how long are gre essays supposed to be

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How Long Should Gre Essays Be

How Long Should GRE Essays Be? (2024's Top Guide)

Students taking the GRE test usually have the same question: What's the ideal length for GRE essays?

The ETS hasn't defined the word count, making it hard for test-takers to know what works. Thankfully, we can get some answers from thousands of previously rated GRE essays. Read on to see what they imply.

The GRE Essay Section

The GRE essay is often called AWA, which stands for the GRE Analytical Writing Assessment.

The name already tells us that the GRE essay tests two things: analytical writing and critical thinking skills.

In total, you have 60 minutes to write your essay. The time is split between two analytical writing tasks that are a part of the GRE essay section:

#1 - “Analyze the Issue” - 30 minutes
#2 - “Analyze an Argument” - 30 minutes

What’s the Issue Task?

This part of AWA mainly evaluates your critical thinking skills.

You’ll be given a prompt, i.e. a statement, that you need to agree or disagree with and explain your stance on the issue throughout the length of your essay.[ 1 ]

To successfully solve the task, you must convince the reader that your stance is valid by presenting evidence and examples. It would help if you also offered an alternative perspective on the issue that resonates with your outlook.

What’s the Argument Task?

The second part of AWA mainly evaluates your analytical writing skills, i.e. your ability to interpret, analyze, and evaluate arguments.

You’ll get a short written passage that presents an argument you need to evaluate. [ 1 ]

To give a satisfying response, focus on how the writer supports his opinion, hypothesis, and implications. In this part of the essay section, you're not supposed to express your opinion or whether you agree or disagree with the claims.

What's the Ideal GRE Essay Length?

Research shows that GRE essays with 500-600 words get the highest points [ 1 ], indicating there is some correlation between the length of an essay and the score.

Many students write really long GRE papers because they think a high word count will get them a better score. But it might not be that simple. First, other things matter more—like grammar, sentence structure, your essay's overall structure, and clarity of your main points.

500-600 word count makes sense from a practical standpoint too. Longer papers give you more room to justify your arguments and create better content overall. On the other hand, writing even longer papers and maintaining cohesiveness isn’t possible due to time restrictions.

The GRE Essay Scoring Process

Two graders initially score the GRE essay. You're first given points by one human grader and a computerized program developed by the ETS, the e-rater.

You can score from 0 to 6 points in half-point increments. Your paper won’t be scored based on how long it is at all.

Even though you have to write two essays to cover both tasks, the ETS reports only one score, which is the average of the two scores.

The e-rater may sometimes give more points to more extended essays, whether an essay is off-topic or if the content is overall poorly written.

However, if the human rater’s score is too different from the score given to you by the e-rater, a second human grader will be brought in to reassess the quality of your essay and give it a new score.

Your final score will then be the average of the two scores assigned to you by human raters.

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education” – Martin Luther King

Here’s what the highest scores for both sections of the GRE essay entail:


The Issue Essay	A student’s essay:
The Argument Essay	A student’s essay:

4 Steps on How to Divide Your Time

To make the most of your time on the test day, plan your essay writing in advance. We’ll walk you through the 4 steps that ensure you’ll produce killer essays and help you decide how much time you need per each step.

1. Read (3 minutes)

Students often make the mistake of skimming through the paragraph and the prompt, thinking this will save them more time for the writing part. Though this may be true, you risk misunderstanding your assignment and writing an off-topic essay.

Instead, read the paragraph and instructions at least two times. You already know what you’ll be asked to examine and present in both tasks, so you could immediately look for those specific things while reading.

2. Think (3 minutes)

Before you get to writing, know what you’re writing about. Brainstorm and come up with your essay thesis. Jot it down. This will help you stay on topic throughout your essay.

Now that you’ve developed your main point, think of examples and facts that will help you support it.

Finally, craft an outline for your essay that includes at least four paragraphs in total:

Introductory paragraph
Two body paragraphs
Conclusion paragraph

3. Write (20 minutes)

After your quick test prep, you’re finally ready to write. Make sure you use a comprehensive and varied vocabulary and pay attention to grammar throughout your essay.

By the time you’re done writing, you should have at least four paragraphs and a 500-word long essay. Each paragraph should help you support your thesis and reasoning, and every sentence should serve a specific purpose rather than serve as filler content.

4. Edit (4 minutes)

In this segment, check if you’ve included the most important points and examples in your GRE essay. Also, quickly check the length of your essay. Instead of counting words, try counting lines—usually, 500 words are equal to about 30 lines of text.

Lastly, check other ways you can make your essay better. Here’s a brief checklist of 5 questions to answer:

Have you been using the same words excessively?
Can you replace them with synonyms?
Are your paragraphs divided in a way that makes sense?
Are you being wordy to make your essay longer?
Have you supported your main point well enough?

How to Prepare for the GRE Exam?
Top GRE Vocab Books
Best GRE Issue Essay Tips
Actionable Tips for GRE Analytical Writing

10 GRE Test Prep and Writing Tips

Include essays in your test prep. Many students focus only on studying for the test during their GRE prep. But, if you want to ensure you’ll be able to write a solid, 500-word long essay in just half an hour, you have to prepare at home. Use examples of previous essays as your prompts and start your practice.
Know your weaknesses. During your test prep , you should get a pretty good idea of where you could improve. Are you struggling with grammar or dividing your content into paragraphs in a way that makes sense? Whatever it is, take note of your weaknesses and focus on improving them with targeted practice.
Read essays written by others. Previous GRE essays with high scores can serve as great examples of what the raters want to see when scoring your essay. Use them as your guidelines for a high score during the test.
Learn new words and quotes. It might seem silly, but learning new words and quotes for essay writing should be a part of your test prep when you’re supposed to write such a long essay and showcase your ability to write varied sentences.
Logically organize your essay. You should have at least 4 separate paragraphs for an essay of this length: one introductory paragraph, two body paragraphs, and one conclusion paragraph. It's also essential you divide them in a sensical way. Make sure each section brings something new to the table, like a unique point or specific examples.
Learn how to support your arguments. The longer the essay, the more room for filler and irrelevant content that undermines your score. To make sure you’ll use only relevant examples and evidence to support your point on the GRE, practice logical reasoning and supporting your arguments during your test prep.
Avoid first-person. Don’t use first-person pronouns like “I” or “we” in your essay. Also, avoid phrases that hint at human subjectivity like “I believe” or “in my opinion.”
Take a clear stance. Pick only one side of the argument you’ll support in your essay. It’s important to clearly refute the opposing opinion in your conclusion as well.
Don’t beat around the bush. Don’t use several sentences or words when one will do. Even though your job is to write a long essay, you don’t want to sacrifice quality for length. Raters want to see straightforward responses free of filler words.
Tackle objections early on. Instead of pretending your thesis is perfect, address possible complaints your readers might have in your essay and explain why you’re still taking the stance you chose.

Recommended Article: Best GRE Test Day Tips

The GRE Example Prompt

Practice might not always make perfect, but it could help you create better, longer essays and get a higher average score. Before the test day, take at least a couple of practice essay prompts and get to work.

You can find samples of the argument essay prompt and the issue essay prompt on the ETS website. Besides that, they also gave you examples of sample responses and the scores they got. [ 1 ]

Wrapping Up

Many students think their final grade depends on how well they write. Though your writing skills might help you get a better grade, your score will ultimately depend on how well you’ve prepared for the essay.

The best prep strategy is to take previous essays. This will help you know what to expect in advance.

Lastly, keep in mind that length is only one of the aspects of your essay, and definitely not the most important one. If you have well-developed arguments, varied sentences, and no grammatical errors, the length may not matter that much.

https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/analytical_writing/argument/sample_task

How Long Should a GRE Essay be?

Usually, if someone is asked what they got on the GRE, it’s normal to address your Verbal and Quantitative score . If written out, some people won’t even take the time to write something along the lines of “156 Verbal, 158 Quantitative.” They will simply use V and Q to denote the sections . Many test-takers tend to overlook and be underprepared for the essay portion of the exam. However, you can bet your bottom dollar that graduate and MBA programs will be looking at your essay score .

I will admit that it is not uncommon for graduate and MBA programs to primarily focus on the Verbal and Quantitative scores of the GRE. With that said, having a strong essay score can help give your application a competitive edge. In this article we will discuss what the GRE Essay prompts are, how the measure is scored, and tips on writing a solid response, including how long the GRE essay should be.

The GRE Essay Section

The GRE will kick off with the Analytical Writing section, where you will have one hour to write two essays. You will be given thirty minutes to write each one. Hence, you cannot choose to use forty minutes of your one hour on the first essay and twenty minutes on your second essay. Once the thirty minutes is up, you will be taken to the second essay prompt, even if you are in the middle of typing out a sentence.

Furthermore, the thirty minutes will not start once you begin typing. You will have to read the prompt, plan out your essay, write your essay, and proofread your essay all in thirty minutes. It is stressful. Test-takers who go in unprepared can find themselves starting off the GRE extremely flustered, which does not set them up for success for the rest of the exam.

The GRE Essay Scoring

Some of you might know that if you take the computer-delivered GRE, which almost all of you will, you can choose to “Report Your Scores” after your exam ends. At this time, the computer will display your Verbal and Quantitative Reasoning scores right then and there. However, due to how the Analytical Writing measure is scored, you will not be able to see how you did on your essays until your official score report is released about two weeks later.

Each essay will be scored by a human reader along with a computer system, known as the E-Rater. ETS created the E-Rater in order to scan your essay and look for a variance in sentence structure, vocabulary used, overall length, and format which it can then use to identify your writing proficiency. The E-Rater will give your essay a score ranging from zero to six. The human reader will also provide a score within the same range.

If the human reader and E-Rater both give your essay a similar score, the average of their two scores becomes that essay’s score. If the scores given were very different, a second human reader will read your essay and grade it from zero to six. In this case, your final score for that essay will be the average of the two human readers scores.

At this point, your two essays that now have scores ranging from zero to six will be averaged to create your official Analytical Writing section score. This score will also range from zero to six in half-point increments.

The GRE Essay Prompts

The Analytical Writing measure is composed of two tasks: Analyze an Issue and Analyze an Argument.

The Issue task will broadly speak to an issue and provide instructions on how to respond to that issue. This essay is probably the most similar to what you have done in school. You will need to consider the issue from multiple points of view and then take a stance on the topic. You will need to demonstrate your critical reasoning skills by using logical examples to support your claim.

The Argument task will not ask you to build an argument but to evaluate an argument provided to you. You will not be asked to state whether or not you agree or disagree with the argument made. If you do, it is likely you will receive a low score. Instead, you will need to address the logical solidity of the argument. In other words, what parts of the argument need to be evaluated more and why.

How Long Should a GRE Essay Be?

There is no official length requirement for the GRE essays. For example, if your essay is three paragraphs you will not automatically receive a score of zero or one. Similarly, a six paragraph essay will not automatically receive a score of five. The logical evaluation you provide is more important than length, but it will be hard to write a fully developed analysis of the argument and issue tasks in three paragraphs.

You should aim to have each essay be five paragraphs and roughly five hundred words (give or take). Your five paragraphs should consist of the following:

Introduction
Body Paragraph 1
Body Paragraph 2
Body Paragraph 3

For an in-depth explanation of how to structure each paragraph, check out our article “How to Write a GRE Essay.”

Tips for Writing a Good GRE Essay

Table of Contents

1. Practice

When it comes to practicing for the GRE, it is not uncommon to practice everything but the timed essays. At the test prep company I work for, we have a saying that “smooth is fast.” If you want your Analytical Writing section to go smoothly, which will lead to you maneuvering through the section quickly, you must be willing to practice. Let me tell you, it is a terrible feeling to have the clock run out as you are in the middle of typing out a sentence on test day.

Practicing will allow you to build up a great familiarity with the structure of the essay prompts. How ETS asks you to respond to the Issue and Argument will always be the same. Furthermore, you will get very comfortable with the basic outline of your essays (i.e. how you put together your intro, body paragraphs, and conclusions). Metaphorically, it will be like playing “Hide-and-Go-Seek” in your own home versus someone else’s home on test day.

Hence, when taking the POWERPREP exams on your ETS account, do not skip over the Analytical Writing sections. Also, read through all the example essays provided by ETS in the Official GRE Verbal Reasoning Guide and reflect on how they were put together. For other writing resources, check out this list of the best GRE prep books , including those that provide essay practice.

2. Take the Time to Plan

On test day, take a few minutes to plan out your essay before you start typing away. Often, we feel so pressed for time we immediately dive into our introduction paragraph before using our scratch paper to create a basic outline. Trust me, time spent doing this is well worth the effort.

Students who do not spend time drafting their essays before they start typing tend to end up with jumbled ideas that have no concrete focus. You must think about what you want to say as a whole and ask yourself the most basic question, “Does it make sense?” Starting to write early on may lead to a longer essay, but if it does not logically flow the amount of words will do little to increase your score.

3. Prepare Examples

When seeking out any test prep expert’s advise on the Analytical Writing section, they will emphasize the importance of the examples you use. You want your examples to be very specific. They can come from history, literature, olympic sports, pop culture, politics, personal examples, current events, and so on. Feel free to be creative with your examples as well!

Personally, I think current events are wonderful to draw from, and by using them you are demonstrating that you care about society and have opinions on how to improve it (something graduate schools are looking for from applicants). I tell my students to watch the news or read The Economis t for two weeks leading up to their test day. Take the time to really reflect on a couple events and develop an opinion about them.

4. Analyze and Then Analyze Some More

It is not enough to have specific examples written throughout your body paragraphs that demonstrate your expertise if they do not truly support your claim. Many test-takers write the introduction to their body paragraph, follow it up with examples, and then conclude the paragraph. They write zero analysis explaining HOW the examples support their thesis.

Not only do you need to have sentences dedicated to analyzing your examples, the amount of these sentences should exceed the amount of example sentences. Remember, your number one goal is to show the reader you are an analytical person and can think deeply (hence, “Analytical” Writing measure).

How Long Should a GRE Essay Be? Summary

The Analytical Writing section will give you one hour to write two essays. One will require you to address the soundness of an argument and the other will ask you to create your own argument based off a given issue. Although there is no official length requirement for the GRE essays, you will still want to make them five paragraphs and aim for five hundred words. For general GRE studying resources, check out our list of the best GRE prep courses .

12 Tips to Ace GRE Writing

woman writing with pencil on piece of paper representing gre writing tips - magoosh

Worrying about the GRE essays? A lot of test-takers find it intimidating to sit down at their computer on test day and write an essay in 30 minutes…and then write another one directly after that! GRE analytical writing can seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. A handful of key GRE analytical writing tips will help you sit down at those word processors and proceed—with confidence—to get the GRE score you want.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the GRE writing tips you can use to boost your essay score on the Argument essay and Issue task. Here are all the GRE essay tips you’ll need to send you on your way to that perfect score.

General GRE Analytical Writing Assessment Tips

While the GRE general test writing section can seem unpredictable, there are still ways to prepare for the essay! Later on, we’ll look at each type of task (Issue and Argument) separately. Before we do that, though, there are some important GRE writing tips to know for Issue and Argument essays in the GRE analytical writing section.

1. Know the topic types

If you’ve been practicing for the AWA, you may be thinking, “ What types? They’re totally random! ” But there’s definitely a pattern to GRE prompts! We’ve identified seven types of analytical writing prompts on the GRE , including:

Government and Power
Intellectual Endeavors

Before you take the official exam, review sample topics in these areas so you know how you’ll address different types of subjects as they come up. You can see all possible Issue tasks and Argument tasks on the ETS website before test day.

But as you look at the GRE ETS AWA prompts , make sure you don’t waste time outlining a possible essay for each and every one. The time it takes—plus the memorization it would involve—is not worth the effort! Instead, focus on perfecting your approach to different topic types.

Remember, you don’t need to be an expert in these areas, or even have outside knowledge—instead, work on coming up with examples to address different types of prompts and how to write about topics you’re unfamiliar with in a short period of time.

2. Read the directions thoroughly

Read the directions? Of course I read the directions! Almost all test-takers think this—but in our experience, not enough are reading the directions thoroughly .

Each Issue prompt and each Argument prompt comes with specific directions, which follow the prompt and are written in non-italicized letters. Make sure to read the directions; do not gloss over them. In your essay, if you do not directly address what the question is asking, your score will take a hit. Let’s take a look at two different directions that follow an Issue prompt.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and supporting your position, be sure to address the most compelling reasons and/or examples that could be used to challenge your position.

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position.

You’ll notice that the directions begin very similarly but then veer away from each other. Nonetheless, both ask you to what extent you agree or disagree with the argument. The first set of instructions asks you to consider possible objections to your point of view (which implies you want to show how those objections are somewhat lacking). The second set of instructions asks you to offer up specific instances in which the recommendation either holds true or doesn’t.

Here’s some good news: the instructions don’t create entirely different essays. Oftentimes, being true to the instructions entails nothing more than a few well-deployed sentences in the conclusion or at the end of a body paragraph.

3. Manage time well

For each and every section on the GRE, you have a time limit —and the AWA is no exception! If you’re like most test-takers, you’ll definitely feel those 30 minutes start to shrink once you sit down at the screen.

To make the most of your time on GRE tests , we suggest dividing up the writing section like this:

2 minutes to read through the prompt and directions
3 minutes brainstorming, outlining, and writing a thesis statement
20 minutes writing the body paragraphs and examples of your essay
2 minutes to edit for small mistakes, such as grammatical errors
3 minutes (if available) to write an intro

Nope, that’s not a mistake—save the intro for last. Why? A few reasons. First of all, if you’ve already stated your thesis at the beginning, it’s not that important. And yet, second of all, test takers get so caught up writing the “perfect intro” that time speeds by and they haven’t focused on their body paragraphs—the meat of the essay—at all. This way, you’ll have a much better chance of getting a high score on the GRE AWA.

4. Write as much as you can

Open up the Official Guide to the essay section and you will see several sample essays. If you turn to the lowest scoring essay—the one awarded a ‘1’—what is most notable about it isn’t necessarily the egregious syntax: the essay is only one sentence long.

Now I highly doubt you will receive a ‘1’. Even if you hammer out a paragraph of barely discernible prose, you are likely to get higher than a ‘1’. The key point here is length matters. And it doesn’t just make the difference between a ‘1’ and a ‘2’; the ‘6’ essay is notably longer than the ‘5’ essay. Sure, the ‘6’ essay is of a general higher quality, but had the ‘6’ essay been the length of the ‘5’ essay it might have received a ‘5.5.’

So don’t think you can just fast and furiously scribble your way to a ‘6’. But as you work to improve the quality of your essays, keep in mind that the more high quality stuff you write, the better. While we’re on the topic, explore these GRE vocabulary words that deal directly with writing:

Issue Essay: GRE Writing Tips

The first essay you’ll see on all GRE tests is the Issue essay . In this task, you’ll be asked to analyze an issue described in the prompt, then create an essay agreeing or disagreeing with it. Read on for our best GRE essay tricks and tips for this task!

5. Come up with pro/con statements

One of the most important things about the Issue essay is that it requires you to take a side.

To do this, make a list of statements that either support or refute the prompt (pros and cons). Then, choose whichever side you think has the best statements. Take a look as Magoosh’s experts walk you through a pro/con evaluation of a topic here !

We recommend you work in shorthand. It doesn’t have to be pretty! It just has to be understandable as you go back through your notes. This shouldn’t take a lot of time—remember, you don’t have a ton of time for brainstorming! Practice pro/con lists until you can make one in under a minute.

6. Choose a side

Based on what you’ve written in your pro/con statement, it’s time to pick a side. You’ll find that the directions for the Issue essay always ask you to agree or disagree. That’s how important this is to creating a high-scoring essay—they actually put the fact that you need to state your opinion in the prompt.

It doesn’t matter what you actually think about this in real life—or even if you have no opinion on it whatsoever! All that matters is that you pick the side you can most easily support.

So how should your opinion show up in the essay? Make sure you state it immediately, as part of your thesis statement. Just as importantly, select examples that support this point of view really well, then explicitly tie them back to your opinion with reasoning throughout the rest of the essay.

7. Relate all examples and reasoning back to your thesis

As you make your pro/con list (described in Tip #5), you’ll be jotting down statements that help support different sides of the argument. Once you’ve chosen what side you’ll be arguing, as in Tip #6, you’ll need to elaborate on those with real-world examples or reasoning.

What’s the difference? Reasoning explains why something’s true (“From the statements X and Y, we can see Z”), while examples show a particular case in which that is true (“The ubiquity of Mickey Mouse proves Z”). Depending on how you brainstorm, you’re likely to have come up with a pro/con list featuring mostly reasons or examples.

Balance it out by making sure you explain why each example is important, relating it to your thesis, and providing a specific instance of each reason you give—again, one that’s relevant to your thesis. Want to see this in action? Take a look at a Magoosh expert brainstorming potential Issue task examples !

8. Make a concession point

Back in Tip #6, we encouraged you to make the position you’re taking in the Issue task really, really clear, and then support your position. But when you look closer at the Issue prompt, you’ll see that you’re also asked to look at both sides of the argument. How is this possible?

The GRE AWA requires pretty nuanced thinking, and this is no exception! You will need to bring up an argument from the side your essay disagrees with, that is true in some cases. This is called a concession point . The instructions don’t tell you to do this exactly—but it’s the best way to discuss both sides of the argument while making sure that you stick to your main argument.

How do you find a concession point? If you’ve followed Tip #5, it’s easy. You’ll need to whip out that old pro/con statement again!

In the end, while you will need to make a concession point, it’s important that the entire essay—including any concession points—all drive the reader back to one opinion: yours.

Argument Essay: GRE Writing Tips

The second task you’ll face on GRE writing sections is the Argument essay. For this essay, you’ll look at an argument and analyze it logically. How to write the GRE Argument essay? You’ll need to know the types of arguments in writing samples, as well as how to present a good argument yourself. If this type of argument test still sounds overwhelming, never fear—we have plenty of GRE analytical writing tips (and a step-by-step GRE writing video guide) for this part of the exam, as well!

9. Identify the assumptions

The first of our tips for the GRE Argument essay? To analyze an argument on the GRE , you’ll need to find out what assumptions the author is making and show why they are unwarranted. Focus on one of these tasks at a time, starting by just finding where the assumptions are in the passage.

Spend some time here: getting these assumptions correct is super important to writing a high-scoring Argument essay. You’re not looking to see how many you can find—there will often be more than one or two! Instead, you want to make sure you’ve found the most important ones the author’s used.

Identifying assumptions takes some practice, so we suggest you take another look at the pool of ETS Argument tasks to practice. As you go through these, ask yourself: what claims is the author making? Where does the author support these claims? What information is missing that would make this claim valid?

10. Find the logical fallacies

After you’ve found all the assumptions in the argument, you’ll need to take it a step further and analyze the argument. To do that, you’ll need to be familiar with the types of logical fallacies you’ll encounter in GRE Argument prompts. Luckily, Magoosh has a video describing logical fallacies in a sample essay for your review!

Just as there are lots of types of arguments in essay prompts on the GRE, so too are there lots of types of logical fallacies in them. For the Argument task GRE essay, you’ll need to identify the most important assumptions, then describe the types of logical fallacies the author is making. You won’t need to describe every single one in your essay (see Tip #12), but you will need to describe and explain the biggest ones.

11. Never agree with the argument

Don’t ever agree with the argument that the Argument task presents on the GRE! Your thesis statement should be a refutation of the logic in the prompt .

In other words, the kind of thesis you’ll need for the Argument task is NOT the same kind of thesis you’ll need for the Issue task. Remember, the Issue task asks you to agree or disagree with the presented argument. On the other hand, the Argument analysis GRE essay asks you to write an essay about an essay. Your thesis should have to do with why the argument is weak due to logical fallacies.

Think about it: if this was a great argument, why would the GRE have provided it for an Argument essay? The whole point of the Argument essay is for you to find the flaws in an argument. Therefore, your thesis should never be that this argument is great and has no flaws! Not only is that (extremely) unlikely to be true, but it also fails to show critical thinking and analysis on your part—which is what the test maker is looking for here.

Long story short? Challenge the argument in your thesis statement !

12. Choose your examples carefully

You’ve identified assumptions. You’ve found their logical fallacies. You’ve written a thesis statement. Now, it’s time to choose examples!

At this point, you may have a huge list of six, seven, or even eight assumptions. That’s great! You’re going to end up throwing a lot of them out. You can write a top-scoring essay using only three or four examples from the prompt. With this in mind, choose the ones that most undermine the writer’s point—in other words, the ones that have the biggest negative effect on the essay as a whole. Once you’ve chosen those examples, organize your body paragraphs around them, as Magoosh’s expert does with the GRE Argument here .

As you write, remember that your examples should always be points about the prompt that support your overall argument in the GRE AWA essay. ALSO remember that your argument in this task is about the construction of the essay, rather than the what they author’s saying (form, not content!). Because of that, it’s not important at all to include positive points about the argument. Unlike the Issue task, the Argument task only needs you to show flaws—not pros and cons.

A Final Word on GRE Writing Tips

While the AWA can seem overwhelming when you first encounter it, practicing with these GRE analytical writing tips can cut that frustration way, way down. Use them to work through some of the prompts on the ETS website, and you’ll see exactly what we mean. They take a little while to get used to, because these aren’t simple tasks—yet at the end of the day, they’ll help boost your score where you want it to be. Good luck as you start putting these GRE essay tips to use!

Also, you can now sign up for Magoosh Premium Plan today to access our AI Expert Tutor that will grade your essay and give pointers on how to improve your score!

Rachel has helped students around the world prepare for various standardized tests, including the SAT, ACT, TOEFL, GRE, and GMAT, and she is one of the authors of our Magoosh ACT Prep Book . Rachel has a Bachelor of Arts in Comparative Literature from Brown University, an MA in Cinematography from the Université de Paris VII, and a Ph.D. in Film Studies from University College London.

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Overview of the Analytical Writing Measure

Analytical writing measure (beginning september 22, 2023).

The Analytical Writing measure of the GRE General Test administered beginning September 22, 2023, assesses your critical thinking and analytical writing skills by assessing your ability to:

articulate and support complex ideas
construct arguments
sustain a focused and coherent discussion

It doesn’t assess specific content knowledge.

The Analytical Writing measure consists of a 30-minute “Analyze an Issue” task. This task presents an opinion on an issue and instructions on how to respond. You’re required to evaluate the issue, consider its complexities and develop an argument with reasons and examples to support your views.

You’ll use a basic word processor developed by ETS to type your essay responses. The word processor contains the following functionalities: insert text, delete text, cut-and-paste and undo the previous action. Tools such as a spellchecker and grammar checker are not available.

Analytical Writing Measure before September 22, 2023

The Analytical Writing measure of the GRE General Test administered before September 22, 2023, assesses your critical thinking and analytical writing skills by assessing your ability to:

construct and evaluate arguments

The Analytical Writing measure consists of two separately timed analytical writing tasks:

The "Analyze an Issue" task presents an opinion on an issue and instructions on how to respond. You’re required to evaluate the issue, consider its complexities and develop an argument with reasons and examples to support your views.
The "Analyze an Argument" task requires you to evaluate an argument according to specific instructions. You’ll need to consider the logical soundness of the argument rather than agree or disagree with the position it presents.

The two 30-minute tasks are complementary. The Issue task requires you to construct your own argument, while the Argument task requires you to evaluate someone else's argument.

Preparing for the Analytical Writing measure

Everyone — even the most practiced and confident of writers — should spend time preparing for the Analytical Writing measure to understand the skills measured and how the tasks are scored. It may also be useful to review the scoring guides, sample topics, scored sample essay responses and rater commentary for each task.

The tasks in the Analytical Writing measure relate to a broad range of subjects — from the fine arts and humanities to the social and physical sciences — but don’t require specific content knowledge. Each task has been tested by actual GRE test takers to ensure that it possesses several important characteristics, including the following:

GRE test takers, regardless of their field of study or special interests, understood the task and could easily respond to it.
The task elicited the kinds of complex thinking and persuasive writing that university faculty consider important for success in graduate school.
The responses were varied in content and in the way the writers developed their ideas.

Published topic pools for the Analytical Writing measure

To help you prepare for the Analytical Writing measure, the GRE Program has published the entire pool of tasks from which your test tasks will be selected. You might find it helpful to review the Issue and Argument pools:

Issue Topic Pool (PDF)
Argument Topic Pool (PDF) (the Argument task was removed from the General Test beginning September 22, 2023)

Test-taking strategies for the Analytical Writing measure (in the General Test beginning September 22, 2023)

Before taking the GRE General Test, review the strategies, sample topics, sample essay responses with rater commentary, and scoring guide for the task. This will give you a deeper understanding of how raters evaluate essays and the elements they're looking for in an essay.
It is important to budget your time. Within the 30-minute time limit, allow sufficient time to consider the issue and the specific instructions, plan a response, and compose your essay. You want your essay response to be the best possible example of your writing that you can produce under the testing conditions.
Save a few minutes at the end of the timed task to check for obvious errors. An occasional spelling or grammatical error won’t affect your score, but serious and persistent errors detract from the overall effectiveness of your writing and lower your score accordingly.

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GRE Timing Tips: How Long is the GRE?

The GRE clocks in at 3 hours, 45 minutes. The GRE consists of six sections with a 10 minute break after the third section. Here’s how you can expect to spend your time on test day.

GRE Test Day Timeline

Task	Time	# of Questions
Biographical Information	+/- 10 mins	—
Issue Essay	30 mins	1
Argument Essay	30 mins	1
Verbal Reasoning (2 sections)	30 mins each	20 each
Quantitative Reasoning (2 sections)	35 mins each	20 each
Experimental Section (unscored)	30 or 35 mins*	Varies
1 Break	10 minutes	—
Possible Research Section	Optional	Depends
Select Schools/Programs	5 mins	Up to 4
Accept Scores	1 min	—
Receive Scores	1 min	—

*If your experimental section is math, your test will be five minutes longer than someone whose experimental section is verbal.

Biographical Information

The first section of the test collects all of your biographical information. If you fill this out, you will start getting mail from programs that have bought your name from ETS . If you don’t want them to sell your name, or you don’t want to spend the time answering their questions, you can click on a box that tells ETS not to share your information.

The scored part of the GRE begins with two back-to-back essays. For the Issue Essay, you’ll make a compelling case for your position on a topic and then analyze the logical soundness of another author’s argument for the Argument Essay. You have 30 minutes for each. Get a preview of what you'll face with these sample GRE essay prompts .

Multiple-Choice Sections

You'll complete five multiple-choice sections, but only four will count. The fifth is an “experimental” section. Keep in mind that the math, verbal, and experimental sections may appear in any order. At the end of the exam, you will know, based on the number of math or verbal sections, if the experimental section was math or verbal, but you will not know which section will not count toward your score.

Research Section

At the end of the test, you may also have an unscored research section that will be used only to help develop and test questions for the GRE. If you want to skip it, you have the option of skipping it.

Cancelling/Accepting Your GRE Scores

Before you see your GRE scores , you will be given the opportunity to cancel. But it usually doesn't make sense to cancel your scores. Most people believe they are doing worse while taking test then they actually are. If you cancel, you will never see your scores and you will have to go through the whole experience again. Plus, you can always make use of GRE ScoreSelect®, which allows you to select which scores get sent to which schools.

GRE Timing Tips

Any timed test will cause at least some level of stress. Try these GRE timing tips to stay confident on test day.

1. Accuracy is better than speed.

Slow down and focus on accumulating as many points as possible. Pushing yourself to work faster results in careless errors and lower scores. Don’t let that clock force you to make silly mistakes!

2. Take it all in.

Correctly answer the questions you know you can get right. This means it’s important to allow yourself to see every question. After all, question 20 could be the easiest one on the test for you.

Read More: GRE Verbal Practice: Questions & Explanations

3. Mark and move on.

If a question is not coming to you immediately, it is not necessarily something that you cannot answer. On the Reading Comprehension questions, for instance, you may struggle on a question that deals with the main idea of the passage. You may even have eliminated some answer choices. Don’t give up yet! If you have invested time and work on a particular question, press the Mark button and move on.

4. Try another question if you're stuck.

When you get stuck on a GRE math question , walk away. Do a few other problems to distract your brain, and then return to the question that was giving you problems

Practice for the GRE

Take a GRE practice test with us under the same conditions as the real thing. You'll get a personalized score report highlighting your strengths and areas of improvement.

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How to Structure the GRE Issue Essay

The GRE Issue essay is similar in structure to the classic 5-paragraph short essay. You may opt for 4-6 paragraphs, but the template given here plans for 5. The official GRE website states that readers of the Issue essay “are evaluating the skill with which you address the specific instructions and articulate and develop an argument to support your evaluation of the issue.” The better organized your essay is, the clearer it will become to the reader.

[ RELATED: 7 Tips for a Perfect GRE Issue Essay ]

Template Paragraph 1: The Introduction

As you develop your points, make sure to pepper your analysis with words that guide the reader through the argument you are making. Words such as because, although, furthermore, however, alternatively will catch the reader’s attention while you develop your argument.

Here’s how to structure each paragraph in your template (taken from our GRE study guide ):

Although the reader will have access to the prompt you received, your essay should stand on its own, making clear the assignment you were given and your response to it. Start your essay by clearly restating the issue you were assigned, followed by a sentence stating your position on that assignment–that is, your thesis. Next, introduce the specific reasons or examples you plan to provide in each of the next three paragraphs, one sentence for each of the forthcoming paragraphs.

Consider the specific task you were assigned, and make sure the language you use in your initial paragraph demonstrates that you understand the special instructions in your assignment. For instance, if your task tells you to “be sure to address the most compelling reasons and/or examples that could be used to challenge your position,” you will be clear to show at least two strong reasons or examples the side opposing yours can use–and then explain why those reasons or examples are incorrect.

Template Paragraph 2: Body Paragraph 1

Bring up your example.
Explain how it relates to the topic.
Show that it fully supports your thesis.

Template Paragraph 3: Body Paragraph 2

Template paragraph 4: final body paragraph, template paragraph 5: conclusion.

If you find you are running out of time, it is better to include your final body paragraph and eliminate the conclusion paragraph, because the conclusion doesn’t add anything new to your analysis. An otherwise well-developed Issue Essay that lacks a conclusion will not be penalized.

Top 4 Tips for a Strong GRE Issue Essay

Choose a side..

… and stick to it! It doesn’t matter which one—just know that trying to have it both ways will come across as waffling.

Be specific and relevant.

Whether your examples are about Mitt Romney, the mating rituals of octopi, or your Uncle Ralph the compulsive gambler, keep them specific and relevant to the real world. You can have some fun, as long as everything you write supports your argument—and you show how it does.

Make strong, declarative statements.

Charged modifiers, active language, and cause-effect sentences add confidence and distinction. “It is unacceptable for the president to permit Congress to pass the law because it unconstitutionally overextends Congress’ powers…” beats “The president shouldn’t allow Congress to pass the law…” any day.

Refute the other position.

Try introducing the opposing viewpoint in your conclusion—then refute it in one to two sentences, reinforcing your own thesis and ending on a strong point.

GRE Issue Essay Sample

Try this sample GRE Issue Essay prompt for practice. Remember that you’ll have 30 minutes to complete it on GRE Test Day. There are various questions you might be asked to answer on the Issue Essay, so it’s best to practice a few different prompts.

The emergence of the online “blogosphere” and social media has significantly weakened the quality of political discourse in the United States. Reason: When anyone can publish political opinions easily, standards for covering news and political topics will inevitably decline.

Write a response in which you examine your own position on the statement. Explore the extent to which you either agree or disagree with it, and support your reasoning with evidence and/or examples. Be sure to reflect on ways in which the statement might or might not be true, and how this informs your thinking on the subject.

How To Write and Structure GRE Issue Essay

Gre analytical writing essay scoring process.

Your GRE essays will be scored by half-point increments, from 0 to 6 (highest). Two graders will score both this argument essay and your issue essay. A third grader will also score your essays if your two initial graders’ scores differ by more than one point. The graders base scores on their overall impression of your essay — holistically — rather than deducting points for specific errors.

The GRE test maker, Educational Testing Service (ETS) reports a single score—the average of the two essays—rounded up to the nearest half-point. This score makes up the essay portion of your overall GRE score, despite there being two separate essays. You can read more from ETS on specific score level breakdowns here .

[ PREVIOUS : < What’s Tested on the GRE: Analytical Writing ] [ NEXT: How to structure the GRE Argument Essay > ]

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How Long Is The GRE?

The length of the gre is one of the first things people want to know about the exam.

Once you’ve made the decision to take the GRE, it’s essential to learn as much as you can about the exam. To be best prepared , you’ll want to develop a study plan and learn how long the exam actually takes. That way you know what to expect come test day and feel comfortable entering the exam center.

How Long Is The GRE Test?

The GRE, or Graduate Record Examination , is administered under strict supervision and security measures, and takes about 1 hour and 58 minutes in total to complete , not including breaks.

Information Section

You will start with ten minutes to fill out your basic information. However, you do not have to use the full 10 minutes offered . When filling this out, be aware that the information you provide may be sold to certain entities who might in turn send you information about their programs.

If you don’t want ETS to sell your name , you have the option to click on a box that tells ETS not to share your information . After you complete the information section, you will have five sections total to complete.

Analytical Writing

The exam begins with Analytical Writing , which includes one assignment . The Issue Essay requires you to write on your stance regarding a topic that is provided in the prompt.

Verbal & Quantitative Reasoning

This part of the exam consists of four sections altogether and a total time of 88 minutes in which to complete it. There are 54 questions total across the four sections.

You’ll have 41 minutes to complete the two Verbal Reasoning sections and 47 minutes to complete the two Quantitative Reasoning sections .

Generally speaking, you should probably spend no more than 70-90 seconds on each of the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning questions. These sections will appear in any order, and although the questions for these sections are multiple-choice, the question format tends to vary, so be sure that you understand what response is required before answering .

The number of questions you answer correctly will determine your overall score for these sections . Points will not be subtracted from a score if you answer a question incorrectly. This means you can skip questions if you do not know them, however, it is best to answer every question (even if it is an educated guess) in order to earn the best possible score .

There is no longer a 10 minute break on the GRE . When tackling practice tests during your test preparation, be sure to mimic the real GRE and not take any breaks, just like the real thing .

This will help train your mind and body for the test.

Experimental/Research Section

There is no longer an unscored, experimental section of the test . Previously, the ETS used the experimental section to test different questions formats and concepts, but that is no longer the case. The ETS removed this section in order to shorten the exam for test takers.

The Order Of The GRE

The exact order of the exam sections varies in terms of the Verbal, Quantitative, and Analytical Writing sections.

You should expect to always start with the Biographical Info, following with the Analytical Writing Sections back-to-back, and then the Quantitative and Verbal Sections in random order .

How Long Does The GRE Take In Total?

Once you have completed the five sections of the GRE, you have five minutes to send your exam results to the school(s) for which you applied and require your score for admission.

By including the informational portion of the exam, sending select schools your results, and going through security/check-in, you should expect to spend around 2 hours and 15 minutes in order to complete the GRE .

As such, be sure to get there on time and clear out your schedule for that day to prioritize the test and its timely requirements. With commute to the testing center, it could be three or more hours.

How long does the GRE take?

The official exam length is 1 hour and 58 minutes. Including the check-in process and school selection portion of the exam, be prepared for the entire GRE testing process to take around 2 hours and 15 minutes to complete.

How is the GRE exam length compared to other tests?

The GRE is a fairly standard length entrance exam at around 2 hours. It is about the same length as the GMAT and LSAT, but much shorter than the MCAT.

1. Introduction to GRE Analytical Writing
2. Issue Essay vs Argument Essay: 11 Key Differences
3. 7 Major Factors That Boost Your AWA Score
4. The 6 Step Process to Conquer GRE Analytical Writing
5. Examples and Analyses of Perfect 6.0 AWA Essays
6. 6 Types of False Reasoning You Should Avoid on the Argument Essay
7. How to Finish an Essay in 20 Minutes: 9 Effective Strategies to Save Time on the AWA Section
8. Top 101 Transitional Words and Phrases You Should Use to Score a 6.0 on the AWA Section
9. 27 Mistakes You Should Avoid When Writing Your AWA Essays
10. Bonus Chapter – Mind-Blowing Templates to Score a 6.0 on the AWA Section

The Advanced Guide to GRE Analytical Writing

71 mind-blowing tips, techniques, and strategies to score a perfect 6.0 on the awa.

Written By Jitta & Sachin

Introduction to GRE Analytical Writing

Getting a 99 percentile score on either of Verbal and Quant sections on the GRE requires several weeks, if not months, of diligence, patience, practice, and smart prep. But with only a fraction of the hard work you put in for Math and Verbal, and just a few days of practice, you can easily get a 99 percentile score on the AWA section. Plus, getting a 6.0 on the AWA isn’t a regular occurrence, and only about 8000 test takers around the world do it every year. So, if you can be one of those guys, you will be famous not only among your friends, but also among the admissions committees.

Unfortunately, the AWA is the most neglected section on the GRE. Test takers across the world believe that they can easily master AWA in a day or two. And look at what they end up with: The average AWA score of a GRE test taker worldwide is a mere 4.0, and the average AWA score of an Indian test taker is even lower. Now, to most Indian students, getting a 4.0 on the AWA might seem like an impressive feat. But in reality, 4.0 is considered just average in most countries. And on top of it, getting a 6.0 isn’t really as tough as it seems. It is only that you don’t know how.

If you are looking to score a perfect 6.0 on the AWA section, you will have to be a lot more planned than most other students. Just as with the Verbal and Quant sections, mastering the essay section on the GRE requires the same amount of confidence, persistence, and practice. And in addition to all that, you will also need a solid guide that can help you with all the strategies and tips. You will need an AWA Bible, so to speak.

But sadly enough, there isn’t much useful information on the internet about this frequently neglected section. Yes, there are some good articles and sample 6.0 essays that you can get with a simple Google search, but nowhere on the internet is a definitive guide to help you write a 6.0 essay on the GRE. And that is why, we at CrunchPrep, decided to provide you with a complete, advanced guide to scoring a perfect 6.0 on the AWA. And hey, don’t blame us if the 6.0 percentile goes down from 99 to 80 soon.

What is the AWA all about?

The Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA) portion of the GRE consists of two essays, each of which you will need to write in 30 minutes or less. The two essays you will see on the GRE are, Analysis of an Issue and Analysis of an Argument. These two essays will always come first on your GRE test, no matter what. You cannot simply skip off AWA, move on to the other sections, and come back later. AWA itself is a separate section, and only after you finish writing the two essays can you move on further.

Despite what most students say, you should remember that the AWA only tests how well you can write an essay, and hence measures only your writing abilities. Contrary to popular opinion, the AWA does not analyze your thought process. As long as your essay sounds logical, writing ability is all it measures. We will be discussing more about this in the upcoming sections.

How important is the AWA?

It is a widely known fact that your AWA essay score is not as important as your composite math and verbal score on the GRE, and getting a 5.0 or 6.0 won’t make or break your chances of getting admitted to the university of your choice. Graduate school admissions officers only bother about your AWA score, if it is too low, or significantly lower than their usual class average. Yes, a poor score on the AWA can definitely send up a red flag, and the admissions committee will certainly think twice before letting you in. Sometimes, they even go to the extent of rereading your SOP and LORs, to find out if they were actually written by you or someone else. So, it is rather safe to say that the AWA score is an important enough factor when it comes to admissions.

What is the score range for AWA?

The AWA score ranges between 0 and 6.0, with 0.5 point increments. But what exactly does it mean to get a 6.0, or 4.0 or for that matter, a 0 on the AWA? Well, the scoring system is designed in a way that your responses to each of these essay questions are scored on a 6-point scale, with 6 being the highest score and 1, the lowest. Given below, are the parameters that ETS looks at when grading your AWA essays:

6.0 – Outstanding:

A well-articulated critique of the argument/issue, demonstrating mastery of effective writing, and displaying the following characteristics:

Clearly identifies and analyzes the most important features of the argument with deep insight.
Develops cogent ideas, organizes them logically, and connects them properly without sudden transitions.
Supports the main points of the critique strongly.
Demonstrates superior control of the English language, including diction, sentence formation, spelling, grammar and syntactic variety used in standard written English.
Few to no flaws in the essay.

5.0 – Strong

A well-developed critique of the argument, demonstrating good control of writing, and displaying the following characteristics:

Clearly identifies the important features of the argument and analyzes them thoughtfully.
Develops ideas clearly, and connects them logically, with appropriate transitions.
Gives a very sensible support to the main points of the critique.
Has clear control of language, including diction and syntactic variety
May have minor flaws like spelling errors, but no major flaws.

4.0 – Adequate

A satisfactory critique of the given argument, demonstrating decent control of writing, and displaying the following characteristics:

Capable of Identifying and analyzing the main features of the argument.
Develops and organizes ideas satisfactorily, but some important connections and transitions may be missing.
Supports the main points of the critique.
Demonstrates sufficient control of language, but may lack syntactic variety.
May have many minor flaws or some major flaws.

3.0 – Limited

A satisfactory essay with clearly flawed critique of the argument, demonstrating little control of the elements of writing, and displaying the following characteristics:

Does not identify or analyze many of the important features of the argument.
Has limited logical development and no proper organization of ideas.
Offers support of little relevance and value for points of the critique
Uses language imprecisely and/or lacks sentence variety
Contains occasional major errors or frequent minor errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics

2.0 – Seriously Flawed

An unsatisfactory essay with serious weakness in analytical writing skills, and displaying the following characteristics:

Demonstrates no understanding of the main features of the argument.
Almost no analyses of the main points have been made.
Does not develop any ideas or is disorganized
Provides nil to few relevant evidences.
Has frequent serious problems in the use of language, grammar, spelling, and sentence structure.

1.0 – Fundamentally Deficient

An essay full of fundamental deficiencies in analytical writing skills, and displaying the following characteristics:

Provides little to no evidence of the ability to understand and analyze the main idea.
Failure to develop an organized response.
Contains severe and persistent errors in language and sentence structure
Has an unusually frequent pattern of errors in grammar, usage, and logic.
A totally incoherent response.

0.0 – Unscorable

A paper that is totally illegible or obviously not written on the assigned topic. A score of zero is given to responses that come under one of the following cases:

The responses are off topic.
The responses are written in a language other than English.
The responses are a mere copy of the given topic.
The responses consist only of random keystroke characters.
No response.

So, it is safe to say that if you write at least a few sentences in English, you will get a score of 1.0. But rest assured, no university under the sun will accept a score that low.

How is the AWA graded?

Each of your AWA essays is scored on a scale of 0 to 6. Two readers will read your Issue essay and assign it a deserving score and two different readers will read your Argument essay and assign it a score. Each grader will award a 6.0 to the top essays and scores of 0 are reserved for essays written on topics other than the one assigned or written in a foreign language. The graders spend about 30 seconds to 2 minutes on each essay, and give it a score based on pre-defined evaluation metrics such as the overall quality of your critical thinking and writing, as mentioned previously. The graders who evaluate the responses are college and university faculty members from various subject matter areas, including higher education.

Once the readers finish grading your essay, the two scores will be averaged to arrive at a final AWA score. If the grades given by the two readers differ by more than a point, a third, highly experienced grader is brought in to resolve the discrepancy (i.e., determine your final score for that essay).

For each essay, your final score is the average of the scores assigned by the two readers or the adjusted score assigned by the third reader.

Here’s how a typical Analytical Writing score might be derived:

If you earned scores of 6 and 5 on the Analysis of an Issue, then your final score for the Issue essay would be the average of these two i.e., (6 + 5) /2 which equals to 5.5 and if you earned scores of 4 and 5 on the Analysis of an Argument, your final score on the Argument essay would be (4 + 5) /2 which equals to 4.5.

Your final AWA score will be the average of your scores on Issue and Argument essays i.e., (5.5 + 4.5) /2 which equals to 5, which will be your final AWA score.

It should be noted that though your AWA scores range from 0 – 6, about 90 percent of all scores fall between 2 and 5. The average score for the AWA section for all the test takers so far is around 4.2.

Your Analytical Writing Assessment scores are computed and reported separately from the multiple-choice sections of the test and have no effect on your Verbal, Quantitative, or Total scores. Your score report however will not include copies of your responses; only scores are sent. You will receive your essay scores approximately 10-15 days after your test date.

What do graders look for in your AWA essays?

Most students think that essay length the only important factor when it comes to AWA scoring. But, in reality, it is not. Of course, it is one of the most important factors , but it isn’t the only factor. You will have to take many other factors into consideration, if you are looking to get anywhere near the perfect score. We have complied a list of all the factors that affect your overall AWA score, so you can be well prepared, while improving your writing skills on those lines.

The 7 Elements Graders Look For:

This is the most important, and also the most fundamental of all factors that the graders judge your essays on. The grader should understand what you are trying to say, by reading once. This makes their job easier, and they will understand that if it can be understood with just a single reading, then your essay has clarity.

As we discussed earlier, the grader can spend a maximum of only two minutes per essay, and it is your duty to make sure your essays have clearly composed ideas, because more often than not, graders do not bother to reread your essay and waste another couple of minutes. Consequently, you will end up with a score much lower than what you actually deserve.

Ask yourselves these two questions when you are writing the essays. What are you trying to say? What’s your main point? These two questions must have solid answers by the time the grader finishes reading the essay. If you think about it, these are the exact same questions you will have to answer, during Reading Comprehension. Just like how you can easily solve a Reading Comprehension question if you have answers to those two questions, graders assessing your essay will also need to find answers to these exact same questions, if you need a perfect score. Substance matters more than any other factor when it comes to your essays. So, make sure you have solid points, and clear logical reasoning that can be easily understood.

2. Structure

You should have seen it coming; structure is the second most important factor on your essays. The way an article is formatted, has a massive impact upon its readability. Your essays should read like a story; something that can be easily understood, and something that has a proper structure and organization. So, it is important that you break up your essay into distinct paragraphs, each with its own meaning and context, while maintaining a smooth transition between one paragraph and the next.

This way, every paragraph reads like a separate story, and the essay graders can easily scan through your entire response easily. Plus, since the transitions are smooth, and there aren’t any sudden twists in your response, it will make the grader’s job a whole lot easier.

So, ideally, you should have a structure in mind before you begin writing the essay. The general structure is to start with an introductory paragraph followed by 3-4 body paragraphs and finish off with a conclusion paragraph. So, you should make sure that there are at least 5-6 paragraphs in your essay, if you want a solid score on the AWA.

3. Sentence Variety

Even though you are writing several paragraphs on the same topic, you should ideally avoid writing similar or same sentences. If you are an avid reader of news, you get the point. No good writer under the sun writes two exactly same sentences in a single essay or article. Consecutive sentences with the same structure and length can sound monotonous and lifeless, and will obviously bore the reader.

Instead of sounding repetitive and boring, use sentence style skillfully. But this doesn’t mean you should rearrange the words, or chance the voice from passive to active or vice versa. It simply means that you should use a different variety of words to mean the same thing.

For example, if you have already written the sentence ‘The most important virtue of a leader is a strong sense of ethics.’, and if you have to use the same sentence at a later point in the essay, you should try and rephrase that same sentence and write something like this: ‘A strong moral framework is paramount for any leader.’ Get the point?

In this way, you should keep varying the sentence structures, flow and rhythm by switching between short and long sentences. You should also make use of transitional and signal words to vary sentence openings and endings.

4. Vocabulary

There has been a longstanding myth among test takers that the GRE really loves heavy vocabulary, and using it on your AWA essays will boost your score. Well, this isn’t true at all. We have seen students with exceptional vocabulary but poor coherence get paltry AWA scores in the past. And we have seen students with great essay scores without using heavy vocabulary.

Like we said earlier, the AWA is not testing how much vocab you have in your arsenal. There’s Sentence Equivalence and Text Completion for that. AWA only tests how logically you can deduce information and write a reasonable critique about an issue or an argument made by someone else. So, don’t buy those myths. As long as you use sensible reasoning, proper grammar and as long as you can defend your point intelligently and use precise vocabulary to convey meaning effectively, you should be alright. It is not needed that you use heavy vocabulary or GRE words.

5. Language and Grammar

Though officially ETS says you may have minor errors in the essay copy, that doesn’t mean you can ignore silly mistakes. Even though the mistakes or errors do not interfere with overall meaning and coherence, you should understand that the time you make your first error on the essay, the grader will notice it, and will be more conscious while reading the rest of the copy. The grader will be even more vigilant to see if there are any visible or obvious blunders that you have made, and this can have a negative impact on your AWA score. So, try and make sure your essay is as spotless as possible, and eliminate all errors before submitting. Take time to proofread your essay, once you finish writing it. Don’t be in a hurry to submit it off and skip to the next section.

6. Reasoning

Reasoning plays a key role in determining the overall quality of your essay. You should always look to include as many logically compelling reasons as you can to support your stance. One of the most important features about a compelling essay is its ability to convince the reader by means of sound logical reasoning. Anyone who reads your response should be totally convinced of your view point, without having second thoughts. To be able to write such a compelling and well-reasoned copy within 30 minutes would be rather difficult, but you can definitely do it with a lot of practice.

So ideally, you should be able to connect your ideas properly to the central theme or idea of the essay, and convince the reader to agree to your point of view. If the essay doesn’t sound logical or reasonable, you will unfortunately have to pay the penalty, no matter how long the essay is.

7. Evidence

In order to make your essay sound reasonable and logically sound, you will obviously need to provide sufficient evidences. If you want to impress the readers, and convince them to agree to your point of view, you will ideally want to provide convincing evidence to back up your thesis. Search for evidences, either direct or implied, and connect them with the essay. You can even create some random examples and evidences, as long as they fit the bill and don’t sound too random. Develop examples that cogently reinforce your thesis is key to a high essay score.

So, those are the 7 most important elements that graders look for in your essays. Make sure you have all these things covered in your essay, and you’re sure to see a perfect score.

Should you skip the AWA section during practice?

This is probably a question that is on the minds of many students. Almost half of the GRE test takers are native English speakers. And these students tend to neglect practicing the AWA section at home, because according to them, it’s not worth investing time on something they are very confident about. But, there are a few vital points that they don’t realize. We’ve observed what students do when they practice for the GRE, how their approaches have affected their scores on test day, and figured out four reasons as to why the AWA section is an extremely important aspect of the GRE exam.

Number 1 Reason Why Practicing GRE AWA is Important: Inflated Scores During Practice:

This is the single most important thing to consider when we talk about the importance of the essay section. Students normally tend to skip the essay section when they take practice tests, so they can directly go to the first section of Math/Verbal. Though this might seem like the obvious choice to you, you should consider the aftereffects before jumping into conclusions.

Think about it. The GRE is not a typical test that you encounter at college or elsewhere. It is a marathon. An intense, 3 hour 45 minute journey, which obviously you aren’t accustomed to. Now, if you skip the essay section during practice, you’ll be forfeiting 60 minutes of the total test time, which means you are going to have to sit for 2 hours and 45 minutes only.

This translates into an inflated overall score during practice, because you are just that much more active than you will be on test day. So, you get accustomed to sitting for 2 hours 45 minutes for the test, and your brain is hardwired to concentrate for that much time only. But, on test day, you still have two more sections to finish after you complete 2 hours and 45 minutes.

Do you get the point? It’s that extra one hour of concentration that requires sudden attention from your brain, which it sadly isn’t ready for. This is exactly why thousands of students score very low on their last two to three sections. They simply aren’t ready for the extra time, because their brains feel tired already. So, if you don’t skip the essay during practice, you’ll be writing in the exact test conditions as on test day, thereby training your brain for the big encounter.

There are a few other important reasons why you should not skip off AWA during practice , and we have discussed them separately.

How Long Should My Essay Be?

The essay graders are aware that you only get 30 minutes to write each AWA essay and they also know that you won’t be able to cover every possible argument, reason and rebuttal. Hence they do not expect you to write a super long detailed analysis of the issue or argument given to you. Remember that most GRE test takers won’t be able to find time to cover everything they would like to cover on the test.

So, how long should your AWA essay be? We see students wondering about this all the time and we know you would like to know about it too. ETS has not spoken out about the ideal length of an essay, and there is no word on the word limit as such. But there seems to be a pattern that appears on GRE sample essays that come along with the ETS official guide to the GRE.

When closely observed, there is a significant increase in the number of words from a 5.0 graded essay and a 6.0 graded essay. The reality is, longer essay is usually better. To analyze further on this topic, we have done a bit of research, and found out an interesting relation between essay length and the final score. If you look at the statistics below, you will have to concur with me. Longer essays usually score better on every essay topic.

If you are a long-essay fan and insist to pen a high scoring AWA essay on the GRE, you should write anywhere between 500-600 words. Don’t ask us why. The research shows that’s how it is, and if it true for a sample of 500 students, it must be true on a larger scale as well.

A column chart with average word count for essays from 500 students

As you can see, the longer the essay, the higher the grades. Notice that a 5+ point essay has length exceeding 500 words. Another interesting fact is, it seems as if 600 is an upper limit for word count. If you go beyond 600 words, you can see how the scores go down. This isn’t surprising, though. Almost no student on this planet can write a perfect 800 word essay under pressure in 30 minutes. If someone is shooting for a high word count, they are surely sacrificing on quality. So, it’s safe to say that 500-600 is what you should be looking at.

If you’d like to know more about the GRE essay length , we’ve done a separate post on that. Go check it out now.

Categorization of GRE Essay Topics

The most fascinating thing about the GRE essay section is that each and every essay topic that shows up on the real test is already published on the official ETS website. This may sound crazy because giving out the questions in advance is totally unnatural. By knowing the topics beforehand, you can prepare sample responses for all those topics and on the test day, all you need to do is just reproduce your sample response. Isn’t that a great advantage for you? You can get a perfect 6.0 score very easily!

But there’s a catch! You were expecting a few, aren’t you?

Well, there are close to 200 topics in all – far too many to practice responses in advance. Also, practicing each of these topics is not advisable as it is going to take a lot of time and effort and there is no point in mugging them up. You could as well spend this time on learning some math or vocabulary. However, there’s a good news. Just scanning through these two lists of essay topics will give you an excellent idea of the types of issues and arguments that show up on test day.

Now, most of the topics that show up on the GRE Essay section can be broadly grouped into five categories. I made things a bit easy for you and listed those five categories below. Take a look.

Government/Politics
Sciences and Technology

So, next time when you practice writing an essay response, make sure you write at least an essay from each of these categories.

How do I get ideas for the essay?

This is most likely the second most frequently asked question in our support mails by students around the world. It’s because a large number of issue and argument prompts on the official essay pool are hard to understand correctly. And when you don’t understand something, how can you write about that something?

So, what can you do about to solve this problem? Here are a couple of things you should work on:

If you were asked to write about a topic from out of nowhere, you would struggle for ideas. But when you already know that there could only be five categories from which your essay topics can show up, then you can turn the table in your favor. You should keep a few related examples for each one of these categories (i.e. education, arts, politics, technology, philosophy) as they will be handy and save you precious time on the test day.

Also, the essay prompts are full of obscure vocabulary and hence are hard to comprehend. Since, every essay prompt that could appear on the GRE is openly accessible on the official ETS website, you should give them a read through. While reading, you should also make note of all the unfamiliar words and later learn them. Learning these new words will ensure that you understand the topic well or at least allow you to take a very good guess.

How to get your essays graded?

Believe it or not, one of the most frequent questions that we receive from students around the world, is how they can get their essays graded. That is a good question, actually. Given the fact that there are so many practice tests for the GRE where you get your Math and Verbal sections graded, there is not even one practice test in the entire world that can grade your AWA score for you. If you are wondering why, it is because it is not at all easy to grade your essay instantaneously.

Think about it. Even on the test day, you will only receive your Math and Verbal scores, but not the AWA score. ETS itself takes about 7-10 days to give you an official report of your AWA score. It is that difficult to assess an essay. Plus, it is required that a human grader reads and grades your essays, if you want an accurate score. Which is obviously impossible if you are taking a practice test at home.

So what can one do? Is there no way to get your AWA essays graded? Well thankfully, there are quite a few options that you can consider. We’ve listed down all the available options, and it is up to you to decide which of them you want to choose.

5 Ways to Get Your AWA Essays Graded

Ets score it now.

The ETS Score It Now, is a great feature available for you to get your essays graded. For a small amount of $13 dollars, the ETS Essay Grader will grade two of your essays. You can submit any two of your essay responses, and the software will get back to you with a graded score of your AWA. Now, for most students around the world, and especially for those from the developing world, $13 is quite a lot of money.

And that is probably the reason why most students don’t even know that such a facility is available. We must agree, that even we at CrunchPrep have never used the service ourselves, or know any student who has, simply because we did not need to. Our expert tutors, on the other hand, have been grading student essays for free for a long time now. But nevertheless, we’re pretty sure that the ETS Score It Now feature will get you an accurate score, because well, it’s ETS who developed it.

And there is one more downside with this feature. The score is all you get, when you submit your essays. No feedback. Now, you would expect that ETS would give you some valuable tips to improve your score, but unfortunately, that $13 you spend is only going to get you a couple of numbers from ETS. So, unless you don’t need feedback, you are really not improving on the essay, and you have money to spend, you should definitely try and consider some other alternatives to this service offered by ETS.

Friends, Family, and Experts

Yes. However unbelievable it might seem, your friends can sometimes help you get better marks. They can help you identify the mistakes you did not find obvious enough, and you also get an outsider’s opinion on your essays, and therefore on your points of view. Now, even though your friends might be untrained, or unaware of the GRE AWA grading system, having a second pair of eyes look at your writing can be really beneficial to finding your flaws. Plus, you receive feedback then and there, right on your face, and it is sometimes the easier way to learn.

But before you let your friends or family judge your essays, you should tell them beforehand that you only had 30 minutes to write your essay, and so they should not expect you to write an award-winning piece. You should also tell them to pay attention to, and then judge you on the following aspects of your essay: structure, logical flow of ideas, and persuasiveness of examples. They should ideally not be looking for impressive words or sentence framing, but it is just an added bonus.

If however, you are too shy to ask your friends or family, try asking an experienced professor at your college, preferably a professor in linguistics or someone who is really good at formal, written English language. These professors not only give you an accurate assessment of your essays, but will also give you valuable insights as to where exactly you can improve your writing skills.

Self-Evaluation

When you don’t have access any professors or wise friends who can help you evaluate your AWA essays, the best option you are left with, is you. Self-evaluation, though most of the time not recommended, can be a really useful option for you. There are hundreds of mock essays on the internet, and with a simple google search, you can get access to various essays for the GRE. Even the ETS website has a few sample answers for essays, and the same questions have sample answers which are purposefully written to mirror a 6.0, or a 5.0 level essay, for example.

So, if you can compare your response with those on the internet, you can roughly estimate whether your answer is closer to the 4.0 or the 5.0 sample. If you can do this a lot of times, you will begin to see a definite pattern, which can help you estimate your average AWA score. Also, most mock essays usually have an explanation at the end, which explain why they have been given their respective scores. This really helps you see if your essay is lacking in similar ways.

This sounds rather difficult, and it actually a really complex and time taking process, which is why you should try and take this approach as a last measure; if you cannot find any other alternative helpful enough.

Internet Strangers

If you are an internet geek, you would probably agree that sometimes, internet strangers are really helpful in nature. There are many GRE forums like Urch , PaGaLGuY , etc, where you will find hundreds, if not thousands, of GRE experts and aspirants, who wouldn’t mind lending a hand. Thousands of GRE aspirants visit these forums every single day, and if you can post your essay and ask for some feedback, more often than not, someone will provide you with the necessary assistance. While this someone may or may not be an expert, it often helps to have a second opinion from someone in your niche.

GMATAWA.com

Alright. We’ve saved the best for the last. GMATAWA.com is probably the most fantastic resource out there, when it comes to grading your essays. It was developed to grade GMAT AWA essays, but rest assured, there’s not much difference between GMAT and GRE AWA essays. The basic structure of essays is the same everywhere, and this website is really helpful in grading your essays.

The grading happens instantaneously, and as soon as you submit your essay, you will receive a composite AWA score, along with various metrics on which your essay has been graded. We, at CrunchPrep, assure you that, other than ETS Score It Now , this is probably the most accurate AWA rater you will see, and you can expect a similar AWA score on your exam as well. So, make full use of this feature, and assess your writing strengths and weaknesses. However, you should remember that the website allows you to grade only 10 essays per email address, so choose wisely which essays you will be sending.

So, those are the five ways that you can get your AWA scores graded. Most often, more than one of the resources mentioned above will definitely be helpful to you. And by the way, remember this: Only two things can make you a better writer – Practice, and Feedback.

Issue Essay vs Argument Essay: 11 Key Differences

The Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA) section of the GRE asks you to complete two separate but complimentary writing tasks: The Issue Essay and the Argument Essay. Each task tests your analytical writing skills, including the assessment of your critical thinking skills. Both these essay questions are allotted 30 minutes each and are scored on a scale of 6.0. And those are the only similarities between them both.

There are lots of differences between these two types of AWA essays that a majority of test takers are unfortunately unaware of. It is common to think that since both these are essay questions, there aren’t many differences between them. And most of the errors that students commit in this section are due to the confusions that exist between these two essay types. GRE Issue Essay and GRE Argument Essay are very different in nature, and hence you need different strategies to tackle them. We will go deep into each of these essay questions you will see on the GRE, but for now, remember that the GRE Issue Essay requires you to construct and support your opinions on a particular ‘issue’ that has been given to you, whereas the GRE Argument Essay requires you to validate the authenticity, or the logical correctness of an argument that someone else has constructed, without letting your opinions interfere with the task. Got the difference? Now, let’s move on to the finer details.

Issue Essay vs Argument Essay:

1. your view vs. their view:.

The GRE Issue Essay basically tests your ability to present an argument with your views, and your ability to convince the reader to agree to your point of view. As you can clearly see here, you should include your own views and add valuable points to your response, in order for the reader to be convinced to agree with you. On the other hand, the GRE Argument Essay requires you to completely analyze a brief argument written by another author, and to effectively critique the argument or the author’s point of view, by providing sufficient evidences, and by asking logical questions.

2. General Topic vs. Specific Topic

In an Issue Essay, the debatable topic that has been given to you to analyze, is very general in nature and can be from any field. It hence doesn’t usually require you to have a very deep knowledge of the topic. The issue is simply provided as a statement, and your job is to pick a side, stick to it until the end without fiddling around, and present your points of view, your analysis, and your final conclusions in a suitable manner.

However, in an Argument essay, the author himself already presents a case with his/her supporting evidences in the form of a paragraph. Your job is to see how logical the argument sounds, and check whether this argument is right or not, whether the argument has been made on solid grounds, with sufficient evidences or not. You should then effectively critique the argument, by choosing sides. If you choose to substantiate the author’s point of view, you can cite your own examples to strengthen the points, and if you wish to go against the given point of view, then you must be able to ask comprehensive questions that check the validity of the evidences provided in the argument.

3. Analysis vs. Reasoning:

The directions for answering the Issue and Argument essays are also different. The directions given for an Argument Essay read somewhat like this:

“Write a response in which you examine the stated and/or unstated assumptions of the argument. Be sure to explain how the argument depends on the assumptions and what the implications are if the assumptions prove unwarranted.”

Or like this:

Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. In your discussion, be sure to analyze the line of reasoning and the use of evidence in the argument. For example, you may need to consider what questionable assumptions underlie the thinking and what alternative explanations or counterexamples might weaken the conclusion. You can also discuss what sort of evidence would strengthen or refute the argument, what changes in the argument would make it more logically sound, and what, if anything, would help you better evaluate its conclusion.

And the directions given for an Issue Essay are entirely different from the Argument Essay, and unlike the Argument Essay, the Issue Essay can be accompanied with a varied set of instructions, and there is no one particular direction for you to follow. For example, on the day of your test, you may see any one of the following directions, at the end of the issue:

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.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the recommendation and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, describe specific circumstances in which adopting the recommendation would or would not be advantageous and explain how these examples shape your position.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and supporting your position, be sure to address the most compelling reasons and/or examples that could be used to challenge your position.
Write a response in which you discuss which view more closely aligns with your own position and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should address both of the views presented.
Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim and the reason on which that claim is based.
Write a response in which you discuss your views on the policy and explain your reasoning for the position you take. In developing and supporting your position, you should consider the possible consequences of implementing the policy and explain how these consequences shape your position.

4. Your Conclusion vs. Their Conclusion:

In an Issue Essay, remember that you must be able to introduce the issue at hand in your own words briefly, using your own conclusion , while in an Argument essay, the given argument must be introduced from the author’s point of view using his own conclusion . This is such an important difference between the two essays, and most students tend to do the opposite more often than not, which is why they end up with average scores. You should always be clear on whose conclusion you are taking into consideration: yours, or the authors. And this depends on whether it is an Issue Essay or an Argument Essay.

5. Reasons vs. Flaws:

The second paragraph in the Issue Essay is where you should be stating the side you have chosen, and also your reasons for standing by it. Whereas in an Argument Essay, the second paragraph begins with the biggest flaw that you have identified in the argument made by the author. You should also discuss how his conclusion made by the author overlooks this major flaw. The flaws in the author’s presented argument must be identified before you start writing your response, which makes it easy for you while critiquing the argument.

6. Real Examples vs. Hypothetical Examples:

In the Issue Essay, the body paragraphs (paragraphs 2, 3, and 4) must definitely involve relevant real world examples that support your chosen claim. Remember that the examples you provide must not only be relevant, but they must be real world, true examples. Which means, you cannot create examples out of thin air, on your own. But, in an Argument essay, you have the flexibility to create your own examples, as long as they are relevant to the given topic, and as long as they efficiently substantiate the argument that you are trying to make. The flaws made by the author that you have identified, must be stated with explanations and solid examples, which can sometimes be fake, as long as they fit the scenario you are trying to explain.

7. Appreciating vs. Questioning:

The conclusion statement in an Issue Essay always involves agreeing with the opposing viewpoint in one or two statements. Even though you might not like agreeing with the opposing viewpoint, you should mention that it can be right in a few instances too. You should do this in order to show your emotional maturity level. But, in an Argument essay, the conclusion statements ends on a note of doubt, where you claim that the argument may have one or more valid points but is otherwise entirely flawed, needs more plausible explanations, and requires more solid examples for it to be valid.

8. Agreeing vs. Disagreeing:

Agreeing to the point of view given in the Issue Essay gives you more points to write, since more often than not, the issue presented to you is a general topic, and there will be few points to go against, while there will be plenty of points to support the given claim in the issue. But we still advise students to go the negative route. We will discuss this later on.

But the scenario is entirely different when it comes to the Argument Essay. The Argument given is deliberately made to sound negative, and since the given argument requires a critical analysis of the presented claims rather than your own perspectives, you can, and hence should, go against the author’s point of view. Since more often than not the author’s point of view will be flawed, you will have lots of points to write, and it becomes easier for you to attack the author’s argument instead of trying to support it.

9. Limitation vs. Liberty:

A very important point you should remember is that in an Argument Essay, you should only prove that the evidences supporting the conclusion are inadequate, not that the conclusion itself is wrong. The conclusion is always right, but you should doubt or question the authenticity of the conclusion, meaning, ask how the author came to such a conclusion without sufficient supporting claims. But it is never wise to say that the conclusion itself is wrong, so you should rather limit yourself to saying that the conclusion needs more evidences. On the other hand, in an Issue essay you have the liberty use anything and everything to support your claim. Because the topic given is very general in nature, you may use any evidences to support your statements, even if they say that the conclusion is wrong.

10. Statement vs. Evidence:

The Issue Essay depends on outside, credible facts, because there are no evidences provided within the issue. The issue question is a simple, generalized statement, and there will be no evidences provided. Which is why you should go search for your own evidences, and decide if you want to support or question the conclusion made by the author. But the Argument Essay already has its own evidences provided within the paragraphs, which you will have to analyze and critique.

11. Two Sides vs. One Claim:

The Issue Essay is always like a two sided coin, presented as a contestable topic with two sides where you have the option to go with the side you can present best. The Argument Essay however does not have two sides for you to choose. It has only one claim which must be analyzed and critiqued.

In the GRE, AWA Section is very important as it shows off your communication skills and writing abilities. Looking out for these common differences between the Issue Essay and the Argument Essay, will help you avoid mistakes and prevent misconceptions. A better understanding of these differences and sufficient practice will help you score high in this section.

7 Major Factors That Boost Your AWA Score

It is important to note that the essay graders are reading your essay in a fairly short amount of time, usually between half a minute to two minutes max. So, rest assured that they are not going over your responses with a fine-toothed comb. Nor do the graders have any rulebook which they have to follow in order to add or subtract points from your overall score. There is no rule that says “subtract .5 points for every 3 grammatical errors in the essay.” Or “Add 1 point for every 5 impressive GRE words used in the essay.”

The graders are there to assess your essay holistically. Which means, they are gauging its overall effectiveness, and then assessing it, as humans. But how do they gauge effectiveness? Are there any metrics that usually have in mind while going through the essays? Yes. Fortunately, there are 7 major factors that that may stand out to a grader and help influence your overall AWA score.

Organization

Organization is given the foremost importance by many graders. And it isn’t that hard to understand why. Essays that are well organized are, in fact, easy to read. That’s important because you don’t want to make the grader’s job any more difficult than it already is. The grader has only a couple of minutes to read your entire essay, and poorly organized essays are hard to follow. This will lead the grader to give you a score lower than you actually deserve. But on the other hand, a well-organized argument is easy to follow. Since the graders are looking at your analytical abilities, it helps if they can follow your argument.

If you organization is unclear, however, then your argument is also likely to come across as unclear. In the next chapters, we will be discussing more about how your essay should be organized in order to get a high score.

Syntactical variety is a very key aspect of writing quality content. Your essays should always have a proper syntax, and you should be using a variety of sentences to make your writing look professional enough to get a perfect score. Syntax is a fancy word for how you organize words into sentences. And you already know how important organization is. You should always try to write clear sentences that are crisp and easy to understand. Unlike what most students believe, you don’t have to use extensive vocabulary, unless they really fit into the scenario. So, save the GRE vocabulary for Text Completion, and write your essays simply yet creatively. Again, you should remember that your grader has to read hundreds of essays on the same day, and they sometimes will not be thrilled to untangle a complex sentence that you have used. So, they naturally skip that sentence and read further. So, it is always better to write clearly and simply than to go for risky propositions and complex sentence structures.

A general finding is that longer essays tend to score higher than their shorter counterparts. This may be attributed to various obvious reasons. First of all, if you have written a pretty long essay, it means that you have a lot of insight into the given topic and you are able to address numerous issues relevant to the discussion. Second, if you can write a 500 word essay coherently within 30 minutes, you will be considered as a voracious writer in general. These are the abilities that are usually likely to impress a grader.

But, make sure that the quality of the essay is maintained throughout the length and breadth of your essay, for, if you don’t maintain quality, you might come off as someone who is just trying to impress but is unable to organize and prioritize their thoughts. Long essays that are clearly organized, use professional language, and contain strong supporting evidences, and give enough reasons to the grader to give you a better score. We’ll soon discuss more on this.

Your essay response should definitely contain quality instances of premises, facts or reasons given to support the conclusion that you are trying to make. Your essay needs to contain some sort of supporting evidence, whether it be logical, statistical, factual, or other forms of justifications. Without proper support, your essay will not be able to effectively develop a firm position on the given argument or issue, and it certainly fails to persuade the reader’s opinion. So, make sure you always look for supporting evidences, and provide them wherever needed.

Like discussed erstwhile, you’re going to have to come up with a lot of examples that help illustrate the point you’re trying to prove, if you want to make your essay stand apart from the rest of the pack. Since test takers have a mere 30 minutes to write these essays and will never know the topic beforehand, the graders are used to seeing a lot of hypothetical examples. And this is completely okay. As long as you make sure that the examples fit the point you are trying to explain, it is completely fine. But the way to make your essay stand out is to use real life examples. I know it is very difficult, but if you are lucky enough to have some background about the given topic, you should try to include an expert opinion within the essay, and if you can, you should try and add relevant facts, statistics, and case studies to your essay.

Although the AWA does not test your grammar skills and the caliber of your writing, if your essay has a lot of grammar errors and spelling errors, it raises a serious red flag in the mind of the graders. This often happens because students tend to think that they can outsmart the grader by using fancy sounding words once in a while. While doing this doesn’t hurt, it is important to remember that you should only use words you actually know. Sometimes, students might not know the exact meaning, or even worse, the spelling of a big word that they heard somewhere, but they still go ahead and use it in a sentence. And obviously, they will be wrong, one way or the other. Now, while spelling is not one of the criteria the graders look for in your essay, nothing gives them a red flag like reading “Sevaral entreprenuers” or “primery hypothesys”. These are regular words used every day, and if you cannot spell them right, your score is bound to go down. Remember that unlike MS Word or other desktop word processors, there is no spell check or grammar check available on the GRE AWA. So, don’t hurt your score by using words whose spellings you don’t know.

The word processor on the GRE is quite basic in nature. You’ll have basic keyboard functions, plus three other features: cut, copy, paste, and undo. And that’s all. No other shortcuts or spell checks or other advanced features like bold and underline. Now, these functions work exactly as they do on your computer. You can cut text from a portion of your essay and paste it in at a different point. Or you can use undo to delete your typing. Use these features and reduce the time you spend on editing your essay. Learn how to use these features, if you are new to them, and practice speed typing at home.

This is really essential in these days of email and text messaging, where most of the younger population use chat language and shortened forms of words like lyk, hw, wat, imma etc. While this form of English is of no good anywhere in your life, it is especially frowned upon by the GRE community. So, if you find yourself using these sort of words in your essay, which has often happened in the past with many students, you will see your score go down suddenly and rapidly. So, it wouldn’t hurt to do a little typing practice at home before test day.

So, those are the seven major factors that help you boost your essay score on the GRE. You should analyze your AWA essays whenever you take a practice test, and see if your essays have all of these.

The 6 Step Process to Conquer GRE Analytical Writing

Here we discuss the step by step process you should implement, if you want to write powerful AWA essays in under 30 minutes and get a 6.0 score. Each of these steps discusses what you should exactly do, so as to make things easier for you on test day. All you need to do is follow these steps during practice, and get these tips into your head without much effort. Though the Issue and Argument Essays are quite similar when it comes to answering, we have given you separate step by step process to ace them both.

AWA Issue Essay:

The Analysis of an Issue essay tests your ability to “explore the complexities of an issue or opinion and, if appropriate, to take a position that is informed by your understanding of those complexities.” What this means is you should properly analyze the given issue and take a strong position: either negative or positive, and then elucidate examples as to why you have chosen that particular side.

The specific directions for the issue essay task are given like this: “In this section, you will need to analyze the issue presented and explain your views on it. There is no “correct” or “best” answer. Instead, you should consider various perspectives as you develop your own position on the issue.”

Before you begin writing your response, you should take a couple of minutes to think about the issue and plan a proper response before you begin writing. This helps you organize your ideas and develop them fully. Make sure to leave sufficient time to reread your response and make any revisions that you think necessary.

Following are the six simple steps that you should follow in the same order, if you want to pen down a powerful AWA Issue essay.

Step 1: Read the Essay

Obviously, this must be your first step. But you don’t just read the essay. You must perform a ‘smart read’. A smart read is where you read the prompt and figure out the central issue, and jot down this issue on your scratch paper, including some of the important concepts from the given topic. This is what more than 95% of students fail to do. Rather than juggling all your thoughts inside your mind, it is a lot easier to pen down whatever you have understood from reading the prompt in your own words.

Your work on this first step gets you grounded for the essay ahead. After reading the given issue, and writing it down in a few concise words, you should be able to understand exactly what the issue is and also what some of the crucial concepts related to that issue are.

Step 2: Brainstorm Reasons and Examples

This is perhaps the most crucial step of all, and this step is also where most of the heavy lifting gets done. Once you know what points you want to prove and what examples you will use to prove that point, writing the essay will be very easy. Half of the duty lies in brainstorming efficient examples and supporting reasons to supplement your point of view. So, make sure you spend adequate time on this step. Pre-planning before you start writing is of the utmost importance, because then, you will have a continuous flow of thought while writing, and there won’t be any wastage of time. If you start writing without thinking through the issue or planning the structure of your essay, you run the risk of wasting time on editing and re-editing your points.

Or even worse, you might reach a dead end and there is no more evidence left with you to substantiate your point of view, but you’ve already spent 20 minutes on the essay that you cannot go back and write a fresh piece. So, it is important that you take the time to brainstorm some examples and then pick a side. After you’ve written down the central issue and the key concepts, you should ideally make a “pro” and “con” list on the scratch paper. Start thinking of reasons for both agreeing with and disagreeing with the given issue. Once you have enough reasons to pick a side, you can move further. You should think about how your personal experiences relate to the issue at hand. Think about things you have observed or experienced in daily life, read about in magazines or newspapers, or even heard about from your family members and friends.

Next, you should be coming up with some examples of your own, that support or illustrate your point of view. Good supporting examples can be the difference between a score of 4.0 and 6.0, so it is worth spending a little time trying to generate them. Don’t spend more than two or three minutes on this part because you can still write a good essay without perfect examples.

Step 3: Pick a Thesis

After you have some reasons and examples for side that you have chosen to go with, you will have to pick a proper thesis based on which you will write your opinion. This is because you don’t have to actually believe the position you write about; sometimes, you may disagree with the issue at hand, but find it easier to come up with examples and reasons for the other side of the argument. So, you need to decide which thesis you are comfortable writing about. Don’t mull over it for minutes together. Just choose whichever thesis allows you to write the strongest essay. In most cases, you find the “con” side easier to argue. You can find a lot of examples that way. And that is completely fine.

Now your thesis needs to state why you believe this position is correct. Take a moment to think about this, and jot your thesis down on your scratch paper. Now you are ready to outline you essay.

Step 4: Outline Your Essay

Don’t start writing your essay altogether. Instead, outline your essay in the direction you want to take. Figure out what you want to write in the introduction, how you want to start off, and how you want to end the conclusion. Then, figure out what you want to write in the body paragraphs. More importantly, you will have to consider how to introduce the opposing side of the argument and how counter it with your point of view. Mentioning the other side of the coin makes the graders think that you are mature enough to have considered the various perspectives on the issue, without going ahead blindly based on intuition.

Step 5: Write Your Response

If you have finished all the previous steps properly and as planned, then this is by far the easiest step of all. All you need to do is write your response in a proper order, something that looks like this:

Introduction – hook the reader with an amazing intro and state your most important thesis
Agreeing to the given issue
Bringing up the negative side of the issue along with supporting facts and quotes
Building up the negative side further with examples and support

This is the most basic essay outline, and the most famous out there. But you can also follow an unconventional structure and still write a great essay. Some of the other structures that you can follow are:

Introduction
First argument for the side you take
Refute your first take and argue for the opposite side
Second argument for the side you take
Refute your take again and argue for the opposite side

This structure allows you to take a neutral step, and hence interweave the arguments for both sides, just like in a debate.

Another structure that can be used in many situations is:

Argument for your side
Argument against your side
Conclusion: evaluate both sides and arrive at thesis

This structure is probably the hardest of all, but has the advantage of being new and uncommon. Graders will definitely appreciate a new structure once in a while, and tend to reward essays that move beyond the norm.

But, the point is, the writing part of the essay should really be the easiest part. Most people who think they have trouble writing actually don’t have difficulty with writing, but they have trouble figuring out what exactly they are trying to say. So if you’ve completed the previous steps, you should know more or less what it is that you want to say about the topic.

Step 6: Proofread

Proofreading is another step that is often neglected, mainly because test takers don’t have the time to. They think they cannot afford to waste one or two minutes proofreading the essay, while they can use the same time to write an additional sentence or two. But as a matter of fact, a perfect 400 word essay gets a higher score than an imperfect 450 word essay. So, you should rather focus on improving what you have already written, and try to spend at least three to four minutes on proofreading what you have written.

Since you don’t have a spell checker on the AWA, you don’t know if you misspelled any word in a hurry. So, be sure to check every single word, and try to refine your essay as much as you can, before the time runs out. Make sure you have all the necessary parts of your essay and the examples you meant to use. Doing these things will clean up the overall appearance of your essay and can only positively affect your score.

AWA Argument Essay

While the Analysis of an Issue task measures your ability to create your own argument, the Analysis of an Argument essay measures your ability to evaluate someone else’s argument. In the words of the test writers, the argument essay tests “your ability to formulate an appropriate and constructive critique of a specific conclusion based upon a specific line of thinking.”

There are two key points in these directions; “evaluate the argument,” and most importantly (it’s so important the directions place it in italics), “do not present your own views on the subject!” Some test takers end up basically writing an analysis of an issue essay when they are supposed to be writing an analysis of an argument essay. Your job here is simply to evaluate and critique the argument presented, not offer your own position on the subject. If you do not answer the question appropriately, you can say goodbye to a good score.

The steps for the Analysis of an Argument essay are somewhat similar to the steps for Analysis of an Issue:

Step 1: Evaluate the Argument

The Analysis of an Argument task presents you with a passage exactly like the passages found on Critical Reasoning questions. Your first task is to break the argument down into its conclusion and premises. Once you have the conclusion and the premises, the next step is to find the assumptions underlying the argument.

Step 2: Brainstorm Assumptions

These arguments are usually full of holes, even more so than Critical Reasoning arguments. You should be able to find two or three major assumptions necessary to make the conclusion work. Look for the common argument patterns: causal, sampling, and analogy. Of course, there may be a lot of assumptions spread around the entire argument, but you only need two or three good assumptions to construct your essay. Now that you have the major assumptions, you can plan the general format of your essay.

Picking a thesis on the argument section is rather easy and involves just one step. Just assume that whatever assumptions that the author has made have no evidences, and go completely negative on that, and prepare a thesis in your mind in that direction.

Once you have laid out the assumptions of the argument, you need to evaluate the strength of these assumptions. Since your task is to evaluate and critique the logic of the argument, you must consider how viable these assumptions are. Generally, the arguments on the GRE are poorly reasoned, so you should basically be looking for reasons the assumptions fail to lead to the conclusion. Think about ways you could weaken and strengthen the argument. A typical essay plan looks like this:

Introduction: Describe the premise and point out the flaws or state your intention
Detail first assumption; explain problems with it and how to weaken/strengthen the argument
Repeat for second assumption
Repeat for third assumption
Conclusion: Give final evaluation of the validity of the argument

This is the most basic format for the argument essay, but feel free to make changes as and when you need. You may also use one of the following structures that are less commonly used.

Introduction: Describe the premises, conclusion, and assumptions of the argument
Weaken the argument by attacking the assumptions
Strengthen the argument by bolstering the assumptions
Conclusion: Present final evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the argument

Another variation goes right to the assumptions in the argument:

Detail first assumption; explain problems with it and how to weaken/strengthen the argument.
Repeat the same for second assumption.
Repeat the same for third assumption.
Conclusion: Evaluate the strength of the argument based on the assumptions.

Step 5: Write

The writing process on the argument essay is in some ways a little easier than that of the issue essay. Because the focus of this essay is the logic of the argument, there is no need for creative prose. Instead, you are merely presenting the flaws of the given argument in an objective fashion. Your delivery on the argument essay can be straightforward and simple and you can still get a great score, provided your analysis is sound. Following is what each paragraph needs to contain.

Introduction Paragraph

Your introduction paragraph needs to lay out the basic parts of the argument and let the reader know what the purpose of the essay is. Your introduction should have these elements:

A statement of the conclusion
A statement of the premises
A statement of the essay’s purpose

Body Paragraphs

The body paragraphs of an argument essay should describe the assumptions necessary to the argument and then critique them. A good critique should reveal the weaknesses of the assumptions and also show how the argument could be strengthened. Argument essays do not require specific examples and in many cases, specific examples would be inappropriate. Focus instead on dissecting the logic of the given argument. A body paragraph should have the following components:

A description of an assumption
An explanation of the weaknesses of the assumption
An evaluation of the conclusion in light of the assumption

Conclusion Paragraph

The conclusion paragraph of an argument essay doesn’t need to do much, but as with the issue essay, you need to have one. All you have to do is make a final evaluation of the soundness of the argument.

Before you leave your essay, spend one or two minutes proofreading your essay. Make sure you have all the necessary parts of your essay and that your essay is free from grammatical and spelling errors. Correct any typographical errors. Doing these things will clean up the overall appearance of your essay and can only positively affect your score.

Examples and Analyses of Perfect 6.0 AWA Essays

Now that you know how exactly you should structure your AWA essays, it is time to understand what a perfect essay looks like. In this chapter, we will discuss a couple of examples for perfect 6.0 Argument and Issue essays, and we will also analyze the reasons these essays deserve a perfect score. This will give you a basic idea of the various key aspects of the AWA essays that you should include while writing. These essays have been taken from the ETS Essay Pool itself.

Example and Analysis of a Perfect 6.0 Issue Essay

“When someone achieves greatness in any field such as the arts, science, politics, or business that person’s achievements are more important than any of his or her personal faults.”

When individuals attain greatness, their achievements are more important than their personal faults. While historians should not whitewash the personal foibles of great individuals, the impact that these mortals have had in their fields should tower over any personality defects. To focus on the personal weaknesses of great individuals is to miss the importance of their achievements.

The course of human history is decorated with individuals able to rise above their peers and reach the zenith in their fields. These individuals are often the subject of intense scrutiny from contemporaneous skeptics and later historians. But no one can lead an exemplary private life all the time; no human being is able to withstand such surveillance and historical scrutiny without personal faults coming to light. Great individuals are no exception. However, it is misguided to focus on their personal faults rather than their achievements. To do so is to miss the importance of their work, without which our culture would be worse off.

For example, Abraham Lincoln was arguably one of the greatest Presidents the United States has ever had. He managed to bring the country through a substantial revolution and to end slavery despite powerful economic and social forces working against him day and night. However, Lincoln was not a saint. He was moody and prone to depressive funks that disrupted his family life and slowly eroded his marriage. These personal faults did not reduce his success as a President. While we do not have to ignore questions about whether he was a depressive, we also should not consider them an important part of his political heritage. In contrast, many people criticize Lincoln’s decision to suspend the right of habeas corpus. This (presumed) failing is not personal in nature, but relates directly to Lincoln’s work in his field. Criticisms of this sort are entirely relevant, whereas personal criticisms are not.

Another example of a great individual dogged by criticism of his personal conduct is Albert Einstein. Einstein developed a number of the most important theories in modern physics, including an explanation of the photoelectric effect, an explanation of Brownian motion, special and general relativity, and Bose-Einstein quantum statistics. Each one of these theories would have been considered a great life’s work for a scientist; for one man to contribute this much is remarkable. However, Einstein also had life-long problems with infidelity. The fact that he cheated on his wife is in no way relevant to his accomplishments in the field of physics, and indeed most references to Einstein properly ignore it. To focus attention on the faults of his personal life is to obscure the impact he made on history.

Great individuals have personal faults, as all human beings do. Yet it is incorrect to assert that these faults detract from those individuals’ accomplishments. We are better able to appreciate the gravity of great accomplishments when we are not burying our heads in the sand, in search of personal failings.

Explanation:

The essay above deserves a perfect score, because it takes all the 7 major elements that graders look for, as we have already discussed in chapter 3: Clarity, Structure, Sentence Variety, Vocabulary, Grammar, Evidence, and Reasoning.

The thesis provided by the student is very clear and concise. There is no confusion about which side the student took. The issue essay tests how well we can present a position on an issue effectively and persuasively, and this essay passes both the tests.

The piece is also very well organized. The most popularly used structure “intro-body-body-body-conclusion” really works well for this type of an issue, and the student made good use of it. While the response included only two examples as opposed to the suggested three, the two examples presented are extremely strong. President Lincoln is an ideal case study of a leader whose greatness should be not be obscured by his domestic problems. The same can be said with Einstein; his infidelities may have wounded his family emotionally, but his contribution to modern science and technology will be remembered throughout the history of mankind. So, obviously, two of the most historic and the most apt examples were presented by the student here.

Additionally, the conclusion is substantial and does an excellent job of summing up the essay. The student uses a variety of sentences in order to make the conclusion unique, and not sounding too much like the introduction itself. He/She does a great job of restating the introduction paragraph without sounding overly redundant. Lastly, this essay is extremely well-written, and shows the student’s grasp over written English language. The grammar and syntax are almost flawless, and it is hard to write a better essay response to this issue, in under 30 minutes.

These are the reasons why this essay deserves a straight 6.0 score.

Example and Analysis of a Perfect 6.0 Argument Essay

The following appeared in the editorial section of a national news magazine:

“The rating system for electronic games is similar to the movie rating system in that it provides consumers with a quick reference so that they can determine if the subject matter and contents are appropriate. This electronic game rating system is not working because it is self-regulated and the fines for violating the rating system are nominal. As a result an independent body should oversee the game industry and companies that knowingly violate the rating system should be prohibited from releasing a game for two years.”

Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. Point out flaws in the argument’s logic and analyze the argument’s underlying assumptions. In addition, evaluate how supporting evidence is used and what evidence might counter the argument’s conclusion. You may also discuss what additional evidence could be used to strengthen the argument or what changes would make the argument more logically sound.

The argument claims that the electronic games rating system, although similar to the movie rating system, is not working because it is self-regulated and violation fines are nominal; Hence, the gaming rating system should be overseen by an independent body. Stated in this way the argument fails to mention several key factors, on the basis of which it could be evaluated. The conclusion relies on assumptions, for which there is no clear evidence. Therefore, the argument is rather weak, unconvincing, and has several flaws.

First, the argument readily assumes that because the electronic game rating system is self-regulated, it is not working well. This statement is a stretch and not substantiated in any way. There are numerous examples in other areas of business or commerce, where the entities are self-regulated and rather successful. For instance, FIA, the Formula1 racing organization is self-regulated. Yet, the sport is very popular and successful, drawing millions of spectators around the world each year. Tickets are rather expensive, races are shown on pay-per-view, and nearly all drivers are paid very well.

Another example is the paralleled movie rating system that the argument mentions. The author fails to clarify whether it is working well, but it is clear that the movie rating system is pretty well received by people, who often base their decisions to go see a movie with kids or not on the movie rating. It has never been a case when someone would feel cheated by the movie rating and express disappointment afterwards. Since the movie rating system is also self-regulated, it follows that this regulatory method is working pretty well and it is not obvious how it can be the reason for the poor electronic game rating system. The argument would have been much clearer if it explicitly gave examples of how the self-regulatory system led to bad ratings and customer dissatisfaction.

Second, the argument claims that any violation fees for bad electronic game ratings are nominal. It thus suggests that this is yet another reason for the rating system not working. This is again a very weak and unsupported claim as the argument does not demonstrate any correlation between the monetary amount of the fines and the quality of the electronic game rating system. In fact, the argument does not even draw a parallel with the mentioned movie rating system and its violation fines. If any such correlation had been shown for the movie rating system, which supposedly works well, then the author would have sounded a bit more convincing. In addition, if the argument provided evidence that low violation fines lead to electronic game manufacturers to ignore any regulations with respect to the game rating system, the argument could have been strengthened even further.

Finally, the argument concludes that an independent body should oversee the game industry and companies that violate the rating system, should be punished. From this statement again, it is not at all clear how an independent regulatory body can do a better job than a self-regulated one. Without supporting evidence and examples from other businesses where independent regulatory bodies have done a great job, one is left with the impression that the claim is more of a wishful thinking rather than substantive evidence. As a result, this conclusion has no legs to stand on.

In summary, the argument is flawed and therefore unconvincing. It could be considerably strengthened if the author clearly mentioned all the relevant facts. In order to assess the merits of a certain situation, it is essential to have full knowledge of all contributing factors.

The piece is also very well organized. The most popularly used structure “intro-body-body-body-conclusion” really works well for this type of an argument, and the student made good use of it. The response included sufficient examples that are pretty solid, and more than satisfy the student’s take. The examples provided are also real-life in nature, as opposed to many hypothetical examples that students write. This gives this essay response quite an edge.

The student uses a variety of sentences in order to make his/her point strong enough to concur with. He/she does a great job of restating the introduction paragraph without sounding overly redundant. All the paragraphs are very well written, and the structure, writing, and vocabulary used by the student shows the student’s grasp over written English language. The grammar and syntax are almost flawless, and it is hard to write a better essay response to this issue, in under 30 minutes.

6 Types of False Reasoning You Should Avoid on the Argument Essay

In order to confuse test takers, the AWA essays will always contain some flawed reasoning or illogical statements. In particular, some of the paragraphs on the AWA Argument essay will contain flawed reasoning, which can appear in many forms. While these forms can potentially be unlimited in number, most of them can be categorized into 6 groups. These are potentially the 6 types of false reasoning that you frequently see on the AWA Argument essays:

Creating stereotypes. Assuming that characteristics of a group in general apply to each member of that group.
Assuming that a certain condition is necessary for a certain outcome
Drawing a weak analogy between two things
Confusing a cause-effect relationship with a correlation (famously known as post hoc ergo propter hoc, i.e. correlation does not imply causation)
Relying on inappropriate or potentially unrepresentative statistics
Relying on biased or tainted data (methods for collecting data must be unbiased and the poll responses must be credible)

Almost all of the argument essays contain more than one of the following flaws, so it is important that you are aware of each and every possible flawed reasoning.

1. The Stereotypical Assumption

We see this happen quite often in our everyday life. People resort to creating stereotypes of a particular person, or a group of people. However, common sense says that it is pretty unrealistic to describe a group and then expect that every single member fulfills the very same characteristics.

For example, saying that ‘Girls are weaker than guys’ or that ‘Asians are geniuses’ is just plain wrong, because in both the cases, the statements are generalized in nature. While both the statements can seem to be true for the most part, we all know that in the real world, some girls are stronger than guys, and that some Asians fail their tests. Which means, one cannot simply make a sweeping statement in either of the aforementioned cases.

Now, you can easily remember this type of false reasoning on the AWA, by relating it to stereotypes. We generally think of stereotypes as harmful because they unfairly limit a certain group to a predefined characteristic that often has little to no evidence. Hence, in order to avoid falling trap to this stereotypical assumption fallacy, you should immediately consider any sentence that generalizes a particular group as plain wrong, and attack that assumption when you are writing your response.

2. The Necessity Assumption:

This is a very frequent type of false reasoning that hides in plain sight. Most students simply cannot identify that this type of reasoning is wrong. The author of an argument usually assumes that a certain condition is necessary to achieve the desired result. This sounds reasonable, but the problem here is, the author simply says that it is necessary to do something to achieve something, and does not provide the necessary evidence which proves that there is no other means of achieving a similar result.

For example, the arguments says that, if students have to perform better in schools, it is necessary that the teachers be more active in the classroom.

Now, this looks like a perfectly logical statement to anyone. But the problem is, the author has not considered whether there are any other ways students can perform better in schools. The author makes a simple statement that outlines only one necessity – the teachers being active – and does not talk about the relevant evidences, or the possibility of other ways to achieve the same result. Of course, there are other factors involved: maybe students can perform better if they study every day at home, or if the school redesigns the curriculum to suit the needs of students, etc. So, you should keep in mind to attack this necessity assumption, and also to include the alternative factors or possibilities.

3. The Illogical Analogy:

Analogy is when someone comes to a conclusion about something on the basis of another thing. For example, if a giant conglomerate has doubled its sales in the last one year because it had spent over $10 million on advertising, then in order for another giant conglomerate to double its sales, it has to spend more than $10 million on advertising.

Now, on the first glance, this might seem like a logical argument. But, if you think about it carefully, it is an illogical analogy that the author has made in order to prove his/her point. The argument may seem sound enough to agree to, but one simply can’t analogize these two scenarios, even though the size of the companies is similar.

First of all, we don’t know if the two companies are based in the same country or not. The demographics in their respective countries may respond to different incentives. And there are several other factors like industry, market size, product quality, support system, target audience, consumer trends, economic situation in the country, etc., that need to be addressed, before the author can make such a comparison. Without this thorough background info, one simply can’t make this analogy, and test takers should hence not fall into such traps.

4. The Correlation – Causation Confusion:

As confusing and bemusing as the title is, this is one of the more frequent fallacies that appear on the AWA argument essays. More famously known as the post hoc fallacy, this is easily one of the most common types of false reasoning you’ll encounter on test day. So it is very important that you master it.

Many arguments try to confuse test takers by arguing that correlation and causation are one and the same. But in fact, they aren’t. There is actually a world of difference between them both. While correlation just means that two events have occurred simultaneously, causation means that one event is the result of another event. Now you understand how different these two are. To illustrate further, let us take this as an example: In the year 2000, Company X released their new computer called Series 5, and that same year, the US witnessed a huge economic recession. Again in 2008, the company released its second computer called Series 6, and the US had undergone another economic recession. So, whenever this company releases a new computer, the economy goes down.

Do you see how illogical it sounds? That is the difference between correlation and causation. The above example shows correlation, and not causation. So, one should be careful enough to understand that just because one event happens after another, it doesn’t mean that the first event caused the other to occur.

5. The Statistical Irrelevance:

You will often find that the AWA arguments cite statistical evidence to support their claims. Now, while we appreciate any kind of statistical data that further bolsters the author’s point of view, we must also be careful to analyze the relevance of the statistical data in a particular scenario.

Sometimes, the argument may cite a statistic according to a survey where a small group of people were asked a question, and based on their views, the author generalized the opinion of the people of the entire city/state/country. For example, if a survey of 1000 people in New York City say that they really need a new park in the city, does it mean that the entire population of the city feel the same? In order to draw a conclusion about anything, a larger sample is required. In order to really identify the voice of the people, the survey should at least include a majority of people in the city. If the population of New York City is 10 million, then the survey should try to include the opinions of at least half that number.

Hence, test takers should keep an eye on statistics mentioned in the arguments made by the author, and try to validate the relevance or significance of the given statistical data.

6. The Data Bias:

Sometimes, even though surveys include a large number of people or a certainly large sample space, it is not enough to conclude that the results obtained from the survey are really true. Biased data is another reason why data can be manipulated with, or tainted easily. For any survey or data to be considered legitimate it has to be collected in an unbiased, fair, and scientific manner.

For example, if a survey was conducted among children in a city, on the question “What is your favorite color?” and the children were given only two options, Blue and Red, one cannot conclude that Red is the most favorite color for the children in the city, even though 83% of the children chose Red. The survey clearly does not ask an open ended question, and is biased towards either Red, or Blue, or both. The survey is designed, consciously or unconsciously, to yield certain desired responses, and this definitely manipulates responses by providing narrow options.

Hence, test takers should question the statistical legitimacy of a survey, and question the author whether the survey or data obtained is scientific and unbiased or not.

Checklist for Argument Essay Task:

Here is a checklist you should use when you practice writing argument essays. Ask yourself these questions to identify the flaws in the given argument.

Are the facts stated in the argument real or are they just preposterous exaggerations? (Hint: you can always question the source of the information provided in the argument)
If the argument draws conclusions from any sample statistical data, then is the connection between the data and the conclusion strong?
Is the sample data taken from the group similar to the other group for which the conclusions were made?
Is the sample data significant enough?
Is the provided sample data inconclusive or invalid? Did it exclude other important factors?
Are the statements mentioned in the argument from an authority on the subject or from individuals trying to voice their concerns/opinions?
Do you have any real world examples that invalidate the conclusion? (examples from your personal experiences, from articles you read before, from the news or from historical incidents)

Is there anything missing in the argument? Maybe there is really something that should have been mentioned to make the argument more concrete.

How to Finish an Essay in 20 Minutes: 9 Effective Strategies to Save Time on the AWA Section

When it comes to acing any section on the GRE, it all boils down to mastering one key factor – time. Time is the only reason why 99% of the test takers cannot get a perfect score on the GRE, let alone on the AWA. But then, just as pretty much with everything related to the GRE, we at CrunchPrep have cracked the code in order to finish off a brilliantly written essay in under 20 minutes. That’s right, 20 minutes only.

Just as with other sections on the GRE, there are a few time saving strategies that you can adopt on test day, if you want to finish off the AWA section quickly, and still score a perfect 6.0. Here are the 9 most effective time saving strategies that you should implement on test day.

1. Finish off Introduction and Conclusion First

This is an amazing technique that not only saves time for you, but also relieves you of the pressure of writing something in reply. All you have to do is, as soon as you are ready to pen down your response, finish off writing the introduction and the conclusion paragraphs first. Don’t bother touching the other paragraphs yet.

Now you may wonder, how on earth one can write the conclusion part without ever concluding the essay in the first place. Simple. As we have already discussed in the previous chapters, you first outline your essay before you start writing it. So, by the time you are about to start penning down your response, you will have already figured out what you want to write in the introduction, how you want to start off, and how you want to end the conclusion. So, it becomes rather easy for you to get started.

Finish these two very important paragraphs as early as you can, preferably in the first 5 minutes. Now, if you can do this well, you only have three more paragraphs to write, and you have over 20 minutes of time left. You can easily write each paragraph in 5 minutes, and the entire essay will be finished before you know it.

2. Always Be Negative

Even though we asked you to pick a thesis in the previous chapters, you should know that if you want to save time, you will have to try and stay on the negative side. This applies to both the Issue and the Argument essays. If you are wondering why, you should understand how the human brain works when analyzing a controversy. It takes no time for us to point out mistakes in others, while it takes a lot of thinking and courage to appreciate something that is controversial, because our brains are evolutionarily hardwired to stay away from something foreign, in order to protect us. And given the incredibly limited time that you have on your hands, it will be easier for you to criticize the author’s point of view, than to take his/her side.

So, let us go with some prejudice here. Before you even start reading the essay question, you should be in a negative state of mind, and be ready to counter the given essay with lots of criticism. You should believe that whatever the author has written is false, no matter how logical it may seem. This sort of thinking will help you brainstorm the relevant points quickly.

3. Attack the Assumptions

In both the Issue and the Argument essay questions, the author will have made multiple assumptions in order to come to a particular conclusion. It is your job now to attack the very assumption that the author makes. There is no point in attacking mere facts, because we never know if the facts are true or false. Which means, you cannot simply claim that the facts presented are wrong. But you can always say that the assumption is wrong. So, as soon as you start reading the essay question, figure out where the author has made assumptions, and think about how you can attack them.

4. Don’t Be A Perfectionist

This is a big problem among students today, especially those who really want to get a perfect 6.0 score. Wanting a 6.0 score is okay, but the problem is, these students try to be perfectionists about everything they write. They try to make sure every little thing about their essay response is perfect. Now, while this is a good practice in normal life, you should remember that this will hit you badly on test day. You cannot simply make sure everything you write is perfect, especially when the clock is running after you, and when you are totally stressed out.

A better strategy is to keep writing even though you make mistakes, as once you think you are done with the writing part, then you can start proofreading your copy for mistakes and small errors.

5. Use the Scratch Paper

One of the biggest sins that GRE test takers commit, is that they don’t use the scratch paper to its fullest. Don’t be under the impression that the scratch paper is given only to help you solve quant problems. The scratch paper can be used effectively to score higher on the AWA section too. Use the scratch paper to pen down your thoughts as you are reading the given topic, and also make use of it to outline your essay, and to devise a proper answering strategy.

If you need more details, on how to use the scratch paper on the GRE , we have done a separate post on that. Check out more scratch paper tips and strategies here .

6. Practice Typing

If there is one thing that can help you write a 500-600 word essay in under 20 minutes, it is the ability to type fast. Considering the fact that you will take about 2-3 minutes to read and understand the given question, another 2-3 minutes to figure out what you want to write, and another couple of minutes to outline your essay, you will be left with roughly 20 minutes to write a 600 word essay. Considering the fact that you should save some time to proofread your essay, you should probably be able to type around 600 words in 15 minutes, which means, 200 words every 5 minutes.

Yes, it is possible to type a couple hundred words in 5 minutes, if you already know what you are going to write. Don’t worry about it. 200 words in 5 minutes equals 40 words per minute, which is exactly the global average for typing speed. But still, if you think you can’t type that fast, start practicing today. There are some fantastic free resources like Keybr and TypingWeb available online, that help you learn fast typing.

7. Practice Keyboard Shortcuts

Learning keyboard shortcuts can be really helpful on test day. The word processor on the GRE is quite basic in nature. You’ll have basic keyboard functions, plus three other features: cut, copy, paste, and undo. And that’s all. No other shortcuts or spell checks or other advanced features like bold and underline. Now, these functions work exactly as they do on your computer. You can cut text from a portion of your essay and paste it in at a different point. Or you can use undo (Ctrl + Z) to delete your previous typing. Use these features and reduce the time you spend on editing your essay.

8. Practice! Practice! Practice!

As straightforward as it gets. Just as with the other sections on the GRE, the more you practice writing long essays at home, the higher you score on test day. But there is a catch here: you should practice typing essays on a computer keyboard. This is rather important, because most of us today use laptops and tablet phones to communicate, and the keyboards we normally use differ greatly from those of the desktop computers. You will have to type on a desktop computer keyboard on test day, and it is recommended that you get used to the new keyboard at home itself.

9. Read The Entire AWA Question Pool

We generally don’t recommend this to every student, since most of them don’t have the time to. But if your test is months away from now, it will do you a world of good if you can go through each and every AWA question from the ETS Essay Pool. There are separate question pools for Issue Essays and Argument Essays , and they are not too many in number. You could probably finish them all in a month or two.

Remember that the AWA questions you will see on test day will be from these essay pools only . So, it won’t hurt to check them all out.

Top 101 Transitional Words and Phrases You Should Use to Score a 6.0 on the AWA Section

The difference between a normal essay and a great essay, is the way it is written. Normal essays are lifeless, and they bore readers a few lines into the story. But on the other hand, great essays meticulously use persuasive language, and gain the reader’s attention. In addition to writing compelling reasons and connecting stories, you should also include powerful vocabulary, if you want to get a perfect score. Since a lot of students who take the GRE are non-native speakers, they will not be able to naturally write essays that sound truly professional.

So, here are some of the words and phrases you should be using when you write your AWA essays. You might have seen these words countless times in books, newspapers, or magazines. But it is time for you to include them in your writings, and make your essays sound professional.

Supporting words – for instance, for example, to illustrate, to demonstrate, such as, particularly, specifically, notably

Additional support – moreover, furthermore, in addition, similarly, in the same way, with respect to, as well as

Putting same idea in a different way – in other words, to put it simply, in view of this, with this in mind, to put it differently, that is to say

Opposing words – by contrast, on the other hand, in comparison, on the contrary, instead, though, while, despite, although

Consequential words – as a result, accordingly, thereupon, thence, thus, because, for this reason, in effect

Time indicating words – immediately, formerly, currently, meanwhile, eventually, first, second, finally, previously, henceforth, in due time, subsequently

Certainty words – without doubt, most importantly, indubitably, undoubtedly, needless to say

Comparison words – in comparison, however, likewise, even so, nevertheless, nonetheless, all the same

Positive words – magnificent, grandeur, magnanimous, phenomenal, marvelous, prodigious, formidable, notable, glorious, wonderful, paramount, sublime, flamboyant

Negative words – unfounded, doubtful, questionable, oversimplified, problematic, unconvincing, unacceptable, biased, unreliable, defective, presumptuous, vague, unwarranted, weak

Against the point of view words – one cannot deny that, to be fair, it could be argued that, granted, admittedly, a stark contrast, as contrasted with, on second thoughts

Concluding words – in summary, consequently, hence, in closing, in conclusion, therefore, ultimately, to summarize, on the whole, for the aforementioned reasons

Ultimately, it is the content of the essay that really matters. If you are able to write an astounding essay, you really don’t need any advanced words or phrases. But since it is a herculean task for many students, especially the non-native students, to write a perfectly professional essay in under 30 minutes, it would definitely help if some of these words are included.

But at the same time, students should be careful enough to not simply scatter these words across the essay as they please. These words and phrases should really fit in the context of the essay, and the sentences must smoothly integrate into one another. Hence, refrain from using these words and phrases improperly, and learn when and where to use them in your AWA essay.

27 Mistakes You Should Avoid When Writing Your AWA Essays

Until now, we have discussed numerous techniques and strategies to score a perfect 6.0 on the AWA section. But, we think it would be beneficial if you have all the probable mistakes at one place, so you can safely avoid them all at once. Here are the 27 mistakes that you should strictly avoid while writing your AWA essays. Now, some of these points may sound repetitive since we have already discussed a lot up until now, but think of this as a checklist that can help you figure out the danger zones and possible pitfalls.

1. Writing a cliché ridden essay

While using cliché phrases and sentences may seem like an idea choice for anyone writing an essay, it would more often than not be detrimental to someone writing the GRE. Understanding the fact that hundreds of thousands of students write the same essays every year, you should try and be a bit different, a bit unique. Using the same examples that everyone uses really won’t help you much, because it only looks like you have lifted those lines from someone else’s passage or an online journal. So, try to use your own examples, and your own sentences while writing the AWA essays.

2. Not citing the original author

Sometimes, it would really help if you can use a killer essay quote or two, in your AWA essays. But it is important to remember that you should cite the original author, lest there is chance that you might come off as pretentious. Whenever you are quoting someone’s lines, it is customary to give them the credit. Doing this will not only reinforce your image as a trustworthy individual, but also gives the grader an impression that you are an intellectual person. After all, only uber-smart people can remember great quotes along with their authors’ names.

3. Writing mixed-up paragraphs

If you remember what we discussed about writing and organization in the previous chapters, you should recollect the fact that you must allocate separate paragraphs for every idea or point that you are writing about. Often times, test takers tend to stuff a paragraph with two or three ideas, and end up mixing it up pretty badly. This can often cause confusion, not only to the grader, but also to you. Discussing more than one point in a single paragraph is not at all recommended. Dumping all ideas into a single paragraph is a very bad idea, and shows poor organization. So, make it a point to not mix up paragraphs.

4. Giving away too much in the intro

The most important aspect about writing an article or an essay is to avoid giving away too much information in the very beginning itself. Don’t believe us? Ask any content marketer. The key to writing exceptional essays is to keep the reader intrigued until the last word. This is one of the reasons why we hate our textbooks but love fiction novels: the latter simply keep you interested until the end. So, you might want to implement the same strategy when writing your essays. Do not give away too many key points, or at least your main idea, in the first paragraph itself. There are separate paragraph for that.

5. Using irrelevant examples

Just as we already discussed multiple times throughout this guide, avoid using irrelevant examples as much as you can. Sometimes it is fine to make up your own examples, but remember that they should be very relevant to the rest of the essay. So, as much as you can, try and come up with strong and concrete examples to support your point of view.

6. Not summarizing effectively

One of the more overlooked mistakes in writing is that many test takers tend to not summarize their essays properly. A perfect conclusion paragraph not only includes the main idea or point of view that you chose to side with, but also has a neat summary of all the points that have already been discussed in the previous paragraphs. Now, this doesn’t mean you need to write them all over again, but a quick conclusive line about each paragraph would do you a world of good.

7. Introducing new points in the conclusion

Yes, this happens quite often, and is one of the major reasons why many are not getting close to that perfect AWA score. Sometimes, you finish off writing the entire body of the essay, and move on to the conclusion paragraph. As you are writing it, you are struck with a new point or an idea that you think should be on the essay at all costs. So, what do you do? You somehow try to fit that point somewhere in the conclusion paragraph, and you think it will add to your existing robust set of points. But guess what? You haven’t backed it up properly anywhere in the essay, and hence the entire point sounds irrelevant or insufficient at that point of time. So, avoid introducing new ideas or points in the last paragraph. Be content with what you have already written.

8. Writing immediately

If you have read the previous chapters thoroughly, you would understand that there is a step by step process that you need to follow in order to get closer to the 6.0 score. But, a majority of the students give in to the temporal pressure, and start off writing as soon as they read the question. This will only lead to chaos in the next few minutes, as you will find your head clogged with ideas. So, give it a minute or two, and think about what you are going to write, before you start typing.

9. Not ideating correctly

A poorly presented idea is as good as an idea not presented at all. Whatever point it is that you are trying to make, you should make it correctly. An improper presentation, or a poorly organized idea will only make your essay sound more amateur that anything else.

10. Taking too much time for ideation

As straightforward as it can it, time is the most valuable resource on the GRE. Taking too much time just to gather ideas is not at all good for your score. Almost all the essays you will see on the GRE are quite simple to criticize, and anyone with decent practice can crack the code easily. So, in order to avoid wasting too much time trying to ideate, you should do a bit of practice at home.

11. Not sticking to one side

We’ve already said it out: Go negative! There is no way an average GRE test taker can write a perfectly balanced essay response in under 30 minutes, which is why most of them tend to sway towards a particular side. You should follow suit, if you want to score higher on the AWA section. Not sticking to any one of the sides shows that you are too afraid to stand your ground, or that you are too confused to pick a side. Neither of this is a good image for you, so always pick a side no matter what.

12. Not using templates/structure

There are a few basic structures for writing the AWA, and adopting them would be a good idea, since you don’t have to reinvent the wheel all over again. We have already done most of the hard work for you, and provided some basic structures and templates that you can easily follow. If you can’t make good use of them, at least try to create your own organization or structure. Otherwise, your essay response ends up being too clumsy to understand.

13. Not being specific enough

Whichever side you choose to take, or whatever point you are trying to make, be specific. Never try to beat around the bush and expect to get away with. You are not a politician. Never use vague statements that only lead the grader to more confusion. Be very specific about your opinions, and have a clear idea of what exactly you are going to write, even if it might sound a bit negative, or a bit harsh on the author.

14. Using complex words just for the sake of using

To paraphrase Maya Angelou’s epic quote, ‘You should use a word only if you know what it exactly means.’ Keep this in mind at all times. Do not use a word just for the sake of using, and end up sounding like a novice writer who is trying to impress people he doesn’t know. Instead, use nice little words that sound simple and professional enough to get you a good score.

15. Not using transitional words

Your essay should read like a story. Every paragraph that you write should have a smooth beginning and a smooth ending, thus making the entire essay readable. This can only happen when you use transitional words and phrases that are like bridges linking one paragraph with another. Not using transitional words can make your prompt sound abrupt and hence, not perfect.

16. Not sounding confident enough

Whether it is an Issue essay or an Argument essay, you are asked to give your opinion. Which means, you are entitled to write whatever it is that you have in mind. Nobody is going to argue, or disagree with you, so there is no need to get defensive at all. Using words such as ‘I think’, ‘in my opinion’, ‘perhaps’, ‘Maybe’, etc., will give the reader the impression that you are not confident enough to put your ideas forth. So, be more confident, and more authoritative when you are writing your opinions. Write like an expert editor of a newspaper, not like a newly recruited intern.

17. Using the word ‘I’ very often

While it is perfectly alright to sound like an expert, it is not alright to sound narcissistic and repetitive. A lot of students use the word ‘I’ way too often that it puts the reader off. Yes, everybody already knows that it is you who wrote the essay and that all the ideas presented in the essay are yours. There is no point in saying ‘I think this’, or ‘I would do that’ etc. A few times is fine, but too many times isn’t welcome at all.

18. Using the same sentence structure over and over again

If you remember what we said earlier, sentence variety is as important as anything else. Using monotonous sentence structures or repetitive phrases throughout the essay is a pretty bad idea, since it tells the reader that you, as a writer, lack variety, or creativity. So, try to rephrase the same sentences and write something else that means the same. Like many other things in life, this comes with a lot of practice.

19. Not including a counter argument

Agreeing with the author to some extent will give the grader a great impression about you as a writer, but if you keep on agreeing with the author’s points of view, without including any new information from your side, you will surely come off as someone without any knowledge about the given subject. Given the fact that almost all essays come from a wide range of topics, and that they don’t need any special prior knowledge, it would be bad if you cannot counter the author’s deliberately wrong point of view along with your two cents.

20. Contradicting yourself

With so many arguments and counter arguments clogged inside your mind, and with the speeding clock on the screen, it is possible that you somehow contradict your own argument. Sometimes, when writing the third or the fourth paragraphs, test takers contradict their own opinions or points of view that they put forward in the first one or two paragraphs. This clearly shows that you get confused easily. So, don’t contradict your own statements, and always read what you have written.

21. Letting writer’s block take over your AWA

Writer’s block is when an author loses the ability to write something new. This has happened to the greatest of writers, and will probably happen to you too, if you don’t practice well enough before the test. If you are someone who is not used to writing a lot, then should start practicing for the AWA, unless you want to end up staring at the screen pondering how to begin the essay.

22. Affecting other sections due to mistakes in AWA

Also you already know, you will face the AWA section first. Don’t let the AWA section set the tone for the rest of the test. Sometimes AWA goes great, and you’ll feel extremely confident (or overconfident) about the remaining sections. Sometimes, you may not do well on the AWA and feel gusted about yourself, which affects the other sections. So, try to stay unaffected by the result. Remember; you are the one who sets the tone, not a couple of essay questions.

23. Focusing a lot on grammar and vocabulary

Even though grammar and vocabulary are really important when it comes to scoring higher on the AWA, you should not overstress their importance. Write whatever you can and as much as you can. Do not bother about silly grammatical errors or workaday vocabulary. Once you think you are done with writing, then go back and read everything, correct those grammatical mistakes, or replace those boring words with good vocabulary. But, do it only once you are done with the essay.

24. Writing unnecessarily long sentences

Mark Twain once said ‘If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.’ That shows how difficult it is to write short and concise sentences. Anybody can write long gibberish in a short time, but it takes lots of practice, time and talent to keep it simple. Now, even though you are not blessed with a lot of time during the GRE test, you should try to minimize your sentences to make them sound smarter. Don’t try to use filler words or phrases so you could increase the word count. Quality trumps quantity any day.

25. Using slang language.

Writing as if you are chatting with a friend is something that happens quite often during exams. Using chat language and shortened forms of words like u, hw, y, etc. is bound to happen, especially if you are not very adept at writing often. If however, you find yourself using these sort of words in your essay, your chances of getting a good AWA score will rapidly decrease. So, it wouldn’t hurt to do a bit of practice at home before test day.

26. Attacking the issue task as if it’s an argument

Or vice versa. It is possible to get confused between an issue essay and an argument and test takers often mistake one for the other. This could be the gravest mistake you will ever make on the AWA section, because if you cannot understand whether the given question is an Issue or an Argument task, then you cannot write a proper response at all. So, make sure you don’t get confused between the two essay formats or structures, and that you have a clear understanding of both the question types.

27. Not leaving time for proofreading

Proofreading is often neglected because test takers simply don’t have the time. They think they cannot afford to waste one or two minutes proofreading the essay, while they can use the same time to write an additional sentence or two. But as a matter of fact, a perfect 400 word essay gets a higher score than an imperfect 450 word essay. So, you should rather focus on improving what you have already written, and try to spend at least three to four minutes on proofreading what you have written.

So, this is the most comprehensive list of mistakes that you can avoid on the AWA section of the GRE. With this, we come to the end of this ultimate guide. And if this were any other guide, we would have finished it here. But since this is an advanced guide for the AWA, we would like to give you something special. Something that is exclusive to only you. In our bonus chapter, we would like to give you a bonus: A couple of super-secret templates that you can use, if you want to speed up your AWA preparation.

Bonus Chapter – Mind-Blowing Templates to Score a 6.0 on the AWA Section

This bonus chapter includes mind boggling AWA Essay templates that will get you a sure shot 6.0 score. We have created these templates after examining several hundreds of AWA essays and responses from students across the world. This chapter contains both AWA Issue Essay Template and AWA Argument Essay Template separately. Using these templates will get you guaranteed results, and you will see a perfect 6.0 score on your own essays, guaranteed.

NOTE: But wait! Just because we have given you a couple of templates, it doesn’t mean that you just copy the same content during your actual GRE test. Remember, this website gets thousands of visitors every day, and if every single one of you use the same template, very soon, all your AWA scores will be cancelled and your essay response will be held for plagiarism. We definitely don’t want that to happen, do we? So, better be careful.

We strongly advise you to use these templates as frameworks, and use them to create your own templates for both the essay questions. The templates provided here are just for reference, and it will only help you if you create similar templates for yourself, rather than using the ones given here.

Download the AWA essay template right now!

So, that’s about it. We have come to an end of this epic guide to ace the analytical writing section on the GRE. We have discussed about 71 invaluable strategies that you could use to improve your writing skills, and thereby get a perfect score on the AWA section.

This is by far the most comprehensive GRE Analytical Writing guide in the world. It was created to help you ace the Analytical Writing section in the GRE. If you think this is very helpful, or if you really loved it, share it with your friends right now! Our goal is to help as many students as we can. So what are you waiting for? Go share or tweet the living daylights out of this guide!

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GRE Sections: Your Path Through the Test

Featured Expert: Dr. Gurmeet Lall, PhD

The GRE sections consist of three main sections, which are scored, and two that are unscored. The GRE is similar to what is on the LSAT in some ways, as the LSAT sections follow a similar format, although the content and intent of the tests are different. There are some changes coming to the GRE that will be implemented next year. These changes won’t eliminate any of the GRE sections but will reduce the number of questions in each section. If you have to take the GRE to get into your program, your GRE test prep should still include the original long-form style of the GRE as these changes won’t affect your graduate school application timeline . This article will break down each GRE section by explaining what each section asks, what its intent is, give you sample questions to aid your GRE preparation, and give you other tips for how to ace the GRE.

>> Want us to help you get accepted? Schedule a free initial consultation here <<

Listen to the blog!

Article Contents 17 min read

Gre sections: what are the gre sections.

What's on the GRE ? The Graduate Record Examination (GRE) has three scored sections:

Verbal Reasoning
Analytical Writing
Quantitative Reasoning

The test also includes two sections that won’t count toward your final scores, but you will still have to complete them. The two unscored sections are:

A repeat of either the Verbal or Quantitative Reasoning section
A research section that is used by ETS to improve the test

Within each of the three main sections are adaptive sub-sections that contain different types of questions based on the section’s intent or purpose. As you can tell from the names, each section tests a different aspect of your knowledge and they all use different methods. For example, the Verbal Reasoning section breaks down into three different sub-sections, which are:

Text Completion

Reading comprehension, sentence equivalence.

We’ll explore each of these sections later, but the Verbal Reasoning section is meant to assess your vocabulary, your ability to understand the meaning of words in a specific context, and whether you can understand complex, graduate-level texts and can identify their main points. The other two sections are not divided into separate sub-sections, but use a variety of question types to make the test more challenging.

The Quantitative Reasoning section follows this format. It has three distinct question categories that are spread throughout the test, although not evenly:

Problem Solving

Data Interpretation

Quantitative comparison.

The GRE is no longer considered a part of how to get into grad school , since several studies emerged proving claims long made by those who oppose the test. Those claims were that the test:

Unfairly privileged people who can afford GRE prep courses
Does not accurately predict the success of those who take the test

After these studies came out, many graduate schools, from the most elite, such as Harvard University and Stanford University to the easiest PhD programs to get into , dropped the test from its graduate school admissions requirements. Many people have applauded the move, but ETS has responded by shortening the test, and arguing that the inequality that prevents students from affording GRE test prep has nothing to do with the test itself.

For now, as we’ve given you the broad strokes of the GRE sections, we can explore them more in-depth, and point out ways that you can improve your timing, your test strategy and what you need to look out for in each test.

Number of Sub-Sections: 2

Time Limit: 30 minutes

Score Scale: 0-6 (lowest to highest)

Analytical Writing is a section that tests for skills essential to doing well in any grad school program, Masters or a PhD, which are:

Critical thinking
Writing skills
Analytical skills

As a potential graduate student this section might be the easiest for you. Every undergraduate has spent their four years learning and mastering these skills by producing countless essays. But if writing and comprehension are not your strongest suits, and you have trouble formulating an argument, and defending or supporting it, then you should try a few writing exercises to practice.

Analyze an Issue

The question format of the Analyze an Issue sub-section is very short, but it can be intimidating in its brevity. You are only given a short prompt or statement, and a paragraph providing instructions; that’s it. There is no word limit as you only have 30 minutes to write the essay, but you shouldn’t take the opportunity to write whatever you want. You have to structure the essay properly and organize it in a way that makes sense to you and your reader.

One way to practice for the Analyze an Issue section is to write a rough draft of any of the essays and statements you’ll need to submit with your graduate school application. You can borrow the format of the Analyze an Issue section – responding to a prompt – and write a grad school statement of purpose , or a personal statement that tries to follow the same structure, in that you:

State a clear position
Support and defend your position with logical arguments
Use clear, coherent language
Organize your argument logically

How to Study for the Analyze an Issue Section

You can take a prompt from the ETS website to practice and to see how the sample responses are scored and evaluated by GRE evaluators so you know what you have to include in your essay and what you have to leave out. What makes writing this essay even more challenging is that you have to complete it on the ETS proprietary word processor, which has a few important features (cut/paste, undo, and insert text), but you won’t have spell-check or grammar-check tools, so you need to be careful and review the essay thoroughly for mistakes before you submit it.

Another important way to prepare for this section is by dividing the time allotted among the most important points that you should cover. For example:

5-10 minutes formulating your position
10-15 minutes writing the essay
4-5 minutes revising the essay

Broken down like that, you can see that you don’t have a lot of time to write, which is the main challenge of a test like the GRE – producing excellent work in a short amount of time. You don’t have to follow this exact timetable, but you should give yourself time limits for how long you spend on each section so you cover all the important points of the exercise.

The Analyze an Argument section is a little different than the Issue section, as it tests your comprehension and analytical skills more than your writing skills, because you will have to take apart an argument using your own general knowledge about various topics. You won’t have to produce an essay, but read one, and then, demonstrate through a written response that:

You understood what the author was saying
You can point to specific arguments made by the author
You can invalidate the arguments using evidence and your own analysis

A tricky part of the Argument section is that you also have to make assumptions about the author’s argument, and relate how those assumptions disprove what the author is saying. This means that you have to consider things that are not written within the question or prompt but are still related to the subject you are analyzing.

For example, you may be given a prompt discussing the points used by someone applying for a bank loan (current business environment, market share, projected earnings, etc.). In your response you would have to consider not only what is written in the prompt, but outside variables, such as bank loan defaults, best business practices, and interest rates that are related to the topic, directly or indirectly.

However, this does not mean that you need to study these subjects, simply that you should make a habit during your GRE prep of reading as much as you can about different subjects in newspapers, magazines, blogs, essays, and academic journals. Remembering even the smallest fact related to a general topic can help give your response the nuance and subtlety that ETS readers are looking for in your response. This kind of preparation is also key to how to study for the LSAT, as you should have at least generalized knowledge about current events and recent, important legal decisions.

How to Study for the Analyze an Argument Section

The Argument section uses different types of prompts, which will ask different things and ask you to approach each response differently. There are eight different types of prompts that will follow the essay or writing sample. If you have the time, you can explore each of the eight prompts with a writing sample to practice addressing the points raised by each, but you can also focus strictly on one to build-up the analytical skills you’ll need to properly respond to any of them.

This is because building up your critical thinking skills is essential to acing this section. The more you are able to follow a line of reasoning, look for and identify key pieces of evidence, and present your arguments in a cogent and understandable way, the better you’ll be able to respond effectively to any of the eight prompts.

Sample “Analyze an Issue” Prompts

“Globalization has both positive and negative effects on cultures around the world. Analyze the impact of globalization on cultural diversity and heritage, and discuss whether the positives outweigh the negatives.”

“The concept of a 'universal basic income' has gained attention as a potential solution to income inequality and unemployment. Discuss the advantages and challenges of implementing a universal basic income policy.”

Increasing urbanization has led to environmental degradation in many cities. Analyze the relationship between urban development and environmental sustainability, and propose strategies to mitigate the negative impact.

Sample Answer for Prompt #2

Poverty remains a persistent challenge everywhere but the concept of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) has the potential to transform society. The idea is simple, but the effects could be far-reaching. This financial safety net could alleviate poverty, but also increase social cohesion and people’s overall well-being. Thousands could escape the cycle of inter-generational poverty and the dream of a more equitable society could be reached.

UBI involves granting every citizen a regular unconditional cash payment, regardless of their socioeconomic background. Its critics say that a basic income will disincentivize people to work. I would make the argument that it would let people contribute to society in a way more meaningful and fulfilling to them, then something they are forced to do to make a living.

The Finnish UBI experiment showcased that although the increase in employment was limited, participants experienced improved well-being and reduced financial stress. This underscores UBI's potential to enhance people's lives, aligning with my belief in the program's positive influence.

The concept of UBI also resonates with me because it could be a way to address other poverty-related issues like homelessness. Although not the same as UBI, Salt Lake City's free housing program, which offers permanent, rent-free housing to the unhoused has nearly eliminated chronic homelessness in the city. This program has had the added effect of cultivating more empathy and compassion among citizens.

Alternately, Salt Lake City’s free housing program and UBI pose challenges. Implementing both of these programs on a large scale requires careful financial planning. While the potential increase in taxes is a concern, it is essential to weigh this against the positive impacts on poverty reduction and overall societal harmony.

Although challenges exist, the advantages, as demonstrated by the Finnish experiment and the free housing program in Salt Lake City, are undeniable. I am convinced that UBI can alleviate poverty, foster social cohesion, and uplift individuals' well-being. As we collectively strive for a more equitable and compassionate world, UBI stands as a tangible step towards realizing these aspirations.

GRE Sections: Verbal Reasoning

Number of Sub-Sections: 3

Time Limit: 30 minutes for each sub-section

Score Scale: 130-170 (lowest to highest)

Verbal Reasoning is another text-heavy section, but instead of making you analyze and formulate arguments, you will have to read passages and either:

Complete a sentence by choosing the correct word
Complete sentences by choosing two or more correct words
Choose an answer that best summarizes a sentence or passage

This GRE section is one you can definitely study for in a traditional way, meaning you’ll have to learn and memorize the definitions of words. But you should also focus on reviewing and analyzing different texts, as this section does require you to also identify parts of an argument, how they all relate to each other, and what, fundamentally, is the author’s point or thesis.

The question formats are different for each sub-section. In the Reading Comprehension sub-section, you’ll be given:

A short, one-paragraph passage
A follow-up question
A list of answers to choose from

This sub-section is where you’ll also use your analytical and comprehension skills to figure out how to choose the correct answer. You have to be able to understand an author’s argument, but, as with the Analyze an Argument sub-section in Analytical Writing, you also have to be able to understand what is implied by the author’s text, as well as what’s explicitly written.

But since there are so many variations on the text used, and the questions being asked you will also have to be able to:

Recognize any secondary or supplementary arguments an author is making
Distinguish between arguments the author supports strongly and arguments they are less passionate about
Connect the various arguments within a passage to understand their relation to one another.

Fortunately, the prep you do for the Analyze an Argument sub-section will also be useful here. You should prepare for the Reading Comprehension sub-section by mining all the graduate-level texts you can find for the words used, as well as the structure and composition they use for their arguments. The texts you should read could be the same – scholarly articles, position papers, opinion essays, long-form reporting articles.

Sample Reading Comprehension Question

"Many species of birds migrate thousands of miles every year, traversing vast landscapes to reach their breeding and wintering grounds. These impressive journeys have long fascinated scientists and bird enthusiasts alike. One bird that stands out in this regard is the Arctic Tern, known for its incredible annual migration.

Arctic Terns breed in the Arctic regions during the short summer months, taking advantage of the abundant food supply. As winter approaches, they begin an astonishing journey to their wintering grounds in the Antarctic. This journey covers a distance of up to 44,000 miles, making the Arctic Tern's migration the longest recorded migration of any bird.

What's even more remarkable is the route they take. Instead of flying directly between the Arctic and Antarctic, Arctic Terns follow a zigzagging route that takes advantage of prevailing wind patterns and ocean currents. This indirect route helps them conserve energy and find food along the way. Additionally, they experience almost continuous daylight for the duration of their journey, which may contribute to their ability to stay on course."

Question #1

Which of the following is NOT mentioned as a reason why Arctic Terns follow an indirect migration route?

A) To conserve energy.

B) To take advantage of wind patterns and ocean currents.

C) To find food along the way.

D) To avoid predators.

E) To experience continuous daylight.

Question #2

Based on the information in the passage, why do Arctic Terns migrate to the Antarctic for the winter?

A) To find food during the winter months.

B) To escape the harsh conditions of the Arctic.

C) To take advantage of continuous daylight.

D) To breed in the warmer climate.

E) To follow a specific migration pattern.

E) Examine the impact of climate change on bird migration. ","label":"Question #3","title":"Question #3"}]" code="tab1" template="BlogArticle">

Text Completion might seem easy on the surface (they’re basically fill-in-the-blanks questions), but you have to be aware of a few subtleties. This sub-section has two distinct question types, which are:

Multiple choice/single answer
Multiple choice/more than one answer

The way it works is that you’ll be given a short, three-or-five sentence passage with either a single missing word, or multiple missing words that have multiple answers for each empty space. We’ll give you sample questions to see what we mean, but where the difficulty lies in the text completion section is that there will only be slight differences between the multiple-choice words and phrases.

All of the words might make sense to complete the passage, grammatically, but within the context of the question and the passage’s argument might be incorrect. That’s why you have to pay close attention to the author’s intent in the passage, understand their tone and overall message, and understand the other words being used to choose the word that fits best in that context. Some questions will be easier than others, but regardless, you should pay close attention to the entire passage, and not just the list of words and answers.

How to Study for Text Completion

If you don’t already do them, you can prepare by doing a lot of crossword puzzles, which is a good way to increase your vocabulary anyway. The discipline and rigidness of crossword puzzles will also make you guess less and try harder to find the right answer the first time or with very little effort. You can also try to create a list of words, their category (verbs, adverbs, nouns) and their definition or write them down on flashcards to be able to read and recall everything about them, just by looking at it.

Sample Text Completion Questions

E) puzzle \/ harmony ","label":"Question #3","title":"Question #3"}]" code="tab2" template="BlogArticle">

The Sentence Equivalence sub-section is where you usually have to find the right word(s) to complete a single sentence rather than an entire passage. You also have to word sentences differently from each other, which tests your vocabulary and whether you can express ideas in various ways. Again, this sounds easy, but with the clock ticking and seeing words you’ve never seen before, it can be difficult for even the strongest students. Here, each word matters. You need to be able to discern how specific words and phrases (“moreover”, “besides”, “equally important”, “although”) either:

Change the direction of the author’s narrative
Introduces something new to the sentence
Modifies what was said before or after

The question format is simple. You are given a single sentence, and a list of six words. However, you might be asked to find two words that fit instead of one, which, depending on how you look at it, makes it easier or harder. That’s why we talked about all the small differences that you have to notice to be able to pick two words from a list of words that all look the same and could each “fit” into the sentence if this wasn’t a test.

How to Prepare for Sentence Equivalence

Coming into the Sentence equivalence with an outsized vocabulary is the best way to get a good GRE score . That takes years to develop and hopefully, being a university graduate, you have. But if you want to be doubly prepared for this GRE section so you can complete it faster and spend more time writing the essay or figuring out the maths problems in the Quantitative Reasoning section, the best way to prepare for this section is by being an active reader.

You should read material (long-form articles in major magazines, feature or personal essays by well-known writers, trade journals, technical reviews, research summaries) online and whenever you find a word you don’t know or understand, Goole it right away. Write down the definition immediately on a piece of paper so you can remember and reference it later. This is a more high-tech way than doing it with a pen, paper and a dictionary, but if that’s your style, you can do it that way too.

Number of Questions: 20 questions

Time Limit: 35 minutes for each sub-section

Score Scale: 130 to 170 (lowest to highest)

The math portion of the GRE may be the most difficult for some, depending on your academic background. But you’ll see more words than numbers, and to put your mind at ease even more, there is no calculus, trigonometry or having to create or solve mathematical proofs in this GRE section. You’ll have to have some understanding of algebra and geometry, which is taught in high school, but if you’re rusty, you can and should prepare.

This GRE section is divided into different question types, rather than different sections. The question types are:

Problem-solving
Quantitative comparison (you’ll have to compare how two separate quantities relate)
Data interpretation sets (you’ll be given tables, graphs, charts and asked to answer questions about them)

But the question formats can range from:

Multiple-choice with a single answer
Multiple-choice with many answers
Numeric entry (you have to calculate a numerical answer and insert it the provided space)

Any of the question formats can apply to the question types, but only the Quantitative Comparison question have the same list of answer and use only one type of question. The other questions type can split off into various formats, which you’ll find on your practice tests. You may be asked to solve a problem that is either multiple-choice or numeric entry, and the same applies to Data Interpretation.

These questions are multiple choice, but always have the same choices, since all you have to do is measure the relationship between two separate quantities. You most likely won’t need your calculator for these questions, as most of them come in the format of word problems (but, sometimes they are expressed mathematically in algebra equations), but more important in this section is to think mathematically to be able to find the right answer.

The answer choices are always:

Quantity A is greater.
Quantity B is greater.
The two quantities are equal.
The relationship cannot be determined from the information given.

So even if it is a word problem, you have to break the problem down into individual variables and plug them into a formula or equation that agrees with your choice and disagrees with the rest of the four answer choices. But since this may take too much time, you can also just take the information as presented, and find the relationships among them guided by the various symbols that link them (the less-than <, greater than >, equal to =). You can also substitute some of the letter values with numbers, if that helps you figure out how calculate them properly.

Problem-Solving

Problem-solving questions on the GRE can divide into various types, some of which are more familiar than others. Do you remember any of the word problem, arithmetic questions on the SAT or ACT like “if Train A departs the station at 12:45, and Train B is supposed to arrive at 1:05....”? If you do then you should expect to find those questions, along with a few variations, such as numeric entry and multiple-choice questions with several answers on the GRE. There are also problem-solving questions where you’ll have to interpret and analyze different data sets presented in the form of graphs, charts and tables.

Gathering and then interpreting data is one of the most crucial and foundational skills you’ll need as a graduate student, which is why the QR section has data interpretation sets and questions. These questions will test whether you can accurately read and draw conclusions or form assumptions based on data displayed in several formats, from tables, graphs, and charts. You’ll either have to enter a numeric value to answer this question, or choose a correct answer from a list of answers related to the information displayed. You should prepare by reading sample questions so you can build upon the analytical and interpretation skills you have, while also learning more about what each of these data sets represents.

How to Prepare for the Quantitative Reasoning Section

The Quantitative Reasoning section will test your hard math skills meaning the things that all students are taught in high school, such as beginner-level statistics (averages, mean, median), geometry (parallels, triangles, planes) and algebra (basic linear equations, relations, and functions). If these are not your strongest areas, you can hire a GRE tutor to help you focus specifically on developing your math skills, which will be important to the GRE. If you can’t hire a tutor, then you should use ETS’s prep materials and strategies specifically designed for the Quantitative Reasoning section to find out which strategy to use and for which question type.

Sample Quantitative Reasoning Questions

Question #1 - Data Interpretation

Refer to the table below and answer the question.

If a customer buys 2 apples, 3 bananas, and 4 oranges, what is the total cost?

Sample Multiple Choice Problem-Solving Questions

E) 48 square units ","label":"Question #2","title":"Question #2"}]" code="tab4" template="BlogArticle">

For now, there are three main GRE sections, but there are two unscored sections that you also have to complete. ETS plans on reducing the number of questions in each section, although they will keep the number of sections on the test.

Each of the three GRE sections is supposed to assess your knowledge in several areas from your reading, comprehension, analytical skills and vocabulary in the Verbal Reasoning section, to your writing, communication and ability to make arguments in the Analytical Writing section. The Quantitative Reasoning section focuses on your arithmetic, data analysis, and problem-solving skills.

The hardest GRE section is different for everyone, but, in general, every section is meant to be difficult even for the brightest students. But the hardest part of the GRE is that its timed, which makes trying to do anything difficult.

The exact number of questions for each section varies from test to test, but only Verbal and Quantitative Reasoning have a range of questions from between 20-27 per section. The Analytical Writing section is made up of two sections that are writing-based and do not have typical multiple-choice answers.

There are multiple ways to calculate your GRE score, either separately for each section, or a scaled score representing your performance in all three sections, and a percentile score that compares your performance to all the other test-takers. A good GRE score also depends on what score you need, but generally for each section you should aim for anywhere between 153-160 with 170 being a perfect score for Verbal and Quantitative Reasoning. Analytical Writing is scored differently and uses a 0-6 range, with 6 being the highest. Getting a perfect score on the AW section is possible, but anywhere between a 4 or 5 is exceptional.

You can prepare for the GRE by tackling each GRE section individually and timing yourself for each section. You should create a study schedule to find out how much time you need to study (total study hours in the triple digits has been shown to correlate to a high score) but you should also take a diagnostic test to figure all this out. You should also read actively and create lists and flashcards of important words, and formulas that you’ll need to remember to answer the questions.

How long is the GRE ? It usually takes four hours to complete the test, as you have 30 minutes for each sub-section within the three main GRE sections.

If you must submit GRE scores to get into your program, then yes. However, now, both Ivy Leage graduate schools as well as the easiest PhD programs to get into have either dropped the GRE requirement or made it optional. If you take anything away from this article it should be that the GRE is not easy, and requires at least a few months of preparation. If you don’t have to take the GRE and the programs you are interested in do not require it, you should spend the time before applying on more important, and required supporting materials, such as your graduate school cover letter , graduate school resume , a research proposal , or getting good grad school letters of recommendation .

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The Best College Essay Length: How Long Should It Be?

College Essays

Figuring out your college essay can be one of the most difficult parts of applying to college. Even once you've read the prompt and picked a topic, you might wonder: if you write too much or too little, will you blow your chance of admission? How long should a college essay be?

Whether you're a terse writer or a loquacious one, we can advise you on college essay length. In this guide, we'll cover what the standard college essay length is, how much word limits matter, and what to do if you aren't sure how long a specific essay should be.

How Long Is a College Essay? First, Check the Word Limit

You might be used to turning in your writing assignments on a page-limit basis (for example, a 10-page paper). While some colleges provide page limits for their college essays, most use a word limit instead. This makes sure there's a standard length for all the essays that a college receives, regardless of formatting or font.

In the simplest terms, your college essay should be pretty close to, but not exceeding, the word limit in length. Think within 50 words as the lower bound, with the word limit as the upper bound. So for a 500-word limit essay, try to get somewhere between 450-500 words. If they give you a range, stay within that range.

College essay prompts usually provide the word limit right in the prompt or in the instructions.

For example, the University of Illinois says :

"You'll answer two to three prompts as part of your application. The questions you'll answer will depend on whether you're applying to a major or to our undeclared program , and if you've selected a second choice . Each response should be approximately 150 words."

As exemplified by the University of Illinois, the shortest word limits for college essays are usually around 150 words (less than half a single-spaced page). Rarely will you see a word limit higher than around 650 words (over one single-spaced page). College essays are usually pretty short: between 150 and 650 words. Admissions officers have to read a lot of them, after all!

Weigh your words carefully, because they are limited!

How Flexible Is the Word Limit?

But how flexible is the word limit? What if your poignant anecdote is just 10 words too long—or 100 too short?

Can I Go Over the Word Limit?

If you are attaching a document and you need one or two extra words, you can probably get away with exceeding the word limit by such a small amount. Some colleges will actually tell you that exceeding the word limit by 1-2 words is fine. However, I advise against exceeding the word limit unless it's explicitly allowed for a few reasons:

First, you might not be able to. If you have to copy-paste it into a text box, your essay might get cut off and you'll have to trim it down anyway.

If you exceed the word limit in a noticeable way, the admissions counselor may just stop reading your essay past that point. This is not good for you.

Following directions is actually a very important part of the college application process. You need to follow directions to get your letters of recommendation, upload your essays, send supplemental materials, get your test scores sent, and so on and so forth. So it's just a good general rule to follow whatever instructions you've been given by the institution. Better safe than sorry!

Can I Go Under the Word Limit?

If you can truly get your point across well beneath the word limit, it's probably fine. Brevity is not necessarily a bad thing in writing just so long as you are clear, cogent, and communicate what you want to.

However, most college essays have pretty tight word limits anyways. So if you're writing 300 words for an essay with a 500-word limit, ask yourself: is there anything more you could say to elaborate on or support your points? Consult with a parent, friend, or teacher on where you could elaborate with more detail or expand your points.

Also, if the college gives you a word range, you absolutely need to at least hit the bottom end of the range. So if you get a range from the institution, like 400-500 words, you need to write at least 400 words. If you write less, it will come across like you have nothing to say, which is not an impression you want to give.

What If There Is No Word Limit?

Some colleges don't give you a word limit for one or more of your essay prompts. This can be a little stressful, but the prompts generally fall into a few categories:

Writing Sample

Some colleges don't provide a hard-and-fast word limit because they want a writing sample from one of your classes. In this case, a word limit would be very limiting to you in terms of which assignments you could select from.

For an example of this kind of prompt, check out essay Option B at Amherst :

"Submit a graded paper from your junior or senior year that best represents your writing skills and analytical abilities. We are particularly interested in your ability to construct a tightly reasoned, persuasive argument that calls upon literary, sociological or historical evidence. You should NOT submit a laboratory report, journal entry, creative writing sample or in-class essay."

While there is usually no word limit per se, colleges sometimes provide a general page guideline for writing samples. In the FAQ for Option B , Amherst clarifies, "There is no hard-and-fast rule for official page limit. Typically, we anticipate a paper of 4-5 pages will provide adequate length to demonstrate your analytical abilities. Somewhat longer papers can also be submitted, but in most cases should not exceed 8-10 pages."

So even though there's no word limit, they'd like somewhere in the 4-10 pages range. High school students are not usually writing papers that are longer than 10 pages anyways, so that isn't very limiting.

Want to write the perfect college application essay? We can help. Your dedicated PrepScholar Admissions counselor will help you craft your perfect college essay, from the ground up. We learn your background and interests, brainstorm essay topics, and walk you through the essay drafting process, step-by-step. At the end, you'll have a unique essay to proudly submit to colleges. Don't leave your college application to chance. Find out more about PrepScholar Admissions now:

Implicit Length Guideline

Sometimes, while there's no word (or even page) limit, there's still an implicit length guideline. What do I mean by this?

See, for example, this Western Washington University prompt :

“Describe one or more activities you have been involved in that have been particularly meaningful. What does your involvement say about the communities, identities or causes that are important to you?”

While there’s no page or word limit listed here, further down on page the ‘essay tips’ section explains that “ most essay responses are about 500 words, ” though “this is only a recommendation, not a firm limit.” This gives you an idea of what’s reasonable. A little longer or shorter than 500 words would be appropriate here. That’s what I mean by an “implicit” word limit—there is a reasonable length you could go to within the boundaries of the prompt.

But what's the proper coffee-to-paragraph ratio?

Treasure Hunt

There is also the classic "treasure hunt" prompt. No, it's not a prompt about a treasure hunt. It's a prompt where there are no length guidelines given, but if you hunt around on the rest of the website you can find length guidelines.

For example, the University of Chicago provides seven "Extended Essay" prompts . You must write an essay in response to one prompt of your choosing, but nowhere on the page is there any guidance about word count or page limit.

However, many colleges provide additional details about their expectations for application materials, including essays, on FAQ pages, which is true of the University of Chicago. On the school’s admissions Frequently Asked Questions page , they provide the following length guidelines for the supplemental essays:

“We suggest that you note any word limits for Coalition or Common Application essays; however, there are no strict word limits on the UChicago Supplement essays. For the extended essay (where you choose one of several prompts), we suggest that you aim for around 650 words. While we won't, as a rule, stop reading after 650 words, we're only human and cannot promise that an overly wordy essay will hold our attention indefinitely. For the “Why UChicago?” essay, we suggest about 250-500 words. The ideas in your writing matter more than the exact number of words you use!”

So there you go! You want to be (loosely) in the realm of 650 for the extended essay, and 250-500 words for the “Why UChicago?” essay.

Help! There Really Is No Guidance on Length

If you really can't find any length guidelines anywhere on the admissions website and you're at a loss, I advise calling the admissions office. They may not be able to give you an exact number (in fact, they probably won't), but they will probably at least be able to tell you how long most of the essays they see are. (And keep you from writing a panicked, 20-page dissertation about your relationship with your dog).

In general, 500 words or so is pretty safe for a college essay. It's a fairly standard word limit length, in fact. (And if you're wondering, that's about a page and a half double-spaced.) 500 words is long enough to develop a basic idea while still getting a point across quickly—important when admissions counselors have thousands of essays to read!

"See? It says 500 words right there in tiny font!"

The Final Word: How Long Should a College Essay Be?

The best college essay length is usually pretty straightforward: you want to be right under or at the provided word limit. If you go substantially past the word limit, you risk having your essay cut off by an online application form or having the admissions officer just not finish it. And if you're too far under the word limit, you may not be elaborating enough.

What if there is no word limit? Then how long should a college essay be? In general, around 500 words is a pretty safe approximate word amount for a college essay—it's one of the most common word limits, after all!

Here's guidance for special cases and hunting down word limits:

If it's a writing sample of your graded academic work, the length either doesn't matter or there should be some loose page guidelines.

There also may be implicit length guidelines. For example, if a prompt says to write three paragraphs, you'll know that writing six sentences is definitely too short, and two single-spaced pages is definitely too long.

You might not be able to find length guidelines in the prompt, but you could still hunt them up elsewhere on the website. Try checking FAQs or googling your chosen school name with "admissions essay word limit."

If there really is no word limit, you can call the school to try to get some guidance.

With this advice, you can be sure you've got the right college essay length on lockdown!

Hey, writing about yourself can even be fun!

What's Next?

Need to ask a teacher or friend for help with your essay? See our do's and dont's to getting college essay advice .

If you're lacking in essay inspiration, see our guide to brainstorming college essay ideas . And here's our guide to starting out your essay perfectly!

Looking for college essay examples? See 11 places to find college essay examples and 145 essay examples with analysis !

Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points? We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download them for free now:

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Ellen has extensive education mentorship experience and is deeply committed to helping students succeed in all areas of life. She received a BA from Harvard in Folklore and Mythology and is currently pursuing graduate studies at Columbia University.

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PrepScholar GRE Prep

Gre prep online guides and tips, complete guide: gre test format.

If you’re studying for the GRE, the absolute most important thing to learn is the GRE format. No amount of math practice or vocab memorization can make up for not knowing what’s on the exam and how it’s structured. To fully maximize your score, you have to ensure that there will be no surprises on test day.

Want to know exactly how the test will present each question? Ready to learn about how to navigate the computerized test? In this article, I will lay out the format of each GRE section, explain the editing, revision, and calculator functions of the test, and give you tips on how to use this knowledge to boost your final score.

Article Roadmap

Why Should You Know the Format of the GRE Cold?
Big-Picture Overview of the GRE
Format of the Analytical Writing Section
Format of the Verbal Reasoning Section
Format of the Quantitative Reasoning Section

How Can You Use the GRE Format For Your Benefit?

Bottom Line on the GRE Exam Format

Why Should You Know the GRE Format Cold?

Knowing the test format and presentation of the GRE is key for maximizing your score.

Prep Benefits

When you’re prepping for the test, knowing the GRE test format can guide you on what you do and don’t need to study . For example, the Verbal Reasoning section heavily tests vocab, but it doesn’t test grammar. Knowing this focuses your studying productively.

Moreover, you can see which test-taking strategies are effective . For instance, having scratch paper means you can outline essays, whereas having the entire test be on the screen means you can’t cross out or otherwise mark multiple choice answers.

Quick side note: we've created the world's leading online GRE prep program that adapts to you and your strengths and weaknesses. Not sure what to study? Confused by how to improve your score? We give you minute by minute guide.

You don't NEED a prep program to get a great GRE score. But we believe PrepScholar is the best GRE prep program available right now , especially if you find it hard to organize your study schedule and don't know what to study .

Click here to learn how you can improve your GRE score by 7 points, guaranteed .

Time Benefits

On test day, if you know what to expect for the GRE exam format, you won’t lose time to surprise or confusion over the question structure.

You also won’t need instructions for each section, which will save you from wasting valuable time reading the “Help” documentation in the middle of a section.

Stress Relief Benefits

Finally, knowing what to expect logistics-wise goes a long way to calm test-day jitters . For example, knowing that you will have access to a calculator and scratch paper spares you the panic that you won’t be able to plan out your essays or that you could be thrown off your game by a minor arithmetic error.

Big-Picture Overview of the GRE Format

Before I lay out each GRE section format in detail, let’s go over the format of the test as a whole.

Please note: this guide will focus on the computerized version of the GRE since almost 98% of GRE test-takers use this version of the test (for more info on the paper GRE, see the last part of this section of the article).

What Sections Make Up the GRE?

The GRE is divided into three types of sections.

The first section of your GRE will always be Analytical Writing , where you will have two 30-minute blocks to write two essays: “Analyze an Issue” and “Analyze an Argument.”

The next five sections can be in any order. They will include two sections of Verbal Reasoning, two sections of Quantitative Reasoning , and one section that won’t count toward your scores.

In each Verbal Reasoning section, you will have 30 minutes to answer 20 multiple choice questions focused on vocabulary and reading comprehension. In each Quantitative Reasoning section, you will have 35 minutes to answer 20 multiple choice and write-in questions on basic algebra and geometry.

The section that doesn’t count toward your score could either be a disguised (unmarked) experimental section testing questions for future GRE exams, or a clearly marked research section that may feature questions with different formats or on other topics. The experimental section looks exactly like one of the Verbal or Quantitative sections, can appear any time after the Analytical Writing section. You won’t be able to tell it apart from the sections that count, so take all unmarked sections you come across seriously. On the other hand, the research section, if it appears, is always at the end of the test.

Your score is determined by the number of questions you get right. There is no penalty for wrong answers, so even if you don’t know anything about a question, you should guess .

How Long Is the GRE?

The GRE is approximately 3 hours and 45 minutes long.

There are 1-minute breaks after each part of the GRE and a 10-minute rest break after the third section. All these breaks are optional. You can take them, or use only a part of each break and go on to the next section – the GRE exam format is flexible.

The GRE Is an Adaptive Test

The GRE’s Verbal and Quantitative parts adapt to how well you’re doing by changing the difficulty of the questions you see.

But, the GRE doesn’t do this question by question – instead, it does it section by section. That means that you’ll start off with a medium-difficulty Verbal or Quantitative section. Then, depending on how well you do, your second section of the same field will either be easy, medium, or hard.

How Is the Paper GRE Test Format Different?

The paper test is the same in content and very similar in structure to the computer version, but I’ll quickly review some of the main differences.

The paper GRE has five sections: Analytical Writing, Verbal Reasoning, and Quantitative Reasoning sections. It always starts with the Analytical Writing section, which contains two 30-minute essay tasks.

Like on the computerized GRE test format, the other four sections can be in any order, but the length of and number of questions in each section is different. There are two sections of Verbal Reasoning (each with 25 questions to answer in 35 minutes) and two sections of Quantitative Reasoning (each with 25 questions to answer in 40 minutes). There are no experimental or research sections on the paper GRE.

Some GRE question formats will be somewhat different to accommodate the paper test. For example, there are no Select-In-Passage questions on the Verbal Reasoning sections. Meanwhile, on the Quantitative Reasoning section, you enter Numeric Entry questions by filling in circles on a number grid.

The paper test is not adaptive. It lasts for about 3 hours 30 minutes with a 10-minute break after the second section.

GRE Analytical Writing Format

The GRE Analytical Writing section is divided into two parts, each of which is an essay question. Let’s look at each of these parts in turn, and then get a solid sense of what the computer screen will look like during this section.

“Analyze an Issue” Essay Format

For this essay, you get a prompt consisting of two parts.

First is a general statement sentence that proposes a broad idea, policy, or issue (always one of the general statements on this ETS list ). This is followed by a prompt that asks you to either agree with, disagree with, or take a more nuanced position on the statement (always one of these prompts ).

Your job is to write an essay that is trying to convince someone else that your viewpoint is right.

Here’s an example of a general statement:

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Scientists and other researchers should focus their research on areas that are likely to benefit the greatest number of people.

This essay is all about the content – you have to use your general knowledge of the world and current events as evidence to support your point of view.

“Analyze an Argument” Essay Format

For this essay, you also get a prompt also consisting of two parts.

This time, first is a paragraph-long argument proving or disproving a thesis with several pieces of evidence (always one of the arguments on this ETS list ).

This is followed by a prompt that asks you to critique the argument’s structure rather than its content (always one of these prompts ).

Your job is to find holes in the argument’s logical thread, problems with its use of evidence, missing or incomplete information, and flaws in its underlying assumptions.

Here’s an example of an argument paragraph:

The following was written as a part of an application for a small-business loan by a group of developers in the city of Monroe.

“Jazz music is extremely popular in the city of Monroe: over 100,000 people attended Monroe’s annual jazz festival last summer, and the highest-rated radio program in Monroe is ‘Jazz Nightly,’ which airs every weeknight. Also, a number of well-known jazz musicians own homes in Monroe. Nevertheless, the nearest jazz club is over an hour away. Given the popularity of jazz in Monroe and a recent nationwide study indicating that the typical jazz fan spends close to $1,000 per year on jazz entertainment, a jazz music club in Monroe would be tremendously profitable.”

This essay is all about the form – you don’t need to know anything about the content of the argument, and your answer should only focus on its execution.

What Does the Analytical Writing Section Look Like?

You will see a split screen, with the prompt on the left side and a blank space where your essay will go on the right side. Here is what this looks like for the “Analyze an Issue” essay:

The right half of the screen features a basic text editor with the ability to cut and paste, as well as options to undo and redo your previous action . Notice that there is no spell check functionality in this text editor. Minor and infrequent spelling errors will not count against you, but you should proofread your work to minimize them.

You will also see a clock counting down the amount of time you have left and several buttons.

The “Next” button takes you to the next part of the section, so do not press it unless you are 100% sure you are done with the essay you are working on.

The “Help” button brings up the instruction page for this section. You shouldn’t need these instructions if you’ve prepared sufficiently.

Now that we’ve covered the Analytical Writing GRE format, let’s move on to the Verbal section.

GRE Verbal Reasoning Format

Each of the two Verbal Reasoning sections consists of three types of questions.

10 questions are on vocab : Text Completion, where you have to pick appropriate words to fit into blank spaces left in a sentence, and Sentence Equivalence, where you have to find two synonymous words or phrases to complete a sentence.

The other 10 questions are Reading Comprehension , where you answer questions about approximately five passages ranging in length from one to several paragraphs.

Let’s go through the format of each kind of question.

Text Completion Questions

In these questions, you’ll see a passage one to six sentences long. It will be missing one to three significant words.

Your job is to pick the correct word from a multiple choice list of possibilities , and click the cursor on that word to highlight it. If you misclick, simply click on another word.

Questions missing only one word have a straightforward format. Here’s an example:

Since the last half of the sentence (particularly words like “not know” and “hidden”) shows that the way the land turns into ice is hard to see, the right answer is “imperceptibly” – the only word that means “difficult to perceive.”

Questions missing 2 – 3 words will be followed by a table. Your job is to fill each blank space with a word from the appropriate column of the table. What’s different here is that you need to choose all the of the missing words correctly in order to get credit for the question .

Here’s an example of a Text Completion question with three blanks:

The author is worried that politics are blocking scientific discussions of climate change. You have to find words that make this argument explicit.

So, since blank (i) states that it’s bad when politics matters more than science, the right word is “overshadowed.” Blank (ii) then elaborates this point, saying that it’s a problem when politics clouds scientific discovery, so the right word is “obscure.” Finally, blank (iii) talks about three synonymous phrases: the “enormous gaps in our knowledge,” the “sparseness of our observations,” and another way to express the idea that we need to know more. Thus, the right choice is “superficiality of our theories.”

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Sentence Equivalence Questions

These questions ask you to find synonymous words or phrases to fill in a blank space in a sentence.

Underneath a sentence with one important word or phrase left blank, there will be six answer choices. Your job is to find the two choices that could complete the sentence and get the same meaning . Please note that you have to find both correct answers in order to get credit for the question.

To select an answer, click the checkbox next to it. If you misclick, click the checkbox again to uncheck it.

Here’s an example:

This sentence is lightly mocking people who fish for compliments by pretending to be humble, so the correct choices are “shrug off” and “deflect” – both of which describe the practice of downplaying achievements.

Reading Comprehension Questions

Each GRE exam includes approximately 10 passages. Most are one paragraph long, with a few that are several paragraphs long.

The passages feature formal writing from many fields – the sciences, business, arts and humanities – but you don’t need to know anything about these subjects to answer the questions .

There are three types of Reading Comprehension question:

Multiple choice with only one answer (this is the most straightforward of the question types – you’ve seen this kind of Reading Comp question if you’ve taken any other standardized tests like the SAT or the ACT).
Multiple choice with one or more answers , where you have to find all the right answers in order to get credit for the question.
Select-in-Passage , where you have to find a sentence in the passage that best answers the question. (Again, remember that the paper test doesn’t have this type of question.)

One-Answer Multiple Choice Questions

Here’s an example of a one-answer multiple choice question:

The question is asking about the point of the passage. The passage doesn’t mention the first three answers at all. The fourth answer is an inference you could draw from the way the author’s defensiveness about Glass’s use of popular music, but the passage doesn’t talk about Glass’s reputation or standing. So the last answer choice is the right one, since the passage directly says that despite using popular music, Glass’s “symphonies’ sound is distinctively his” – i.e. not a copy of someone else’s.

Multi-Answer Multiple Choice Questions

Multiple choice questions that have 1 or more answers are trickier. Since any and all of the answer choices could be correct, you have to carefully find all the answers that apply. The only way to get credit for the question is to pick all the correct answer choices, and only the correct answer choices.

Here’s an example of a multiple choice question that has more than one answer:

The question wants to know how the passage describes Glass’s music. Answer choice 1 is correct – Glass is “reviving” using popular music in classical music. Answer choice 2 is wrong – the passage specifically says that Glass’s music is “not a version of popular music.” Answer choice 3 is right as well – the passage implies that Glass has been doing this kind of fusion during his whole career as a composer. So to get this question right, you’d pick only answers 1 and 3 by clicking those checkboxes.

Select-In-Passage Questions

For select-in-passage questions, you have to find the appropriate sentence in the passage itself . In other words, this time, you have to click the left half of the screen instead of on the right. Here is an example:

You have to find a sentence that talks about two different ways that rock and classical music can be combined. Only the last sentence of the passage fits this description – this is where the author describes popular music written for classical audiences, and also classical music written to appeal to audiences more familiar with rock.

What Does the GRE Verbal Reasoning Section Look Like?

Here is what the screen will look like when you’re answering Verbal Reasoning questions:

Just like in the Analytical Writing section, you will see a countdown timer and the “Help” button which will show you instructions for this section.

The “Exit Section” button will leave the section that you are working on, so only press this button if you are very sure that you are done with that section.

Please note that in this section, the “Next” button is different. Here, “Next” button takes you to the next question and the “Back” button takes you to the previous question, of the section you’re working on. You can press these buttons even if you don’t click an answer to the question you’re on.

The “Mark” button allows you to flag a question in order to come back to it later. The “Review” button takes you to a different screen where you can see the status of each question. Stay tuned: I’ll talk about using these tools later in the article! For now, let’s move onto the format of the Quantitative section.

GRE Quantitative Reasoning Format

Each Quantitative section consists of eight to nine Quantitative Comparisons, eight to nine Problem Solving questions, and three to four Data Interpretation questions. Quantitative Comparisons questions ask you to compare two values to each other to determine which is bigger. Problem Solving questions pose word problems, geometry questions, or equations. And finally, Data Interpretation questions give you a series of questions based on a graph or chart.

The questions test your knowledge of these math topics:

Arithmetic : integers, arithmetic operations, estimation, percent, ratio, rate, absolute value

Algebra : exponents; linear and quadratic equations; simultaneous equations and inequalities

Coordinate geometry : graphs of functions, and lines

Geometry : lines, circles, triangles, polygons, three-dimensional figures; area, perimeter, volume, and angles

Data analysis : basic statistics (mean, median, mode, range, standard deviation), interpreting data tables and graphs, probability

Many questions aren’t really about number crunching, but instead about figuring the problem out logically – with estimates, reasonable guesses, and inferences.

Nevertheless, along with the scratch paper you get at the beginning of the test, the computerized GRE exam has a built-in calculator that you can use as much as you want to in the Quantitative sections.

Quantitative Comparison Questions

These questions will give you two quantities, and your job is to figure out whether one of the quantities is bigger than the other , whether they are equal, or whether there’s not enough info to know.

The two values will always be under the labels Quantity A and Quantity B, and the answer choices will always have the same format and wording.

Here is an example:

In fact, we don’t know how big angle PQS is compared to angle SQR because nothing in the problem reveals this information. That means we don’t know exactly where line QS intersects line PR. It could bisect it, or it could be closer to P or closer to R. So, the answer is the last choice – we don’t have enough information to know which of the line segments is bigger.

Multiple-Choice Questions

Just like in the Verbal sections, there are two types multiple-choice questions on the Quantitative sections. 1-answer multiple-choice questions only have one right answer. But multiple-answer questions can have any number of correct answers – and you have to find all of them to get credit for the question. This is a tougher type of question in the GRE test format.

Here’s an example of a 1-answer multiple-choice question:

(5x + 32) + 2x = (4 – 2x) + 2x 7x + 32 = 4 (7x + 32) – 32 = 4 – 32 7x = -28 x = -4

So, the first answer choice is correct. To select that answer, you have to click the bubble next to -4. If you misclick, simply click the bubble of the answer you do want instead.

Here is an example of a multiple-answer multiple-choice question:

Simply go through each answer possibility and divide it by 2 and 3.
Realize that numbers divisible by 2 are even, eliminate the odd numbers, and then find which even numbers in the list are divisible by 3.
Realize that a number divisible by both 2 and 3 would have to be also divisible by their product (i.e. 6), and go through the list to find multiples of 6.

To pick the answers, you have to click the checkboxes next to the right numbers (12, 18, 36). If you misclick, click on the checkbox again to clear it.

Numeric Entry Questions

For some questions, instead of clicking your cursor on the right answers, you will use the keyboard to type in your solution into the provided blank. (And again, remember that on the paper GRE test you answer these questions by bubbling in a number grid.)

These answers will always be integers, decimals, or fractions. If the answer is a fraction, the question will have two blank spaces – one for the numerator and one for the denominator.

Here is an example of a Numeric Entry Question:

To answer the question, you just have to rewrite the sentence into a bit of arithmetic: (0.25 * 18) + (0.35 * 100).

The answer is 39.5 (notice that there is already a dollar sign next to the answer blank. All you need to enter is the number itself, or simply click the “Transfer Display” button if you used the calculator to do the arithmetic).

Data Interpretation Questions

Data Interpretation questions are either in multiple choice or numeric entry format. But the difference is that these questions are connected to one table or graph . The good news is that depending on the type of graph used, you may be able to estimate the right answer.

Here’s an example of a problem that relies on data interpretation:

Here, since Store P started with $800,000 in 2006, and from 2006 to 2007, Store P grew by 10%, that means that at the end of 2007, Store P had 110% of the dollar amount that it started with. So, ($800,000 * 1.1) = $880,000.

Now we do the same thing again with next year’s data. Store P started 2007 with $880,000, but then lost 10% of this value from 2007 to 2008. That means that at the end of 2008, Store P had 90% of the amount it had in 2007. So, ($880,000 * 0.9) = $792,000; the right answer is the second choice.

What Does the Quantitative Reasoning Section Look Like?

This is what the screen will look like when you’re answering math questions:

You’ll see the same “Exit Section,” “Help,” “Back,” and “Next” buttons, as well as the countdown timer, that we already went over the in the Verbal Reasoning section.

But now, there is a new button, “Calc,” which you can use to bring up the calculator , or to make the calculator disappear if you want to put it away for a moment.

The calculator (seen in the above image) appears in a separate window which you can move around the page with your cursor. You can use the calculator either by clicking its buttons with your mouse or by typing into it with your keyboard. Its functionality has arithmetic functions (addition, subtraction, division, multiplication, and square root), memory functions, and parentheses for specifying the order of operations in your arithmetic.

The main difference is the calculator’s “Transfer Display” button, which copies whatever number is on its display onto the GRE question blank. Use this button to avoid careless transcription mistakes when answering Numeric Entry questions.

You can use what you now know about the format of each section to improve your studying and test day performance.

Tips for Analytical Writing

Remove the element of surprise. Since ETS has published all the possible prompts for both essays, there is no reason for you to be surprised by the essay topics on test day. Read each of the Issue statements and each of the Argument paragraphs and brainstorm evidence to argue the case one way or the other. When you’re reading the Argument paragraphs, categorize the type of errors they tend to make: logical leaps, erroneous inferences, and the shoddy use of evidence.

Plan your essays out. Before you start typing your GRE essays directly into the computer, use the supply of scratch paper you get at the beginning of the test from your test proctor to jot notes or briefly outline your essays.

Take a breather. Each essay is preceded by a page of general instructions that you click to dismiss. Reading these instructions doesn’t count towards the 30 minutes you have for the essay. So, if you need a second to collect your thoughts before starting the second essay, pause on this instruction page.

Tips for Verbal and Quantitative Reasoning

Here is some advice for making the most of the GRE exam format on both of these sections, as well as some more Quant-specific tips.

Use The Mark and Review Tools

Don’t practice on paper. Since you answer the questions by clicking your mouse on the computer screen, you won’t be able to use the strategy of crossing out wrong answers in your test booklet to narrow down the choices.

Flag the toughest questions. With the “Mark” and “Review” buttons I described earlier in the Verbal and Quantitative sections, the GRE lets you skip around within each section, mark questions for further attention, and to see your overall progress. The “Mark” button allows you to flag a question in order to come back to it later, while the “Review” button takes you to a different screen where you can see the status of each question in the section you’re working on.

Here’s what the Review screen looks like:

Use the Review Screen to group questions. For each question in the section you’re working on, the Review screen lets you know whether you’ve answered it, flagged it, skipped it, or not seen it yet. Because you can effectively sort the questions into four categories (Answered, Answered & Flagged, Skipped, and Skipped & Flagged), you can use the Review option to efficiently use your time. For instance, you can:

Answer easy questions
Answer & Flag questions where you’ve eliminated 2 or more incorrect answer choices
Skip questions that seem confusing
Skip & Flag questions that will require the most time to answer

From here, you can either click “Return” to go back to the question you were on, or click “Go To Question” to type in the number of the question you’d like to revisit.

Estimate with to-Scale Graphs and Charts

Don’t estimate with geometric figures. For the GRE format, geometric figures aren’t drawn to scale. That means any pictures of triangles, polygons, and circles don’t necessarily reflect the dimensions they are supposed to have according to the problem. This means you can’t use estimates to answer geometry-based questions.

Use estimates on graphs and charts. On the other hand, anything graphed on an xy-plane (like a line, for instance), or on a number line, IS drawn to scale. Graphs and charts (like bar graphs, line graphs, or circle graphs) are also drawn to scale, so you can use estimates in these problems as well. For example, estimating the intercepts or slope of a line is a valid strategy.

Check Yourself With the Built-In Calculator

Keep the “Transfer Display” calculator button in mind when working on the Numeric Entry questions. By automatically copying your result into the answer blank, you’ll avoid careless errors.

Bottom Line: What You Must Know About the GRE Format

Knowing the GRE test format helps with prep, time management, and stress .

Analytical Writing
Two Verbal Reasoning
Two Quantitative Reasoning
Either an unmarked experimental section or a marked research section
“Analyze an Issue”: convince someone else that your viewpoint is right.
“Analyze an Issue”: find holes in an existing argument.
Text Completion: pick words to fit into a sentence.
Sentence Equivalence: find synonyms to complete a sentence.
10 passage-based Reading Comprehension questions
8-9 Quantitative Comparisons : compare two values.
8-9 Problem Solving : find the answers for word problems, geometry questions, or equations.
3-4 Data Interpretation : answer questions based on a graph or chart.
Questions cover arithmetic, algebra, geometry, and data analysis .
Countdown clock for the section you’re working on.
“Help” button: opens the instruction page for the section you’re on.
“Exit Section” button: leave the section before time runs out.
Basic text editor featuring cut, paste, undo, and redo functions.
“Next” button: take you to the next essay.
“Next” and “Back” buttons: go to the next or previous question.
“Mark” button: flag a question in order to come back to it later.
“Review” button: show your section progress.
“Calc” button: bring up the calculator or to make it disappear.
“Transfer Display” button: copy calculator’s display onto the GRE.
Study all the possible prompts for both essays on the ETS website.
Use scratch paper to outline your essay before you start typing.
Use the instruction page to clear your mind before a new section .
Use the “Mark” and “Review” tools to sort questions into categories and then work on them in ascending order of difficulty.
Estimate answers on questions that use diagrams drawn to scale , including xy-plane graphs, bar graphs, line graphs, or circle graphs.
Use the “Transfer Display” calculator button to avoid careless errors.

What’s Next?

More questions about the GRE format? Check out our complete guide to the computerized test’s structure and how to use it your advantage.

Looking to learn more about the GRE marking scheme? Check out our guides to how the exam is scored , the GRE score range , and average GRE scores .

If you’re ready to sign up for the test, check out the GRE test date schedule and follow along with our full guide to registration .

Ready to improve your GRE score by 7 points?

Author: Anna Wulick

Anna majored in English at Princeton and to get her doctorate in English Literature at Columbia University. She is passionate about improving student access to higher education. View all posts by Anna Wulick

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COMMENTS

How Long Should Your GRE Essay Be? [A Data Driven Answer]
Longer essays usually score better on every essay topic. If you are a long-essay fan and insist to pen a high scoring AWA essay on the GRE, you should write anywhere between 500-600 words. Don't ask me why. The research shows that's how it is, and if it true for a sample of 500 students, it must be true on a larger scale as well.
How Long Should GRE Essays Be? (2024's Top Guide)
The name already tells us that the GRE essay tests two things: analytical writing and critical thinking skills. In total, you have 60 minutes to write your essay. The time is split between two analytical writing tasks that are a part of the GRE essay section: #1 - "Analyze the Issue" - 30 minutes. #2 - "Analyze an Argument" - 30 minutes.
How Long Should GRE Essays Be? (Answered)
When it comes to the AW section of the GRE, longer is better, until a point. The perfect length of GRE essays is somewhere between 550 and 650 words. But any longer and you may be hurting your score. Our expert test prep team covers how long GRE essays should be, as well as other tips you should know for test day.
The 15 Best GRE Essay Tips to Improve Your Score
Argument Tip 2: Only Write About Major Points. Because you only have 30 minutes for the GRE argument essay, you don't have to analyze every single facet of the argument. It's more important to analyze major features that contribute to the argument's efficacy (or lack thereof).
How Long Should a GRE Essay be?
The GRE will kick off with the Analytical Writing section, where you will have one hour to write two essays. You will be given thirty minutes to write each one. Hence, you cannot choose to use forty minutes of your one hour on the first essay and twenty minutes on your second essay. Once the thirty minutes is up, you will be taken to the second ...
GRE Essay: Tips on Approaching the GRE Analytical Writing Section
By simply writing often you will be able to write with greater command and facility. With diligent practice, words will not seem submerged deep in your subconscious but will instead spring to life on the page. 2. Don't forget to outline/brainstorm. You must think about what you are going to write before you write.
GRE Argument Essay: How to Get a Perfect 6 Score
Practically speaking, no, you don't need a perfect 6.0 on the Argument essay. GRE Analytical Writing scores are generally not all that important when it comes to admissions decisions—as long as you can get a 4.5, you'll be set for most schools.
4 Top-Scoring GRE Sample Essays, Analyzed (Issue + Argument)
Our guide includes in depth analysis of 4 GRE essay examples, plus take-away tips on how craft a high-scoring essay. Looking for GRE sample essays? Our guide includes in depth analysis of 4 GRE essay examples, plus take-away tips on how craft a high-scoring essay. ... The survey may have been 10 pages long, with 2 questions dedicated to river ...
How to Write a Great GRE Argument Essay
Fact #4: Quality matters, but so does quantity. The essays that tend to get the highest grades have one feature in common: length! Write as much as you can—without being repetitive. Your Argument essay should include at least four indented paragraphs and consist of 350-600 words—ideally somewhere in the 500-600-word range.
PDF Overview of the Analytical Writing Section
3BIntroduction. The Analytical Writing section of the Graduate Record Examinations® (GRE®) tests your critical thinking and analytical writing skills. It assesses your ability to articulate and support complex ideas, construct and evaluate arguments, and sustain a focused and coherent discussion.
7 Tips for a Perfect GRE Issue Essay
Don't waffle. You don't have time to argue both sides of an issue on the GRE issue essay. Even if you don't believe in the side you choose, you'll only have time to argue one side effectively. If you take a middle-of-the-road approach you won't sound as confident or clear. Remember, according to ETS, the "readers are evaluating the ...
12 Tips to Ace GRE Writing
2 minutes to read through the prompt and directions. 3 minutes brainstorming, outlining, and writing a thesis statement. 20 minutes writing the body paragraphs and examples of your essay. 2 minutes to edit for small mistakes, such as grammatical errors. 3 minutes (if available) to write an intro.
GRE General Test Structure
The overall testing time is about 3 hours and 45 minutes. There are six sections with a 10-minute break following the third section. Measure. Number of Questions. Allotted Time. Analytical Writing. (One section with two separately timed tasks) One "Analyze an Issue" task and one "Analyze an Argument" task. 30 minutes per task.
GRE General Test Analytical Writing Overview
The Analytical Writing measure of the GRE General Test administered before September 22, 2023, assesses your critical thinking and analytical writing skills by assessing your ability to: articulate and support complex ideas. construct and evaluate arguments. sustain a focused and coherent discussion. It doesn't assess specific content knowledge.
GRE Timing Tips: How Long is the GRE?
The Essays . The scored part of the GRE begins with two back-to-back essays. For the Issue Essay, you'll make a compelling case for your position on a topic and then analyze the logical soundness of another author's argument for the Argument Essay. You have 30 minutes for each. Get a preview of what you'll face with these sample GRE essay ...
How to Structure the GRE Issue Essay
GRE Analytical Writing Essay Scoring Process. Your GRE essays will be scored by half-point increments, from 0 to 6 (highest). Two graders will score both this argument essay and your issue essay. A third grader will also score your essays if your two initial graders' scores differ by more than one point. The graders base scores on their ...
Advice for length of essay? : r/GRE
It should only take 1-2 minutes in the beginning, and you can choose to start at the body paragraph first since most people get stuck thinking for a good intro. In terms of paragraph structure, what worked for me was 1) transition sentence between paragraphs, 2) main idea, 3) evidence, 4) 2-3 sentences for explanation.
How Long Is The GRE? (Answered + Full Exam Guide)
Analytical Writing. The exam begins with Analytical Writing, which includes one assignment.The Issue Essay requires you to write on your stance regarding a topic that is provided in the prompt.. Verbal & Quantitative Reasoning. This part of the exam consists of four sections altogether and a total time of 88 minutes in which to complete it. There are 54 questions total across the four sections.
The Advanced Guide to GRE Analytical Writing
If you are a long-essay fan and insist to pen a high scoring AWA essay on the GRE, you should write anywhere between 500-600 words. Don't ask us why. The research shows that's how it is, and if it true for a sample of 500 students, it must be true on a larger scale as well. A column chart with average word count for essays from 500 students
GRE Sections: Your Path Through the Test
The texts you should read could be the same - scholarly articles, position papers, opinion essays, long-form reporting articles. ... Each of the three GRE sections is supposed to assess your knowledge in several areas from your reading, comprehension, analytical skills and vocabulary in the Verbal Reasoning section, to your writing ...
The Best College Essay Length: How Long Should It Be?
In the simplest terms, your college essay should be pretty close to, but not exceeding, the word limit in length. Think within 50 words as the lower bound, with the word limit as the upper bound. So for a 500-word limit essay, try to get somewhere between 450-500 words. If they give you a range, stay within that range.
Complete Guide: GRE Test Format • PrepScholar GRE
The GRE is approximately 3 hours and 45 minutes long. There are 1-minute breaks after each part of the GRE and a 10-minute rest break after the third section. All these breaks are optional. You can take them, or use only a part of each break and go on to the next section - the GRE exam format is flexible.
r/GRE on Reddit: How long should the issue and argument essays be to
600 is the mean word count for both to receive a good score. But not necessarily! You can exceed or trail 600 and still get a perfect score. As Gregmat says, "A 300 word well worded, syntactically sound essay is better than a 600-word essay without proper grammar."

How Long Should GRE Essays Be? (2024's Top Guide)

The GRE Essay Section

What’s the Issue Task?

What’s the Argument Task?

What's the Ideal GRE Essay Length?

The GRE Essay Scoring Process

4 Steps on How to Divide Your Time

1. Read (3 minutes)

2. Think (3 minutes)

3. Write (20 minutes)

4. Edit (4 minutes)

10 GRE Test Prep and Writing Tips

The GRE Example Prompt

Wrapping Up

Recent Posts

How Long Should a GRE Essay be?

The GRE Essay Section

The GRE Essay Scoring

The GRE Essay Prompts

How Long Should a GRE Essay Be?

Tips for Writing a Good GRE Essay

1. Practice

2. Take the Time to Plan

3. Prepare Examples

4. Analyze and Then Analyze Some More

How Long Should a GRE Essay Be? Summary

12 Tips to Ace GRE Writing

General GRE Analytical Writing Assessment Tips

1. Know the topic types

2. Read the directions thoroughly

3. Manage time well

4. Write as much as you can

Issue Essay: GRE Writing Tips

5. Come up with pro/con statements

6. Choose a side

7. Relate all examples and reasoning back to your thesis

8. Make a concession point

Argument Essay: GRE Writing Tips

9. Identify the assumptions

10. Find the logical fallacies

11. Never agree with the argument

12. Choose your examples carefully

A Final Word on GRE Writing Tips

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Overview of the Analytical Writing Measure

Analytical Writing Measure before September 22, 2023

Preparing for the Analytical Writing measure

Published topic pools for the Analytical Writing measure

Test-taking strategies for the Analytical Writing measure (in the General Test beginning September 22, 2023)

GRE Timing Tips: How Long is the GRE?

GRE Test Day Timeline

Biographical Information

Multiple-Choice Sections

Research Section

Cancelling/Accepting Your GRE Scores

GRE Timing Tips

1. Accuracy is better than speed.

2. Take it all in.

3. Mark and move on.

4. Try another question if you're stuck.

Practice for the GRE

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Free MCAT Practice Test

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How to Structure the GRE Issue Essay

Template Paragraph 1: The Introduction

Template Paragraph 2: Body Paragraph 1

Template Paragraph 3: Body Paragraph 2

Top 4 Tips for a Strong GRE Issue Essay

Be specific and relevant.

Make strong, declarative statements.

Refute the other position.

GRE Issue Essay Sample

How To Write and Structure GRE Issue Essay

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