This comic essay has some serious advice to offer about how to write a passing essay for a standardized test.
How to Write a Passing Essay
by Lubby Juggins
Why do so many Americans keep household pets? How have your eating habits changed since you left middle school? Which do you prefer, a car or a pickup? What is your favorite piece of furniture in the whole world?
No, boys and girls, these are not brain-teasers from Mensa or tidbits from the latest Cosmo quiz. Rather, these little mind-stretchers are the sorts of banal topics that thousands of students will be taunted with next week on a statewide standardized test. Huddled like refugees in the Fine Arts Building, with blobs of ink on their fingertips and beads of blood on their foreheads, panicky students will scribble moronic five-paragraph themes on subjects that would bore even a math professor to tears.
Fortunately, I can quietly boast that I’ve passed the test--the proof is there on my transcript. But really, there’s no honor or glory in it. Composing a passing essay for a standardized test is a lot like passing a drug test: no wit or wisdom required, just play by the rules. In fact, it’s more like passing a peach pit: all pain, no fruit.
Still, by relating the story of how I successfully discharged my duty, just maybe I can spare you a little pain.
It all began in the hallway outside the testing room, where a few hundred of us were lined up like wet firecrackers on the fifth of July.
I was minding my own business, thank you, when all at once this bona fide jerk invaded my air space. You know the kind: a big smiley button for a face, a loud phony laugh in all the wrong places, lots of barnyard noises and random teeth.
"Your first time?" he said, laughing hideously--like this was a mixer at the prison and his dance card wasn’t full.
I grunted a “yeah” and ducked down to tie the laces on my loafers. Please, please, please go away. But the jerk knelt down beside me.
“Third time lucky for me,” he said, and then laughed so hard he blew a corn kernel through his cuspids. Oh, jeez.
“I got it all figured out,” he said. “Here’s what you gotta do.” And then, between volleys of laughter, Mr. Wizard proceeded to explain how to pass the test: keep it short, don't say "I," use lots of semicolons but no big words, and at the end of the paper write “Thank you and have a nice day.”
I felt a terrible urge to skewer him with my number two pencil. But at that point, fortunately, the line started to move, and a few minutes later I was slumped over a desk staring at the exam booklet.
Chill out, I told myself. Just remember the advice you picked up in the writing center. Think about the topics, rehearse your introduction, use specific details, don’t repeat yourself. For godsakes, I thought, a child of six could pass this thing. So, please get me a six year old!
I could smell the Egg McMuffin leaking out of my pores as I copied my student number and then settled in to read the first topic. "Environmental problems are global in scope and respect no nation’s boundaries," it said. "Therefore, people are faced with the choice of unity and cooperation on the one hand or disunity and a common tragedy on the other. Discuss."
Oh, no.
Instantly I felt a red rubber ball growing where my nose had been, and a great conical hat sprang up on my head. Now I was wearing parachute pants and big floppy shoes, and my Bic Cristal pen had morphed into a bicycle horn.
I tried to write. Honk, honk!. The room shushed me. I had to write. Honk, honk! Honk, honk!
"Shhhhhhh!" the circus crowd responded.
Okay, calm down, I told myself. So you’ve hit on the only unmoronic topic that's ever appeared on a standardized test. Just remember what Uncle Carl said right before he was arrested: “On every test, there’s always one topic you’ll know enough about to write a decent, passing essay.”
And so, wiping the greasepaint off my cheeks, I turned to topic number two: “If you learned that you had only six months left to live, how would you change your life?”
Six months to live . . . change my life. All at once, the room, the Fine Arts Building, the entire campus vanished. Now the sundown sky poured down like honey, the air hummed with the songs of wagtails and magpies, and a kind woman was moistening my brow with emu oils and cloaking me with her long black hair.
Watching the waves retreat, entranced by the music of the spheres, I felt for one heart-wrenching moment so utterly, so terribly, so wonderfully alive. All the dreck and disaster of my boring little existence had been leading up to this single incredible moment.
“Darling,” I whispered to the woman by my side, gently stroking her hair, “please take a message.”
And so, at my request, she began to write: “Having been given just six months to live, I have decided not to complete this test. Instead, I shall spend these last precious days embracing my loved ones in the South Pacific . . ..”
And that, you see, is how I passed the essay test. Oh, you can forget Mr. Wizard, who’s now on his fifth or sixth attempt. Just keep in mind what my Uncle Carl told me. And details! Remember to give them details--rich, ripe, and specific.
