题目写作北美

2016年10月新sat写作详解北美VIP

专业权威，尽在北美VIP....

亚

洲的三场写作题目，除了五月那场因为是历史类的文章，加上生僻的用词让大家觉得比较头疼以外，剩下的两篇题目都不是特别困难。六月的题目写作手法明显，文章逻辑也很清晰。十月的这次，一反大家认为的十月的题目一般比较难的偏见，也是很容易理解的。以下是考场作文原文：

Read, Kids, Read

As an uncle I’m inconsistent about too many things.

Birthdays, for example. My nephew Mark had one on Sunday, and I didn’t remember — and send a text — until 10 p.m., by which point he was asleep.

School productions, too. I saw my niece Bella in “Seussical: The Musical” but missed “The Wiz.” She played Toto, a feat of trans-species transmogrification that not even Meryl, with all of her accents, has pulled off.

But about books, I’m steady. Relentless. I’m incessantly asking my nephews and nieces what they’re reading and why they’re not reading more. I’m reliably hurling novels at them, and also at friends’ kids. I may well be responsible for 10 percent of all sales of “The Fault in Our Stars,” a teenage love story to be released as a movie next month. Never have I spent money with fewer regrets, because I believe in reading — not just in its power to transport but in its power to transform.

So I was crestfallen on Monday, when a new report by Common Sense Media came out. It showed that 30 years ago, only 8 percent of 13-year-olds and 9 percent of 17-year-olds said that they “hardly ever” or never read for pleasure. Today, 22 percent of 13-year-olds and 27 percent of 17-year-olds say that. Fewer than 20 percent of 17-year-olds now read for pleasure “almost every day.” Back in 1984, 31 percent did. What a marked and depressing change.

I know, I know: This sounds like a fogy’s crotchety lament. Or, worse, like self-interest. Professional writers arguing for vigorous reading are dinosaurs begging for a last breath. We’re panhandlers with a better vocabulary.

But I’m coming at this differently, as someone persuaded that reading does things — to the brain, heart and spirit — that movies, television, video games and the rest of it cannot.

There’s research on this, and it’s cited in a recent article in The Guardian by Dan Hurley, who wrote that after “three years interviewing psychologists and neuroscientists around the world,” he’d concluded “reading and intelligence have a relationship so close as to be symbiotic.”

In terms of smarts and success, is reading causative or merely correlated? Which comes first, “The Hardy Boys” or the hardy mind? That’s difficult to unravel, but several studies have suggested that people who read fiction, reveling in its analysis of character and motivation, are more adept at reading people, too: at sizing up the social whirl around them. They’re more empathetic. God knows we need that.

Late last year, neuroscientists at Emory University reported enhanced neural activity in people who’d been given a regular course of daily reading, which seemed to jog the brain: to raise its game, if you will.

Some experts have doubts about that experiment’s methodology, but I’m struck by how its findings track something that my friends and I often discuss. If we spend our last hours or minutes of the night reading rather than watching television, we wake the next morning with thoughts less jumbled, moods less jangled. Reading has bequeathed what meditation promises. It has smoothed and focused us.

Maybe that’s about the quiet of reading, the pace of it. At Success Academy Charter Schools in New York City, whose students significantly outperform most peers statewide, the youngest kids all learn and play chess, in part because it hones “the ability to focus and concentrate,” said Sean O’Hanlon, who supervises the program. Doesn’t reading do the same?

Daniel Willingham, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, framed it as a potentially crucial corrective to the rapid metabolism and sensory overload of digital technology. He told me that it can demonstrate to kids that there’s payoff in “doing something taxing, in delayed gratification.” A new book of his, “Raising Kids Who Read,” will be published later this year.

Before talking with him, I arranged a conference call with David Levithan and Amanda Maciel. Both have written fiction in the young adult genre, whose current robustness is cause to rejoice, and they rightly noted that the intensity of the connection that a person feels to a favorite novel, with which he or she spends eight or 10 or 20 hours, is unlike any response to a movie.

That observation brought to mind a moment in “The Fault in Our Stars” when one of the protagonists says that sometimes, “You read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.”

Books are personal, passionate. They stir emotions and spark thoughts in a manner all their own, and I’m convinced that the shattered world has less hope for repair if reading becomes an ever smaller part of it.

题目解析

从选题上来说，此次亚洲的题目出自纽约时报14年的文章，从文本里引用的最近在青少年之间较为热门的爱情小说（在2014年已经拍成电影）The Fault in Our Stars（幸运里的错）这一点也可以看出，考试的选题较为与时俱进。

从文章的主题而言，读书的话题跟官网给出的 Why Literature Matters话题相似。而六月份的题形式文风跟OG上的Bag Ban Bad for Freedom and Environment 也出奇地一致这一点说明，在出题上是有规律可循的。

本篇文章篇幅为800字左右，17个主体段落，跟比OG上说的650-750个左右的标准一致，难度不大，可读性很强。

从写作手法的而言，理性感性还是文章结构的论据都十分明显。开头段用自己的故事（anecdote）通过对比（contrast）的方式引出了文章的话题“I believe in reading — not just in its power to transport but in its power to transform”。紧跟着通过引用（reference）的方式，引用

Common Sense Media的数据（statistic）比较（contrast）了31年前人们爱读书的现象和人们已经不再为了兴趣而阅读的现状。然后开始大段议论读书的好处，使用了reference, rhetorical question 以及personal anecdote等写作手法.

本次作文的难点：作文的难点一般有两个，一是写不完；二是写作手法的选择，要么找不到写作手法，把细碎的手法凑到一段强行凑字数，要么手法太多，左右不知道怎么选择。本次考试的难点则是手法太明显，难以取舍。而但是根据考试的Reading这部分的评分标准里面提到的：需要“demonstrate the most important detail” and explain “how they interrelate”这一点，这就要求我们对于写作手法的选择，是基于对文章全局性的理解，想清楚以后再写的；而非断章取义看到什么就写什么的结果。

北美VIP祝大家节日快乐！考取自己理想的分数！

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