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New Video: How to Study for the SAT and ACT Reading and Writing Sections: Vocabulary LIKE A BOSS!

2/7/2019

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Here it is - please watch it, then comment, like, and subscribe to my channel!

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New SAT and ACT Prep Video on the Properties of Zero!

1/26/2019

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This should help you prepare for the math sections of the SAT and ACT. Here's the link...

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New Video on American Idiom - "Crazy Stupid Words" Part II!

1/24/2019

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Here's the link - let me know what you think!

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I'm a Top Pro on Thumbtack! That puts me in the top 4%.

1/22/2019

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Thanks to all my customers who gave me high ratings!

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SAT and ACT Math Video on Transversals - More Than Meets the Eye!

1/20/2019

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Find it here!

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New Video - How to Study for the SAT and ACT : Second Essay Done in Real Time

1/13/2019

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Here's a link to my latest video, the second video in which I answer an SAT essay question "in real time." https://youtu.be/EcxXlxDwqkk

Here's the essay I wrote in the video. NOTE: Don't copy this essay and submit it for a class. As I've noted below, at least one plagiarism-checking site has visited this site, so you'll probably get caught if you do. All right, here's the essay. Let me know what you think of it - all constructive comments are welcome!

In the persuasive essay “The North West London Blues,” writer Zadie Smith uses ethos (authoritative facts and commonly-accepted ideas), pathos (appeals to emotion), and logos (logical argument) to support her point that public libraries are important and should remain open.

The most notable writing technique Ms. Smith uses in her essay is pathos. She details how library supporters have offered to staff the Kensal Rise library, have protested its closing to the point of forming human chains outside libraries in North West London, and have written lengthy editorials in newspapers asking for the libraries to be preserved, mostly to the effect of “Defend our libraries. We like libraries. Can we keep our libraries? We need to talk about libraries.” Smith describes the authors of these editorials as “[p]leading, like children.”

Smith also argues that libraries are some of the very few public spaces left where people can congregate without having to pay money to be in the space, as in the case of a coffee shop where patrons are expected to buy coffee or leave. Smith further argues, explicitly mentioning ethos, pathos, and logos, to explain that human beings are emotional creatures, and it is actually more logical to accept that human beings can be emotional and sentimental, and provide allowances for those facts, rather than just stating that those emotional concerns are at odds with the most “logical” and economically efficient solutions. While she concedes that spending on public health (e.g., the British National Health Service), and lowering classroom sizes are also worthy uses of tax money, she points out that libraries are also important, even though they meet intangible needs (e.g. public exposure to culture and places to socialize), rather than concrete ones (e.g. more hospital beds).

She points out that the best result for businesses in a capitalist society is often at odds with public emotional needs such as libraries, which is why the “sweet real estate deal” mentioned earlier, is not best for society’s needs, even if it would help balance the local council government’s budget. Smith also argues that “If the losses of private companies are to be socialized within already struggling communities the very least we can do is listen to people when they try to tell us where in the hierarchy of their needs things like public space, access to culture, and preservation of environment lie. “But I never use the damn things!” says Mr. Notmytaxes, under the line. Sir, I believe you.” Zadie Smith’s use of humor, the comical name of a library opponent whose main argument is his taxes shouldn’t pay for things he doesn’t use, underscores the frivolity of the anti-library argument. It shows that mere financial concerns are no match for the strong and justified support libraries have in British society. All of this is very emotional and makes the reader much more sympathetic to the cause of leaving libraries open.

Smith also makes judicious use of ethos (i.e., facts, morality, commonly-held common-sense beliefs) to support her argument in favor of the preservation of British public libraries. At the beginning of her essay, she notes libraries are seen as obsolete by “technocrats” who cite the fact that every book in the world can be accessed online, so physical libraries are obsolete, as well as expensive and unnecessary.
However, she counters the “technocrats’” assertion with the fact that libraries remain popular with the public, even though almost all students and other library patrons have computers with which they could access Internet versions of the same books found at the libraries. Smith supports her assertion with a statistic: “British libraries received almost 300 million visits last year.” That statistic, if true, certainly supports the idea that libraries are extremely popular with the taxpayers who use them. Unfortunately, Ms. Smith does not cite to a source for that statistic, but the statistic seems realistic, and can probably be found easily by any reader who wishes to research it on the Internet, or at a library.

Smith also notes the government’s reasons for closing the libraries, namely, their obsolescence and expensiveness to run, are more than overcome by their popularity with the taxpaying public. The author also cites to a “sweet real estate” deal as the reason one local government “council” would like to close a popular library, and also mentions that another library is scheduled to be closed, despite “friends” of that library volunteering to staff it for free.

In the second paragraph, Smith notes the fairly obvious point “All libraries have a different character and setting. Some are primarily for children or primarily for students, or the general public, primarily full of books or microfilms or digitized material or with a café in the basement or a market out front.” This does emphasize that different libraries serve different populations, which utilize them for different purposes, which implicitly makes them better than a general Internet search for books and research material, since the material is organized for the needs of the population that generally uses each particular library.

Smith emphasizes the non-obvious point that “Libraries are not failing ‘because they are libraries.’ Neglected libraries get neglected, and this cycle,in time, provides the excuse to close them. Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay.” Smith’s use of facts, e.g., ethos, helps support her point.

Finally, Smith uses logos in a very simple, persuasive form. She points out that government funds are intended to support taxpayer needs, since after all, they came from taxpayers’ taxes. Emotional needs are needs, so they should be supported, even “irrational” needs, such as libraries. She also points out the logic behind neglected libraries – that libraries that are neglected fall into disuse, which leads to an excuse to close the libraries.

For the reasons stated above, Smith uses ethos, pathos and logos to make a very solid argument in favor of libraries.

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New Video in the "American Idiom" Series!

1/8/2019

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It's about "crazy" and "stupid" idioms. Here it is!

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How is academia responding to the growing essay writing industry? (From Quora)

12/7/2018

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www.quora.com/How-is-academia-responding-to-the-growing-essay-writing-industry

There are websites that scan the web for plagiarism. See, for example, Online Plagiarism Checking | PlagScan. which I know about only because my website's analytics showed someone accessed my website from that site (probably because I have some sample essay answers in my blog. According to their site, they check the web, academic databases, a “pool” of information designed to prevent plagiarism, and so on.

Essay-writing services, often advertised as “research assistance” (I believe that was the name of one such company that advertised in magazines and/or comic books) get by on the grounds that it’s perfectly acceptable to cite the research of others in your own research paper, as long as you cite it properly. Of course, they’re “shocked, just shocked!” to find some people simply submit the research paper they bought as their own work, instead of using it as “research assistance.”

Would you trust people who’ll help you defraud your high school, college, etc., so you can get grades you didn’t earn NOT to sell the same paper to others taking the same course? Even if they don’t do it the same semester or the same year, an odd turn of phrase or factual or grammatical error can stick in a professor’s or high school teacher’s mind for years.

I heard some of my college classmates got in trouble when one of them copied another’s old paper from one course and submitted it in another, without wondering why the professors in both courses had the same last name. As it turned out, they were a married couple, and they discussed some unusual feature of the two papers, which led to the plagiarism being discovered. But I digress. I can’t imagine this NOT happening if two students order the same research paper. Also, schools could simply be proactive and order papers from these “paper mills” and put them in anti-plagiarism databases.

This may be a bit melodramatic, but someone who’s evil might use your plagiarized paper to blackmail you, etc. Imagine this phone conversation between a term paper mill owner and a person who submitted such a paper as his or her own work “Hello, Judge Smith? Congratulations on being appointed to the bench at such a young age! Hey, I’d like to use your name and picture as one of our satisfied customers… Oh, you wouldn’t like that? Well, we already printed up flyers at a cost of about $20,000 - oh, you’ll pay us to destroy them? Well, that’d be a shame, but we’ll do that as soon as we get the money - have a nice day, Your Honor…” People in professions where they can lose jobs and licenses for “moral turpitude” (e.g. judges, lawyers, doctors, teachers) can suffer real consequences from cheating YEARS after the fact…

Even after you’re dead, people will accuse you of plagiarism - I believe both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and President Nixon were accused of plagiarism or cheating in school in the late 1990s, LONG AFTER THEY HAD DIED.

Don’t cheat - everything is really easy to upload to a database. That’s how many college papers are “handed in” these days, so it’s not as though colleges wouldn’t take an extra few minutes, or even hours, a week to upload everyone’s papers to a database. It could easily be done at say, 3 am on Saturday or Sunday, when computer resource use is at a minimum. So it’s super easy to get caught these days. Just do your own homework; don’t be a putz.

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What type of student is more likely to do well on the SAT vs the ACT? (From Quora)

10/24/2018

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The ACT is better for you if you can pound out simpler math questions in less time (you get 60 minutes to do 60 problems); the SAT math is better if you can handle questions that are trickier (i.e., there’s a shortcut you need to find to do it quickly). If you take the SAT, you do also need to memorize the basic formulas the SAT provides, but you really should know most of them in any event. ACT math asks you to plug values into some scary-looking formulas, and the SAT asks you to manipulate some formulas. If you get past the weird decimals, variables, etc., the actual math is very easy in both types of “formula” problems.

As others have answered, the “new SAT” is very similar to the ACT. The SAT has added charts and graphs to interpret, in response to the ACT’s science section, which mostly should be called the “Data Interpretation” or “Can You Read Charts and Graphs?” section, since you need only know very basic science to do the problems. (You do need to know some basic science facts such as the charge of an electron, what photosynthesis is, etc., but way less than I’d expect anyone who’s about to graduate from high school to know.)

The reading sections on both tests are very similar - it’s a wash. You won’t see any real differences between the two. Both test vocabulary in context, details, main ideas, and inferences from things implied but not stated in the text. They’re both frustrating in that the hard questions can present very subtle shades of meaning where many students lose points for picking answers that are perfectly good answers, but not the “best” answers according to the test makers. The English/Writing tests are identical - the College Board basically copied the ACT’s test wholesale, then added a few charts and graphs, when they came up with the “new SAT.”

The essay on the SAT is probably harder for most students. While the ACT just asks you to analyze three perspectives on an issue, then present your own (or just explain which of the three you agree with), the SAT requires you to analyze the arguments in a persuasive essay (e.g., a newspaper editorial), explaining how the argument is presented and NOT whether you agree with it. So if you aren’t familiar with the terms “ethos,” “pathos,” and “logos,” don’t like it when you can’t express your personal opinions on an issue on which you have strong feelings, etc., or just didn’t do that well in English classes where you had to analyze the texts you read for technique, rather than simply explain what you just read, you’ll find the ACT essay easier to handle. It’s closer to the essays you had to write from grade school on; the SAT is more of a 10th or 11th-grade assignment.

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Answer to "What should I do to increase my reading score on the SAT, and what is the best way to deal with the passages?" (From Quora)

10/24/2018

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As the answer to the old “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” joke goes - “Practice, practice, practice!”

For the reading, you don’t need to know so much about “basic grammar concepts,” as another responder posted, although those will help immensely with the writing sections.

What you should focus on for READING is vocabulary and reading comprehension, as well as some SAT/ACT-specific test-taking tips. The fastest way to learn new words is to learn word roots, using a page such as this one: The web’s largest word root and prefix directory

It also pays to read your SAT review book’s vocabulary section (e.g., roughly pages 163 through 240 of the Barron’s SAT book - I don’t have a copy handy as I am out of town right now). If your book doesn’t have a vocabulary section, you can find vocabulary pages online or simply get a high school level vocabulary book, or get the Barron’s SAT book (all of these should be available at your public library if you are in the US).

There are 8 downloadable official practice SATs, as well as links to Khan Academy and other resources here: SAT Practice Tests What you should use these for is to experiment with reading the passage, then the questions, or reading the questions, then the passage. Generally, you should read the passage first, then do the questions, but you may find the opposite approach is easier if you (1) are having real trouble understanding the passage, or (2) already understand the point the passage is trying to make and the passage is organized to be skimmed easily (most likely a science passage or news article).

This approach probably won’t work so well with prose fiction, which can jump all over the place in reference to time, are more likely to have weird details buried in the text, and so on.

Generally speaking, you should use the same tactics you use to answer ANY SAT (or ACT) question - math, writing, or reading - which is to try to guess your own answer before you look at the answer choices. If you see an answer choice that matches your choice, congratulations! You’ve probably got the right answer. But double-check your answers at the end to make sure you haven’t been tricked.

Another tactic you should use is marking the questions PRECEDING “command of evidence” questions. What I mean is some questions will read something like “15. Which of the following provides the best evidence for your answer to the previous question?” So if you make some mark next to question 14, the previous question, and then mark where you find your answer to that question with your pencil, you should have the answer to question 15 clearly marked. That doesn’t always work, since the there can be more than one group of lines that both support the same correct answer, but it’s a lot better than panicking while thinking “Where the heck are those lines with the answer? I was JUST LOOKING AT THEM!”

A related tactic is “reverse engineering” answers using the command of evidence questions. Let’s say you didn’t know what the answer to question 14. You could read all the answers to question 15, go to those lines, and see what lines lead you to a good answer to question 14. That’s a way to use the test questions to answer each other. It’s not as good as figuring out the answers yourself, but it’s a good emergency tactic if you get stuck.

To handle vocabulary questions, GO AND READ THE LINES. Don’t rely on the answer choices or questions with ellipses (you know, those dot thingies as in “All the young dudes … the news”) - they’ve left out the parts that will help you answer the question, and of course, they’ll say it’s to save on printing. If you believe that, I can get you a really good price on the Golden Gate Bridge. ;-) One thing you SHOULD know is that the common meaning of the word is often NOT the right answer, but you should be able to determine that by reading the lines in the passage. This is especially true if the passage was (or seems like) it was written more than 50 years ago, written by someone whose first language is not English, or is a highly technical piece of writing. For example, a “sheet” can be used to cover a bed and to sleep under, but it can also be a piece of paper, or a rope used to adjust a sail on a boat. It should be obvious which one is meant when we read “The sailor pulled on the sheet to raise the sail,” but that’s certainly not the most obvious choice if we’re just guessing without looking. So DON’T GUESS AT VOCABULARY QUESTIONS WITHOUT LOOKING. They’re usually fairly easy, so you might even want to do them first. Remember, a hard question isn’t worth any more than an easy one, so you might as well get the easy questions right first.

Speaking of handling easy questions first, it’s a pretty good idea to flip through the whole section and start with passages you like and/or understand well. If you know you don’t understand biology, or Jane Austen novels make your skin crawl, work on the passages that you like more first. You’re more likely to get the right answer to questions about passages you understand and enjoy than you are to get the right answer to questions about passages you don’t understand or don’t like. That way, if you run out of time, you can simply guess at the questions you were less likely to get right. In other words, the sections you don’t like can be your “sacrificial” sections (this is especially useful on the ACT, where you generally aren’t given enough time to read all the passages properly).

Furthermore, don’t fall for the “smart kid answer.” What I mean is, don’t pick an answer just because it has a word you don’t understand in it. The SAT and ACT people know many teenage test takers will pick an answer with a fancy word because “the smart kids know this word, so it must be right!” So if you see an answer that uses simpler language and seems right, it probably IS right. However, if none of the other answers are right, then PLEASE DO pick the “smart kid answer.” The process of elimination really does work.

When answering detail questions, such as “Which of the following was the reason why…” or “All of the following are true, EXCEPT…” make sure you scan all the answer choices, then look for words from those choices in the passage. Then make sure they haven’t used those words to try to trick you. For example, if the passage said “Joe really liked French fries,” a good trick would be to have “An aversion to French fries” as an answer to “Which of the following was a characteristic Joe had?” A careless, rushed, or panicking test taker might see “French fries” in the text and think “Ooh! That must be the right answer,” ignoring that an “aversion” to something is a dislike of, or tendency to avoid. that thing.

When answering paired passages, make sure you read Passage 1, then answer all the questions about it. The Passage 1 questions almost always come first (sometimes there’s a question about both passages before the Passage 1 questions - if so, skip it) Only then should you read Passage 2 and answer the questions about it. Why? It’s simple - facts from Passage 2 make great wrong answers to questions about Passage 1. A student could think “Hey, I recall reading something about turtles, so this turtle answer must be right!” If turtles were discussed in Passage 2, not Passage 1, he or she is wrong. Is it fair to do things like that? Probably not, but we don’t get to choose.

That’s all I have for right now. Hope this helps!

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Tutoring blog! :-D

New Video: How to Study for the SAT and ACT Reading and Writing Sections: Vocabulary LIKE A BOSS!

Here it is - please watch it, then comment, like, and subscribe to my channel!

New SAT and ACT Prep Video on the Properties of Zero!

New Video on American Idiom - "Crazy Stupid Words" Part II!

Here's the link - let me know what you think!

I'm a Top Pro on Thumbtack! That puts me in the top 4%.

SAT and ACT Math Video on Transversals - More Than Meets the Eye!

New Video - How to Study for the SAT and ACT : Second Essay Done in Real Time

New Video in the "American Idiom" Series!

It's about "crazy" and "stupid" idioms. Here it is!

How is academia responding to the growing essay writing industry? (From Quora)

What type of student is more likely to do well on the SAT vs the ACT? (From Quora)

Answer to "What should I do to increase my reading score on the SAT, and what is the best way to deal with the passages?" (From Quora)

Author: John Linneball Who did you think? ;-)

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