Your success in TOEFL iBT writing lies in your preparation. Therefore, to prepare, you should practice making written responses to sample iBT independent writing tasks after which you can have someone else, preferably a TOEFL iBT writing specialist, evaluate your essay according to the official TOEFL iBT rubrics that Educational Testing Service (ETS) uses to evaluate your essay. Framed from the official ETS guidelines for the independent writing task of the TOEFL iBT, the following four questions about your essay should be answered by whomever you choose to evaluate your essay:
1. Did I answer all parts of the question?
Since many of the TOEFL iBT questions are multi-tasked, you should get feedback as to whether or not you have answered all parts of the writing assignment.
2. Is my essay well-organized?
In this case, the reviewer of your essay should check your thesis statement and topic sentences in the body paragraphs to make sure that they directly answer the question being asked. There should be adequate use of transition words and other types of signal words that show how your ideas are connected. Your reviewer should pay particular attention to the key junctures of your paper which can be especially troublesome: end of the first paragraph, beginning and end of each paragraph, and concluding paragraph.There should be a strong sense of unity in all these key junctures.
3. Do I provide adequate supporting detail for the generalizations I use in my essay?
To evaluate this, your reviewer should check to see that you are using specific, even personable, details in the body paragraphs that are relevant to the topic statements of those paragraphs. It is also important to evaluate whether or not the details show a progression of ideas. The reviewer should check for word cues such as for example, for instance, and case in point, all of which can be used to introduce supporting points.
4. Do I write with grammatical fluency, with only minor grammatical or word choice errors that do not obscure meaning?
The reviewer, ideally a native-English speaker familiar with the language of academic writing, should keep in mind that it is not just important to be grammatically correct, but it is important that you use a combination of simple, compound, and complex sentence structures, thereby displaying what ETS calls syntactic variety. Another sticky issue to consider is your idiomaticity of language use. In other words, how natural sounding are you? Would a native speaker use similar grammar and vocabulary to express comparable ideas? Does it sound like you are translating from another language? Compare the following sentences:
- Unnatural: How many years do you have?
- Natural: How old are you?
Even though both sentences are grammatically correct, "How old are you?" is more natural sounding.
If you can do well in these four areas when taking your practice tests, you have a good chance of scoring higher than 24/30 points on the independent writing task when you take the actual TOEFL iBT exam.
Good luck!
Essay Writing ServicesEssay Services
No comments:
Post a Comment