Write the argument with the clock running

Why timed argument essays go wrong

Timed argument essays often become weak because the plan contains more examples than the writer can develop. The cure is to fix your position before drafting and to choose only the evidence you can explain. A short plan leaves more time for commentary, and commentary is where the rubric points are earned.

A short plan before drafting

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. Then spend no more than five to seven minutes narrowing the claim and choosing two or three developable examples. On a roughly 40-minute essay, that leaves most of your time for writing and for adding reasoning where a paragraph is thin.

The practice prompt for this chapter:

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.

Notice the operative word. The prompt asks about value, and the value is stated relative to changing circumstances. A thesis that says only "tradition is important" has ignored the second half. A thesis that says "tradition is valuable when it still serves a present need" answers both.

Reading the model response

The model response below was drafted under timed conditions. Read it once fully; then notice how each paragraph does one job.

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.

What the model does, paragraph by paragraph

• Paragraph 1 (thesis). A qualified position with a built-in test: keep a tradition only as long as you can identify what it still does. The thesis sets a standard, so the examples can be judged against it.
• Paragraph 2 (harvest festival). A labeled hypothetical in which the original function disappears but a new one takes over. It supports the "keep it" half of the thesis, and it explains how: community cohesion persisted after produce logistics disappeared.
• Paragraph 3 (doctoral examination). A second hypothetical that earns its place because it contrasts with the first: no new purpose emerged, so the tradition survives only by inertia. This is the chapter 32 principle in action: the second example adds new reasoning.
• Paragraph 4 (test and implication). The two cases yield a general test and an implication about how communities should behave, rather than restating the thesis.

Author-applied rubric estimate: 6/6

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

Two features are worth borrowing. First, both examples are hypotheticals, and both are clearly framed as such with "Imagine" (Chapter 31). Second, the commentary does not stop at "the tradition is good" or "the tradition is bad"; it names the mechanism in each case.

Revision demonstration

Even a response that scores well can be improved. Here is the final sentence of the third paragraph 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. When you revise under time pressure, look for sentences like the "before" version and replace the judgment with the mechanism.

A timing template for your own 40 minutes

1. Minutes 0-2: circle the operative word; restate the scope.
2. Minutes 2-7: draft the thesis, test it against the wording, choose two or three examples you can develop.
3. Minutes 7-32: write. Give each body paragraph one purpose, a warrant, and an earned ending.
4. Minutes 32-40: strengthen the thinnest paragraph, check that the thesis condition appears consistently, and finish the last sentence.