SAT Essay Help: Sample Essay 3

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• SAT Essay Help: Sample Essay 1
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• SAT Essay Help: Sample Essay 4
• SAT Essay Help: Sample Essay 5
• SAT Essay Help: Sample Essay 6

Prompt:

When we witness an injustice or the violation of a principle, anger can give us the courage to act, not react. Productive anger can be a guide to appropriate, powerful, and healing action. All the political and social movements of our time are rooted in anger, including the struggle against apartheid, the fight for civil rights, and many environmental and animal protection initiatives. The founders of these movements experienced healthy anger against conditions they considered to be unjust and unacceptable.

—Adapted from The Ultimate Guide to Transforming Anger,

by JANE MIDDELTON-MOZ, LISA TENER, AND PEACO TODD

(Health Communications, 2004)

Assignment:

Can anger be used for positive results? Organize and compose an essay that establishes your viewpoint on this issue. Substantiate it with examples and evidence derived from what you have read, studied, experienced, or observed.

Essay:

Some people think that anger is just a negative emotion and it should always be held under control. But sometimes anger can be used for positive results. In these cases, it shows that it was well to not resist feeling anger but to use it for positive purposes.

This lesson is clear when you look at the life of inventor Thomas Edison, who is known as more responsible than anyone else for creating the modern world. In his research laboratory in New Jersey, he invented many things. But as a child, his life was anything but successful. His mother didn't like his teacher. She got so angry she took him out of school and home schooled him instead.

Another example of the positive results from anger was seen in my school this year. In student government there were a lot of students who had good ideas about a service project for our school. It was really hard to decide what to do, and people got very angry when they had to defend their ideas. But finally when we came to a decision, it was a blend of a couple of different ideas, which shows that the anger produced a positive result.

As you can see from these two examples, anger can produce positive results.