Is laziness getting to you? Does the thought of having to write and then have that writing decide the fate of your academic career making your majorly anxious? When writing a GRE essay, you need to remember a few key tips. Your main aim is always to score as high as you can, thus improving your chances of getting into your grad school of choice. No matter how strong you are academically, not everyone can easily write an essay. There’s a lot you need to remember and it can often get overwhelming. But there are certainly ways around this.
Here are a few helpful GRE essay tips that will surely get you one step close to scoring a perfect grade.
This ain’t a riddle
Don’t make them guess what you stand for! If your stance is not clear enough, the foundation of your essay becomes weak, which makes the rest of your essay not really worth reading. Make sure you understand what you want to talk about so you can very clearly explain it to your reader. You will need to make our side very obvious, and stick to it until the very end. Don’t keep switching sides or getting sidetracked because that will give the impression that you’re easily distracted and can’t convey your thoughts in an organized way. That is one of the main skills they want to test in you so be careful not to give them the wrong impression when it comes to this.
- Make sure to establish your position in the very beginning and stick to it
- Do not get sidetracked. Dedicate your essay to explaining your initial topic as well as you can
Don’t make a mess they’ll have to clean up
Organization is important. Don’t make your essay look like a puzzle with several pieces missing that your reader will have to fill in for themselves. Make sure you know all the information you have to put in, and make sure you plan ahead so you know what part will go in which section of the essay. This is one of the most important things to keep in mind when you’re writing a GRE essay because they need to know that you have good coordination, space and time management skills.
- You essay needs to reflect that you can articulate yourself well in a limited amount of time and a limited amount of space.
- Don’t let it look like your thoughts are all over the place.
Practice!
You need to make sure that before the actual essay, you’ve had plenty of practice and have a basic idea of what you’re going to do, no matter what the topic is. This is important because it is bound to save you a good amount of very valuable time. Write multiple essays beforehand to understand every aspect of it as well as you can so once you actually get into it, your mind doesn’t go blank and you understand what you have to do.
- Write practice essays beforehand so you know what to do when the real essay is in front of you
- Time yourself so you learn to manage it better
I have evidence to prove myself
No matter what you state, make sure you have facts and evidence to prove its authenticity. Stating things without backing them up will make your position in front of them weak, providing logic makes you come off as responsible and like you know what you’re talking about. Also, make sure you don’t state something without ensuring its authenticity.
- Don’t assume things. Always make sure to do a background check on everything you state to avoid embarrassing situations.
- Give facts and figures for everything, mention sources if any of your information has been taken from somewhere else.
Don’t give them reasons to reject you
Some student applications get rejected solely based on the most basic, easily avoidable mistakes like bad grammar and syntax. You do not want to be one of them. Make sure to pay special attention to using correct grammar and good sentence structure. Practicing essays in advance will definitely help you with this.
- Pay attention to sentence structure and make using correct grammar a priority.
- If you make the most basic mistakes, it will make you come off as irresponsible and as if you don’t care enough about the essay.
Make your statements strong and confident
Not unlike top argumentative essay writing, this essay demands to know how you think and your opinions on certain things, along with the strength of those opinions.
They don’t want to hear this!
Try not to waste their time. They won’t like that. Only mention things that you believe are relevant to the cause of you essay. Don’t give them a big sob story that will waste their time. Don’t make them feel like you’re trying to gain sympathy instead of proving your worth academically.
Drafts are important
Do you think you’re perfect? Well, unfortunately you aren’t. The first draft of any piece of writing can never be the final one. Write over and over again until you’re completely sure you’ve written the most perfect essay you possibly could. You’ll realize that the quality of your writing improves with each new draft.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Elijah Gabrielson has done MA in Linguistics from the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Illinois. He is currently working on an autobiography which he started writing at the age of 25, five years ago. He loves to analyze things and read literature, and has dedicated himself to writing and takes part in Eazy research to find topics he could potentially write about.