Sample Essay - Excellent

Essential to being an American is perseverance. This does not mean Americans are simply persistent, doing the same things over and over in a vain effort to succeed, but rather, we share a commitment to following through on our goals and pursuing them over time, in different ways if necessary, until they are met.

Being an American means I relentlessly pursue happiness. I don’t give up; I keep trying until I get it right. As long as I can remember I have wanted to be an English teacher. All through middle school my teachers proclaimed me a “natural” writer and a gifted author. When I began my gifted English grade class as a freshman, though, I faltered. The works we were reading—Greek mythology, long, dense novels; Shakespearean plays with language I had trouble understanding—gave me real pause. I stumbled and my grades suffered. I got a C on my report card, something that had never happened in my life until that point.

I knew I had to persevere if I was going to have a future as an English teacher. I determined to try new approaches to reading and writing until I found ways to understand what I was reading and write intelligently about it. By the end of that year, my efforts had paid off. By devoting more time to reading, writing questions in the margins, keeping a dictionary nearby, and working on detailed outlines before I set out to write anything, my work as well as my grades improved. I never got below a “B” in English for the next three years.

Perseverance is so fundamental to being an American that it is embodied in the Constitution itself—itself a second and try, if you will. Americans did not give up on their new country when the Articles of Confederation proved inadequate, and more importantly, they knew they would have to adjust their form of government. The Preamble declares that the new form of republican government, which the delegates persevered over a long hot Pennsylvania summer to write, was created “in order to form a more perfect union.” Further, the Constitution contains within itself the means for amending it, which illustrates that it was written to endure if Americans citizens persevere in working for change.

One such citizen was Alice Paul. Paul devoted her life to a cause she believed in and used various approaches when it came to persuading others of her message. When her initial efforts with NAWSA appeared to her to be ineffective, she switched to more radical strategies but never took her eyes off her ultimate goal: a constitutional amendment securing votes for women. It is in large part thanks to her perseverance that the Nineteenth Amendment was passed.