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 – EXCELLENT
ESSAY QUESTION: Using examples from the novel, Brave New World, explain the costs of
scientific advancement.
N. B.: This is the first argument of the essay.
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Strengths:
• The second paragraph of the argument begins in a logical place (knowledge), and the
transition is sound (communication).
• Strong links are made between the quotation support and the topic sentences (thinking).
• Quotations are integrated well (communication).
Tips for Improvement:
• The expansion of the paragraph and explanation of the first quotation could be developed
more in terms of how the production of humans has become a massive experiment. The
perception of people being experiments is particularly dehumanizing, so adding this notion to
the costs of scientific advancement would increase the overall significance of the argument
(knowledge).
• The quotations, while basically supportive, are all pulled from the same part of the novel.
Pulling an example of passivity from later in the novel may yield a stronger sense of working
with the novel as a whole (knowledge).
• Give more context for the first quotation. When does the Director describe Bokanovsky's
Process? (communication)
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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. Stability is achieved largely through the
production of identical twins to populate the lower castes. Before they are born, their lives have
already been planned out for them and they are conditioned throughout the embryonic and early
childhood phases, when their minds are highly impressionable. While those who are destined to
become Alphas or Betas are bottled separately and well nourished, the embryos destined as
lower caste 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;
however, as the Director states, "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). The Bokanovsky Process is clearly firmly entrenched as an institution of the World
State. The uniform appearance of the resulting twins serves as a metaphor of the sameness that
manifests itself in this society in various ways. The Director uses phrasing such as "will bud, will
proliferate, will divide", which serves to emphasize how predictable and routine the production
of citizens has become. The creation of masses of people for performing menial tasks is more
important to the World State than letting an embryo develop on its own, which could yield less
predictable results, and it also exemplifies the control that the citizens are under from the outset.
Besides controlling physical development, the World State also exercises psychological
control over its citizens in a way that discourages any kind of individual initiative. This control
begins when the children are very young and may be still individually curious, but any kind of
original inquisitiveness is soon conditioned out of them. The result is that the children are left
with the capacity for limited independent thought. An extreme example of early conditioning is
portrayed when the narrator describes the torture of children who handle flowers, for which the
Director offers the following as part of his justification:
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, ready to obey his every
whim with the flick of a wrist, not beings capable of reason. The Director's assertive tone, shown
in phrasing such as "it was decided", "to abolish", and "it was essential", serves to emphasize
how the citizens are acted upon and have no input on decisions that significantly affect their
lives. They exist essentially for the purpose of responding to various stimuli, irrespective of their
personal desires. Another form of conditioning that encourages passivity among the citizenry is
hypnopaedia: a form of sleep-teaching that provides moral instruction, repeated thousands of
times over the course of one childhood. While they are sleeping, or doing nothing, the people of
the World State are molded in such a way as to be rendered incapable of taking any kind of
individual initiative. The narrator compares the effect of hypnopaedic teaching to that of "liquid
sealing-wax" (25), metaphorically suggesting that the citizens are impervious to ideas not
presented to them hypnopaedically and that sleep-teaching is highly retainable. Ultimately, the
conditioning is so powerful that, according to the Director, "the child's mind is these suggestions,
and the sum of the suggestions is the child's mind. And not the child's mind only. The adult's
mind too – all his life long. The mind that judges and desires and decides – made up of these
suggestions. But all these suggestions are our suggestions!" (25) The Director's enthusiasm in
emphasizing his point makes it clear that mind control is a significant goal of those who control
the World State. A mind that is made up of the State's "suggestions" is not capable of
independent thought, leaving all the citizens unable to separate their own wants from the wants
they are taught to have. Consequently, the citizens are passive, only responding to stimuli
imposed by the World State, and incapable of acting in an original manner. Humanity’s constant
thirst for knowledge is no longer a need that has to be quenched. Thus, 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: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1994. Print.