Write the argument with the clock running

CHAPTER 34

Write the argument with the clock running

Timed argument essays often become weak because the plan contains more examples than the writer can develop. Fix the position before drafting and choose only the evidence you can explain. A short plan leaves more time for commentary.

A short plan before drafting

The timed drill below uses a new argument prompt, followed by a full model response and a row-by-row scoring explanation. Read the prompt the way Chapter 30 taught: find the operative word, define the scope, and commit to a defensible position, before listing any examples. Spend no more than five to seven minutes narrowing the claim and selecting two or three developable examples before you begin writing.

PROMPT FOR THE TIMED ESSAY

Prompt: Communities and institutions often face pressure to preserve long-standing traditions even as circumstances around them change. Write an essay that argues your position on the value of maintaining tradition in the face of changing circumstances.

MODEL RESPONSE

This response was drafted under timed conditions. Read it once fully before turning to the scoring explanation that follows.

Tradition is valuable when it preserves a specific function a community still needs, but it becomes a liability when it is maintained for its own sake after the function it once served has disappeared. A community should keep a tradition only as long as it can identify what the tradition still does, not simply because the tradition is old.

Imagine a small town with a decades-old harvest festival, originally organized to help farming families coordinate sales and labor. Even after mechanized transportation and refrigeration made the original economic function unnecessary, many towns have kept similar festivals alive because they continue to perform a different, still-needed function: gathering a community that might otherwise have few shared occasions to meet in person. In this case, the tradition survived because its underlying purpose, community cohesion, persisted even after its original purpose, produce logistics, disappeared. The tradition changed what it was for without the town needing to abandon it.

Now imagine an academic department that still requires every doctoral candidate to pass a long examination in a methodology that once dominated the field but no longer reflects most students' research, a requirement instituted decades ago. If the field has since diversified into several distinct approaches, and the examination no longer reflects what most candidates will actually need for their research, maintaining the requirement serves no identifiable function beyond institutional inertia. Here, unlike the harvest festival, no new purpose has emerged to replace the original one; the tradition persists only because changing it requires effort no one has been willing to expend.

The distinction between these two cases suggests a specific test: a tradition is worth maintaining when its underlying purpose, whether the original one or a new one that has since attached itself to the same practice, still serves a genuine present need. A tradition that fails this test, continuing only because no one has formally ended it, is not preserving value; it is merely resisting the work of updating an institution to its actual circumstances. Communities that apply this test deliberately, rather than defaulting to either automatic preservation or automatic abandonment, are best positioned to keep what still serves them and release what does not.

Model response, approximately 40-minute timed argument essay

AUTHOR-APPLIED RUBRIC ESTIMATE: 6/6

This is an instructional model scored by the author using the current College Board rubric; it is not an official College Board sample or score.

Thesis: 1/1. The response takes a qualified position: tradition is valuable when it still serves an identifiable present function.

Evidence and commentary: 4/4. Two developed hypothetical examples are tested against the same standard. The essay explains why the harvest festival still serves a function and why the outdated doctoral requirement does not.

Sophistication: 1/1. The argument builds a sustained distinction between a tradition whose function has changed and a tradition whose function has disappeared, then uses that distinction to produce a clear test for the claim.

REVISION DEMONSTRATION

Even a response that scores well can be improved. Below is a version of the third paragraph's final sentence with a realistic weakness, followed by one targeted revision.

Before

So this shows that some traditions are bad and should probably be changed at some point.

After

Here, unlike the harvest festival, no new purpose has emerged to replace the original one; the tradition persists only because changing it requires effort no one has been willing to expend.

The weaker version reduces the example to a vague judgment that “some traditions are bad.” The revision names the actual mechanism: the original function disappeared and no new function replaced it. That specific contrast is what lets the example support the thesis.