SAT essay outline you should use, no matter what topic you get or what position you take: