So, for fun and profit, I'm going to post some of my practice work studying for the GRE on my blog. The way I'm planning to do it is: I'll read a promp from the issue or argument pool here and Chowon will time me. I'm going to write it out in Notepad, because the GRE environment won't have spellcheck, and then when I'm done I'll paste the prompt and my essay here. Chowon will then be my reviewer and criticize my essay.

Before I paste this in, I want to be the first to say that I feel like I totally botched it. We didn't do a 5 minute warning at the end of my time slot either, so I stopped without a conclusion.... anyways, here's the essay:

[PROMPT]
To understand the most important characteristics of a society, one must study its major cities.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the statement and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider ways in which the statement might or might not hold true and explain how these considerations shape your position.
[/PROMPT]

[ESSAY]
The statement at first appears to be a fine rule of thumb for analyzing a society, but it depends on a vague and unwritten assumption about which characteristics are most important to a society. If we allow If the most important characteristics of a society are social, we might find that major cities tend to contain representation for almost every social subgroup in a society, but analysis of the city alone might not yield accurate information about the proportions which those subgroups comprise in the society at large. If we hope to learn about the driving economic powers in a society, we might find that the main cities are the largest single economic movers in a society, but when compared to the society as a whole we may rather see that the cities represent a small proportion of the total economy. I would like to think that the most important characteristics of any society are those traditional behaviors and idiosyncrasies which connect the society to its past and make it totally unique. I find that cities do not best represent those characteristics, and therefore I do not agree with the statement.

Since the advent of the internet, we've seen countries become increasingly integrated into a global culture. America now finds itself with Korean pop stars on the top of its music charts, for example. Cities, being the industrial centers of a nation, are most exposed to other cultures by means of trade and exposure to international travellers. As a result, what we find in a city is not always the truest expression of the characteristics making a society unique, but rather we find a mix of adapted features with characteristics otherwise unknown to the society. The statement, then, seems to devalue cultural distinctives, in favor of a society's compromises.

Different countries have historically expressed internal and international trade in broadly different ways. We can contrast the feudal economy of ancient Japan against the tribal economy of ancient Israel; the procurated economy of imperial Rome against the socialized economy of modern China. These economic differences were and are representative of deeper cultural understandings about human equality, personal ownership, and objective sources of authority. A cursory evaluation of Japan yields that the feudal lord owned his subjects by the sword, and was considered superior to them; in Israel, people were defined in part by their tribal membership, and attempted to keep themselves and their property within the tribe and thereby among equals. In Rome, local societies determined their own means of distributing ownership of property and wealth, but were required to pay taxes to Rome; in China, we today see ownership of production generally focused in the hands of the government and upper class.
[/ESSAY]

I ran out of time at the end. I was trying to drive towards eventually trying to make a point that the unique characteristics of the above societies were most punctuated outside the city rather than inside it. Looking back, I feel like I definitely should have taken a different angle. BSing like this is not a strength of mine.

Anyway, there it is! I'll post the next one here as well, and hopefully we'll see improvement over the next few weeks/months.