(These tips apply mainly to the independent writing task.)
1. Plan your essay before you write. This is an absolute must. If you just start writing, then you will end up losing track of your main points and getting off topic. Even students with good English skills do this when they don’t plan ahead. Take five minutes to plan out your two or three supporting ideas, and then you’ll know exactly what you are doing in each paragraph before you begin writing it.
2. Organize your essay clearly. Follow the boring but simple format of 4-5 paragraphs, with paragraph 1 = introduction; one paragraph for each supporting idea; last paragraph = conclusion. If you are not familiar with the five paragraph essay format, take a class or get a tutor who knows how to do it.
3. If you are offered a choice between two things – i.e. which do you prefer, the city or the suburbs - choose only one. Never try to argue both sides – this is rarely successful and usually leaves the writer without enough time to justify both arguments.
4. Write what you can write, not what you want to write. Nobody cares about your opinion. Harsh, but true. When you are asked which you prefer, the city or the country, do not sit around pondering all your experiences and preferences and trying to decide which you really like. The essay raters don’t care. There is no rule that says you have to express your true feelings on this test. By the time the raters see your essay, they will have read a dozen essays on the exact same topic and will not be interested in anything other than whether or not you have an adequate introduction and conclusion, if you stayed on topic, made your points clear, etc. They have a rubric for grading. Nowhere on the rubric does it say your essay should be interesting, cute, clever, funny, or honest. It’s all about structure and language use.
For instance, if you are writing about why you like the city, you don’t have to describe that indefinable something in the air, the excitement of the throng, the scent of roasting chestnuts wafting on the air and how it makes you nostalgic for your childhood. If your English is that good, then go for it. Write it. But if it isn’t – and let’s face it, it probably isn’t – go with what you know: The city has the best shopping. You can find many types of ethnic food in the city. The city has many job opportunities. Even if you hate ethnic food and shopping, if you have the vocabulary and grammar to write clearly about those topics, do it.
5. Don’t try to give every reason why. Again, no one cares about this. If there are a dozen reasons why you like the city, just choose two or three that are easy to write about and use those. You don’t lose points because you didn’t give every possible reason. Same goes for an essay about why you should recycle – you are not writing a research paper. The rater doesn’t care if you managed to list every possible reason to recycle, or even the most important ones, just that you gave at least two or three and supported them well with good paragraph structure and language use.
6. Keep the introduction short and to the point. It is a myth that you should have a big introduction where you start with some very general statement and then work your way down to the actual topic statement. You get no points for that, and frankly, it’s annoying to read. Make your position clear (I prefer the city or I prefer the country) in the first or second sentence. Occasionally I have seen a very advanced student with excellent English and good writing skills in their own language use a longer, more complicated introduction and make it work, but that is very rare. Most of the time, a long introduction is just irrelevant junk wasting your writing time and annoying the rater. So skip it and get right to the point. The only thing your introduction needs is your topic statement and a summary of your two or three supporting details. Two or three sentences is fine. More than 4 sentences is probably too much.
7. Don’t include a question. Not in your introduction, not anywhere else. What teacher is out there telling students to do this? It is completely inappropriate in almost every case, and while you may see it occasionally in professional, published writing, I have never seen it used correctly by a student. Just don’t do it.
8. Keep sentence structure simple. Again, it’s about what you can write, not what you want to. I always have one student who is capable of writing a clear, concise essay, but who feels compelled to try to make his sentence structure and vocabulary more varied and interesting, and then ends up with long, grammatically incorrect sentences and vocabulary that is used incorrectly. If you don’t really know how to use a word, then use a different word that you do know. Use sentence structures that you know are correct. There are a limited number of structures allowable in the English language – don’t get creative with your structure or you will likely end up with sentences that don’t make sense.
9. Use short sentences. One of the most common problems I see with toefl essays is sentences that are too long and have too many grammar mistakes to be intelligible. It’s so common that I sometimes tell students to count the lines that a sentence takes up on their paper – if it’s more than two, I tell them to break the sentence into two sentences instead. For those struggling with grammar, it is especially important to keep your sentences short and simple – as in, subject-verb-object. No more than one “and.” No more than one subject. No more than one verb. This may not be the most beautiful writing, but if it’s what you can do, then do it. It is more important to be clear than to try to use complicated grammar. There are no points for effort, only for success.
10. Indent and/or leave spaces between your paragraphs. There is nothing more difficult to read than one giant paragraph, and if the reader has to struggle to identify your introduction, conclusion, and supporting details, then you may not get credit for having them even if you do.
