What's going on guys, and welcome to How To Get 24+ on the Writing Section.
First of all, let me say that I am NOT going to do an overview of the writing
section here, so if you're not sure about the TOEFL writing or if you're still new
to it, I'll leave a link in the description below to a couple of other
videos that would be more helpful. This video is specifically for students who
have taken the TOEFL writing before or know a bit about it and they're not
really sure how to improve their score. Lots of students need 22-24 or higher, so
I'm going to show you how to do that, and I'm going to show you two strategies in
particular. The first strategy I'm going to do, is what we're going to do together,
is we're going to talk about ultimate templates, and basically what they are
advanced templates with a little bit more complicated grammar and vocabulary.
And I'm going to explain how it works, and you'll feel pretty comfortable using
it by the end. Also, I'm going to show you what conditional sentences are, a very
brief overview of conditional sentences and why they are important to put in
your writing. Both of these things are gonna help expand your vocabulary and
grammar, which is crucial to get a twenty four or higher the TOEFL writing. My name
is Josh McPherson, I am the head instructor at tstprep.com where our
mission is simple, to help you get a TOEFL score you need as quickly and
easily as possible. And today we're gonna talk about the TOEFL writing section.
Really quickly, I just want to promote our new course the TOEFL writing section
course, How To Get 24+ in Two Simple Steps, it's now available at our site tstprep.com,
and this is just a little taste of everything that's available in
that course, okay. Now, the first thing we're going to do is we're gonna talk
about templates. Now, I'm sure that you've probably used templates, but I'm going to
show you actually how to use advanced templates, and why they're important. So
let me start with that, why they're important? And to do that we have to look
at the grading and how the TOEFL writing is graded. So I'm gonna need my computer.
So come with us. So before I show you the advanced
templates and how to use conditional sentences, I just first want to quickly
go over how the test is graded, how the writing section is graded. So Michael
Goodine from TOEFL resources recently came out with an excellent video about
the grading criteria. If you have 20 minutes to spare, I definitely recommend
it, and I will link to it in the link below. He goes through a couple different
areas of how the test is graded, and all this information is from ETS and from
academic research. And, basically, there are two parts, that I broke it down even
less than how he broke it down, to make it really simple, is that you are graded
on organization and development, which is basically your structure, and then
vocabulary and grammar. And, if you notice that your organization and development
is about 65% of your grade, and about 35% is vocabulary and grammar, but I am going
to be focusing on the smaller number, the vocabulary and grammar, excuse me.
Why is that? Because most students, who come to me, who say that they're
struggling with the TOEFL they can't get the score that they want, and I look
at their essays, almost all the students know templates, almost all of them know
to give a personal example, almost all of them know how to organize their
paragraphs, but they have some problems with vocabulary and grammar, and that's
the thing that's holding them back. And that's also a really hard thing to fix.
The structure is actually kind of easy to follow. Once you know about templates,
once you start getting into the nitty-gritty and trying to improve your
writing, that's when it's vocabulary and grammar, and that's where it gets really
difficult. So I've created templates, ultimate templates, I call them advanced
templates, to help show that you have a more expansive vocabulary and a more
expansive grammar. And I'm going to show you an example from one for the
independent writing. So we want to improve our vocabulary and grammar. So
let me show you these advanced templates. And I'm just going to show you one, I'm
gonna leave a link in the description below for for the other, for the template
what is it like, PDF download thing, maybe you can get, okay. So here it is. So
you'll notice that there are gonna be longer sentences, more sophisticated
vocabulary, more complicated grammatical structures, and more colloquial phrases.
So first let me just show you the kind of basic template that you're probably
used to, okay. So here, "There is no shortage of opinion on it", so this is a
nice little phrase to start, and you have to say the question a different way. So
if the question is something like, give your friend advice on the healthiest way
to, or the best way to lose weight. So there's no shortage of opinion on ways
to lose weight or the best way to lose weight, whatever it is. In my opinion, I
think that the best way to lose weight is to diet and exercise. I feel this way
for two main, okay so, so on. And let me make something very clear, that you can get
even a perfect score with these traditional templates. They don't,
you don't need an advanced template to get a high score. It's just if you're
struggling, it's because of your vocabulary and grammar, so we're gonna
use an advanced template to try to help you boost that, all right. Now, let's look
at the advanced template for the same introduction. No one can deny that there
are both positive and negative aspects of ... okay. So, if you notice here, I use the
phrase no one can deny, so like there's no shortage of opinion of, it's also a
phrase, okay. So when you use this kind of phrases, the
e-rater actually can pick up on those phrases, it's been programmed to be able
to identify idioms, colloquial phrases, and so on. So you want to use them. And
then, the next sentence you'll see, "If I were forced to choose, comma, I would
definitely", so you have a comma in there, you have to use a conditional sentence.
I'm going to talk about this next, and so it's a more complicated grammatical
structure. The next thing you'll see is that "It is my firm belief that", so
instead of saying "I feel this way", "It is my firm belief" and this phrase "firm
belief" is a phrase, you want to try to include phrases, commas, longer sentences,
and these are things that the e-rater, which is the computer that grades your
essay, has been programmed to pick up on, and also, by the way, the graders,
the human graders will also see that you're writing at a pretty advanced
level. It's my firm belief that, and then you paraphrase the question, so and for a
number of reasons and, again, I put another comma here, and I will develop
these ideas in the subsequent paragraph. So this kind of difficult vocabulary,
instead of saying "following" paragraph, "subsequent". So we try to just make the
vocabulary a bit richer and try to make the sentences a bit longer. So it's just
these little things you've want to stack these little things up, and these little
things pile on each other, and they help you get to the next level. So that's the
advanced template for the introduction for the independent writing. I'm actually
not going to go into too much detail with this because you can just take a
look at it on your own and see. I just wanted to introduce the idea and you can
see why I've developed these templates this way. And, if you look at the e-rater
features really quickly, there are a couple things that they are programmed
to look for. Now, this is not a list of all the things that they're to look for,
these are things that are easy for other writing programs to program in a robot
basically. So these are just easy things for a computer to check for your essay,
and so, obviously, ETS, the company who makes the TOEFL, will use these criteria
to help grade your essay. Here's a couple
of examples. The amount of words in your essay of course, repeated words, if you
say the same word too much, it might hurt your score, will hurt your score, the
amount of phrasal verbs and idioms, yeah you want to try to use these colloquial
phrases. You don't want to use too many idioms like "I'm so hungry I can eat a
horse" or something like that, because then that's a little too casual, but you
do want to use colloquial phrases, phrases that have two or more words,
because they show an advanced level of vocabulary. They can also see the average
length per word. They can take all of your words into account and see how long
your average words are. They can see the average length of your sentences. If
your sentences are too short, that could be a problem, and they could also count
the number of commas you have. So, you see, all of this stuff builds on each other.
So that's why you want to use these advanced templates, and you'll notice
some of them are pretty similar. There's some phrases that are similar, but
there's just a couple extra things that are really help boost your score to the
next level to get 24. Now, and some of you might be wondering why don't you start
with advanced templates, why aren't these the first templates that teachers teach.
Because the first goal of any teacher is to just get you used to the structure of
the TOEFL, and these simple templates work for the most part. They work well, so
that there's not really too much of a reason to teach you an advanced template,
unless you can't improve your score. If you can't improve your score, and that's
why you're watching this video right now, probably then that's why you need to
start using a more advanced template. The next thing I want to talk about is
conditional sentences. Now, I'm not going to turn this into a grammar lesson
because, to be honest, it´ll be pretty boring, and just conditional sentences are, you
know, they're not so easy to teach, to be honest, and they're not so easy to learn.
And so, I don't want you to learn about conditional sentences, I want to teach
you two specific places, with two specific types of conditional sentences
for you to use a conditional sentence in your essay. I'm going to just show you
two places in your independent essay where you can use it. Now, hopefully by
now you understand why you should put a conditional sentence in your essay,
because it makes your sentence longer, and the e-rater is checking for that.
Alright, so let's get right into it. So the first place that you should put your
conditional sentence, and you saw it already is in your introduction
paragraph of the independent essay, and I've already shared it with the ultimate
template, but I'll show it here in action. When this question, your friend wants to
lose weight, what would advise, and so here is the sentence at the end. If my friend
asked me how to lose weight, I would suggest the following two things: a balanced
diet and exercise. So if you see here, if my friend asked me, so this is one way
that you can form it, if my friend asked me, I would do this. Another thing if you
could say is, if I were asked, which I believe this what's in the ultimate
template. Let's go back to the ultimate template really quickly, yeah. So in the
ultimate template you'll see here, if I were forced to choose. So here this
template work, if there's two choices, like do you agree or disagree, but this
other question is about advice. And so, when you're asking about advice, it would
be better to say, if I had to tell my friend, okay. So that's when you want to
use this conditional sentence. So in this situation you're going to say "if" and
then you're going to use a noun or pronoun here, the subject. So, if my
friend asked, if I were asked, if I had to choose, if I were forced to choose, so
that's the first part. It's going to be one of those, and then you put a comma
after that, "I would" and then the base form of the verb. If I were forced to
choose, let´s say for example the question is, do you agree or disagree all high
school students should wear school uniforms, if I were forced to choose, I
would say that all students should not wear school uniforms, like that, okay. In
this situation, if my friend asked me how to lose weight, I would say, I would
suggest, and then you have the base form of the verb. So that's the first
place that you can put a conditional, towards the end of
your introduction paragraph. Now, the second place that you can put a
conditional sentence to expand your vocabulary and make your grammar look a
bit more complicated is towards the end of your body paragraphs. Basically, it
should be the conclusion of your personal example. By now you probably
know that in your writing, in the body paragraph, you probably have a personal
example to connect to your reason. So here, for example, the person says, the
writer here says, a well-balanced diet has been proven to help people lose
weight, so they think of well-balanced diet. Now, they should have a personal
example explaining why they believe that. They're gonna talk about their mother
here and talk about my mother, okay. So after you tell your story, it's very
important that your end shows like a lesson that was learned, shows why this
example helped inform your reason. It should show how your personal example is
connected to your reason and what happened. So you use this conditional to
imagine a past, this conditional is called,
it's a very complicated word, you don't need to know about past unreal
conditional, you imagine something in the past and what your life would be like if
it happened. If my mother had never consulted a nutritionist, she would have
never known the importance of a well-balanced diet. So you see, this is
pretty difficult grammar, which is why I teach it, because if you can just put
this one difficult grammar form in your essay, it shows a pretty strong handle of
English grammar. So the form here is "if" and then the subject, and then "had". If
I had gone, it's like the past perfect, so if I had gone to college, if I had lived
in America, if I had been born to somebody else,
so that that's the expression. And then the second clauses, I would have, I would
have never known, I would have never been, I would have lived, I would have seen, so
on. So that's the structure of that conditional sentence. Try this and see
how it works. I know it's a little difficult, so these
strategies are a little bit difficult to do, so it's up to you if you want to do them
or not. But the reason, I hope you understand my reason, and I just want to
go back to the grading criteria really quickly, because you're probably
struggling with vocabulary and grammar, and I want to find some ways
for you to improve your vocabulary and grammar, and make your sentences a bit
longer, and to get that score just a couple points more to where it needs to
be. You have made it to the end. You have learned how to use advanced templates
and why they're important, so they can show to the e-rater and the human grader
that you have an expansive vocabulary and English grammatical knowledge. You've
also learned how to use conditional sentences to put in your independent
essay so you can have some examples of longer sentences and, again, that helps
improve your score. You can visit our website for more of this kind of stuff
tstprep.com. And I strongly recommend that you do an evaluation, because
that'll save you a ton of time. You'll know your strengths and weaknesses and
what you need to do to get to that 24 or more. All right, thank you for watching
guys. Good luck and
I take care guys. Bye-bye.