Note that student work varies significantly from one assignment to the next, even within the same mark range. The intent behind providing samples such as this one is to guide students in recognizing key criteria of assignments and in assessing their own work.
SAMPLE ARGUMENT – GOOD
ESSAY QUESTION: Using examples from the novel, Brave New World , explain the costs of scientific advancement.
N.B.: Note that the argument below is the first one of the essay.
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Strengths:
• The overall structure of the paragraph is clear (knowledge).
•
Quotations are pertinent to the passivity argument (knowledge).
•
The topic sentence is argumentative (thinking).
• The paragraph is well-written in terms of sentence structure and diction (communication) .
Tips for Improvement:
•
The stability notion put forward immediately after the first quotation would be better placed in the expansion of the paragraph (knowledge).
•
Towards the end of the argument, hypnopaedia is discussed in detail, but no quotation support has been offered. It would be worthwhile to bring in another quotation before explaining the effects of hypnopaedia. Adding support would lengthen your argument, which would make it worthwhile to consider breaking the argument up into two paragraphs
(knowledge).
• Stronger links need to be made between the quotation support and the topic sentence, as the explanations are too general.
Integrate segments of a quotation into explanations to demonstrate closer analysis of the text (thinking).
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Under the totalitarian government, the people of the World State are given no choices of their own, shaping them into passive citizens. Before they are born, their lives have already been planned out for them and they are conditioned from the very start, when their minds are still moldable. Those who are destined to become Alphas or Betas are bottled separately and well nourished. The lower castes receive no such treatment. In order to create unity and stability in the society, they are replicated using Bokanovsky's Process. Usually, one egg will become one human adult, as outlined during the tour of the Hatchery, when the Director explains, "But a bokanovskified egg will bud, will proliferate, will divide. From eight to ninety-six buds, and every bud will grow into a perfectly formed embryo, and every embryo into a full-sized adult.
Making ninety-six human beings grow where only one grew before" (3-4). Stability is achieved

through identical twins manipulating identical machines. The bokanovskified eggs do not choose to be lower caste, and nor do they choose to see their face repeated on the same body, an army of twins. And even if someone did find it peculiar to be staring at their own face when there is no reflective surface around, the conditioning they undergo is enough to erase that thought. In the past, citizens of lower castes have been conditioned to like transportation and nature, which the
Director discusses in the following explanation to the students: primroses and landscapes […] have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes; to abolish the love of nature, but not the tendency to consume transport. For of course it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it. (19)
The Director speaks about the people as though they are mere puppets, not humans of rationale and reasoning, ready to obey his every whim with the flick of a wrist. Conditioning in all its forms, including hypnopaedia – a form of sleep-teaching that provides moral instruction, repeated thousands of times over the course of one childhood – is employed so well by the government that the population is unable to separate their own wants from the wants they are taught to have. Instead of being proactive, the citizens are passive, only making choices concerning their basic physical needs, such as when and what to eat. Humanity’s constant thirst for knowledge is no longer a need that has to be quenched. The scientific developments of predestination and conditioning techniques create passive citizens, unable and unwilling to make their own decisions.

Work Cited
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: HarperCollins Publishers , 1994. Print.