1. TOEFL iBT Writing: Does Your Essay Meet These Four Criteria?
Your success in TOEFL iBT writing lies in your preparation. Therefore, to
prepare, you should practice making written responses to sample iBT
independent writing tasks after which you can have someone else, preferably
a TOEFL iBT writing specialist, evaluate your essay according to the official
TOEFL iBT rubrics that Educational Testing Service (ETS) uses to evaluate
your essay. Framed from the official ETS guidelines for the independent
writing task of the TOEFL iBT, the following four questions about your essay
should be answered by whomever you choose to evaluate your essay:
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1. Did I answer all parts of the question?
Since many of the TOEFL iBT questions are multi-tasked, you should get
feedback as to whether or not you have answered all parts of the writing
assignment.
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2. Is my essay well-organized?
In this case, the reviewer of your essay should check your thesis statement
and topic sentences in the body paragraphs to make sure that they directly
answer the question being asked. There should be adequate use of transition
words and other types of signal words that show how your ideas are
connected. Your reviewer should pay particular attention to the key junctures
of your paper which can be especially troublesome: end of the first
paragraph, beginning and end of each paragraph, and concluding
paragraph.There should be a strong sense of unity in all these key junctures.
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2. 3. Do I provide adequate supporting detail for the generalizations I use in my
essay?
To evaluate this, your reviewer should check to see that you are using
specific, even personable, details in the body paragraphs that are relevant to
the topic statements of those paragraphs. It is also important to evaluate
whether or not the details show a progression of ideas. The reviewer should
check for word cues such as for example, for instance, and case in point, all
of which can be used to introduce supporting points.
4. Do I write with grammatical fluency, with only minor grammatical or word
choice errors that do not obscure meaning?
The reviewer, ideally a native-English speaker familiar with the language of
academic writing, should keep in mind that it is not just important to be
grammatically correct, but it is important that you use a combination of
simple, compound, and complex sentence structures, thereby displaying what
ETS calls syntactic variety. Another sticky issue to consider is your
idiomaticity of language use. In other words, how natural sounding are you?
Would a native speaker use similar grammar and vocabulary to express
comparable ideas? Does it sound like you are translating from another
language? Compare the following sentences:
Unnatural: How many years do you have?
Natural: How old are you?
Even though both sentences are grammatically correct, "How old are you?" is
more natural sounding.
If you can do well in these four areas when taking your practice tests, you
have a good chance of scoring higher than 24/30 points on the independent
writing task when you take the actual TOEFL iBT exam.
Good luck!