Five TOEFL Writing Mistakes And How to Avoid Them

[Music] [Applause] so today we're gonna talk about TOEFL writing how to avoid these five mistakes so these are five common mistakes that I see students make pretty often in the TOEFL writing now I'm gonna assume that you know a little bit about the TOEFL writing already if you don't know about it there's a link to a quick guide which will help you understand the kind of structure of the TOEFL writing not just the writing but every section of the TOEFL okay so it's 12 pages really quick and you'll know everything about TOEFL that you need to know for the structure now today I'm going to talk about mistakes and this is for both the integrated and independent essay so both of these essays I'm going to talk about each one a little bit now it's very important that you watch this because I'm gonna tell you things that a lot of students do I've taught hundreds of students at this point of students the TOEFL over the years and this happens a lot and you want to make sure that you're improving that you're getting better as you write so these are ways to help you improve and help you get better in your writing okay let me stop talking let me start teaching so the first mistake you start writing immediately now I'm gonna sound like a teacher here so maybe you've heard this before but you need to make an outline before you start writing this is a very famous thing that writing teachers tell students that students don't do and then teachers that you have to do and blah blah blah so your outline doesn't have to be a whole lot basically it's just kind of your plan what you're going to say in your introduction what you're going to say in your body paragraphs you don't have to plan out your conclusion the conclusion is pretty simple it's more important for the independent writing for your second writing task because that is your writing everything from your own opinion your own experience everything you are creating for the integrated essay it's not that important to write an outline because you have your notes from the reading in the listening section and you are just reporting information for the most part so you don't really need an outline so you could start writing immediately I guess for the integrated essay but for the independent essay you really want to make sure that you write an outline that you know what you're gonna say in the beginning what you're gonna say in the middle and don't worry about the end so much okay so I'm more particularly you want to write down your two reasons for your opinion and your independent essay you don't have to really write that in the outline just kind of know what it is and then your examples what you're gonna say to help support your reason okay now that's that number two another mistake that you do is you think you're finished but you're not tick tock okay so you think you're finished but you're not how can I explain this basically the test is really the long the test is about four hours and the writing section is the last section of the test so at this point after sitting down and taking a test for four hours you want to go home I want to go home everybody wants to go home so you've to dn't sorry pretty quickly even me I've taken the test before I try to just write it as fast as I can and get out of there after you finish writing stop well you will stop because you've finished um and don't leave yes go back and edit check your spelling look at the sentences and the paragraphs that you weren't sure about that you were a little confused about and edit when I write something when I write a blog post when I write some articles books whatever most of my time is spent editing the first time I write something it's garbage my first thing whatever I put that immediately is very bad usually not just grammatically not just vocabulary but just it's just not good writing my writing gets better as I edit I'm not a fantastic writer but I'm a pretty good writer because I edit a lot that's what you want to do you want to make sure that you go back and you edit it's very necessary in order for you to write well okay so your score will improve if you leave yourself enough time to edit so even when you're practicing make sure when you're using the clock make sure to give yourself two or three minutes to edit again important for both essays very important for independent essay the second essay okay you use fancy words so for example a plethora of tenacious Tenzin's then signs then the denizens I think it's venison's like citizens but with addy denizens a plethora of tenacious denizens now you don't have to know what that means this I'm just using this as an example to say that you don't have to use fancy words you don't have to use very difficult academic words it's important to use synonyms you don't want to use the same vocabulary over and over again but you also don't want to try to sound smart I say this for this speaking definitely it's very important for the speaking but it's also important for the writing it's actually not a problem to sound smart to use fancy words it's actually okay for the writing it's just that you want to make sure that you understand the words that you're comfortable using the words like I'm not comfortable using most of these words but the road is okay for me but tenacious and denizens I don't use those words very often I know what they mean but I don't feel comfortable using them you want to make sure that you feel comfortable with the vocabulary that you're writing if you think vocabulary is a problem for you then maybe you need to study some more vocabulary when you use words that are very difficult that you don't understand I can tell the grader can tell the TOEFL grader can tell everybody knows that these are not your words this is something that you were either taught to do or you're trying to sound smart and actually you just sound unnatural and you don't like a native speaker native speakers fluent English speakers they feel comfortable when they're writing when they're speaking make sure you do the same when you are writing when you're speaking okay next one number four you think your opinion matters yeah your opinion doesn't matter and this might be your face right now so you think your opinion matters yeah you your opinion doesn't matter nobody cares I know that's not true your opinion matters especially for writing tasks - for the independence via writing tasks but for the integrated speaking that I'm sorry I keep on saying speaking the integrated writing the first writing tasks don't give your opinion don't give any outside information for the integrated writing you only report information that's it you don't say your opinion you don't make any conclusion about the about what all this means you just report information very important for the integrated writing a lot of students kind of put in their own perspective their own opinion don't do that for the integrated writing you will get points off you are only supposed to report information for the integrated writing that's because in news and journalism in the past at least it was supposed to be important for academics scholars journalists to keep their opinion out of the information okay so you don't give your opinion at all first TAS integrated writing no opinion second task yes but first one no the next one number five you do it all alone yes so and this is a scared face for writing and for speaking I have some bad news is that you do need a teacher you need somebody and I say that's bad news because a lot of people want to do it alone they want to study alone at the website that we run TOEFL speaking teacher calm all of our teachers are TOEFL experts and also we do writing evaluations so I'll leave a link again in the description but we check your writing we tell you what you're doing well what you're not doing well and how you can improve so you can definitely take advantage of that that's hopeful speaking teacher calm the thing is is that you need somebody who's an expert to tell you what to do to get better at speaking and writing in particular with the reading and listening you can check your answers you can change them you can find explanations for them but speaking in writing there's so many different ways to be wrong there are a lot of ways to be wrong in the speaking and writing because everybody's gonna have a different spoken response everybody's gonna have a different writing response so you need a teacher or an expert to be able to tell you what you're doing well and how you can improve and we do that there Topol speaking teacher calm so don't do it alone because you're gonna keep making the same mistakes over and over again if you don't go to our site find another teacher or find a very advanced student find a tutor find somebody who will help you who grade your writing and tell you what you're doing well and what you're not doing well and how you can improve okay that's it five mistakes again you start writing immediately you think you're finished but you're not you use fancy words you think your opinion matters and you do it alone don't make these mistakes thank you for staying to the end as always you're amazing you're watching a TOEFL video on the Internet there's a million other things you can do but you stay to the end of this congratulations you're motivated and I love teaching students like you thank you and leave any comments questions below and I'll answer okay alright take care guys

Channel: TST Prep TOEFL

Views: 77,953

Keywords: TOEFL Writing help, TOEFL writing mistakes, TOEFL writing section, TOEFL writing five mistakes, TOEFL Josh, TOEFL Speaking Teacher, Josh MacPherson

Id: hjHF8TQFLgY

Length: 10min 43sec (643 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 10 2018