Use examples you can write about in detail (SAT Essay)

This may sound obvious, but please bear with me: unless you are desperate, do not attempt to use SAT essay examples that concern people, events, books, etc. that you are not truly familiar with. If you see the prompt and think up the perfect example...which you maybe sort of kind of know something about, please think twice before using it.

Do not be tempted to use a more "sophisticated" example (like The Oedipus Cycle) that you don't know cold at the expense of a "casual" one (like your championship baseball team from last season). If you can write a stronger essay about the latter, use it instead.

If you have a stellar first example but really don't know much about your second example, nix it and just have one very detailed example; you'll end up with a stronger essay.

But, you may be saying, it's fine if I don't know a lot about an example; I'll just make up the details. After all, the College Board won't penalize me for saying that George Washington led an intergalactic force to stop a Martian invasion. While technically that's true, I've also read enough essays gone wrong to know that most people aren't nearly as gifted at making things up as they'd like to believe, and when they try to write about unfamiliar topics, their essays tend to have some things in common:

They're vague.

They're repetitive.

They lack detail.

They make unsupported claims

They're short.

This last one is really the important part; there are studies that show a correlation between essay length and score. The College Board explains this phenomenon by claiming longer essays tend to score higher because they include more detail and thus generally contain more convincing arguments. Now, whether or not you buy the College Board's reasoning, the bottom line is that you're better off producing a longer essay.

So, to put it as a syllogism that befits a reasoning test:

Detailed Knowledge of Examples = You Write More

You Write More = Higher Score

Thus: Detailed Knowledge of Examples = Higher Score

Which means, practically speaking, try to use books that you've actually read rather than just looked up on SparkNotes. The difference will show.

It also means that if you read Hamlet in 9th grade English class and are planning to use it, make sure you remember what happens, who the characters are, what their relationships are, when things happen, etc. Sit down and spend twenty minutes going over it to make sure you have everything straight.

So no, you won't be penalized if you get some of the details a little wrong, but you've got to be specific and convincing regardless. And that's a whole lot harder to do when you don't really know what you're talking about.