How to Extend your Ideas in TOEFL Writing!

hello toefl students i am mark one of the expert toefl teachers here at e2 and you may be here because you've been told that in your writing you've got unclear positions or perhaps you're having difficulty extending your ideas or perhaps you don't have enough range in the grammatical structures you're using when you're writing in today's video we're going to look very carefully at how you can extend your answers using a few different techniques by the end of this video you'll hopefully be able to start using these techniques but more importantly hopefully you'll have a little bit more fun when you're writing today we're looking at essay writing and how to get a four or a five in your essay now in order to do that you need to extend the ideas that you write about in your essay but how do we do that how can we find different ways to express and continue extending our ideas today we'll look at three techniques that you can use to help make those ideas clearer and fully extended these techniques are how it works effect and global examples and i'll go into those in detail in the video don't worry about them right now now before we get into the techniques let's take a minute to look at how to get the scores that you want we'll take a look at a five and a four in the essay and we'll see what exactly you need to do to get up to that score let's quickly take a look at a number five you can see here for a five you need well organized and well-developed ideas and you need to use appropriate explanations exemplifications and or details so this means you're extending your ideas and your ideas are clear another thing it wants is unity progression and coherence this means that from one sentence to the next it flows smoothly if i'm reading it it's not difficult to find the idea or i'm not waiting to see okay i understand the language but what is the point you're making that should always be clear to the reader and finally displays syntactic variety though it may have errors now basically what that means is grammatical range so you're able to use different sentence structures to express your ideas now i also do want to take a look at a four for many of you that's going to be more than enough to get the score that you want or to get into the program that you need the toefl exam for let's just take a look at that to see how it's a little bit different for a 4 it says addresses the topic and task well does not fully elaborate so even if you don't have all the extending ideas but you have some you'll be in an okay position to get a good score it also says well organized well developed just like a 5 using appropriate and sufficient explanation so it might not go into full detail but it's giving enough detail that's a little bit more what we'll be looking at today it also says unity and progression although there may be redundancy digression or unclear connections we're going to try to avoid that today and finally it says demonstrates syntactic variety though it will have occasional noticeable minor errors so again you've got a good range of grammar and sentence structures but for a fort you can make a few more grammatical errors so do remember that you want to have range of grammatical structures but it doesn't always have to be perfect now that said you want to have as few grammatical errors as possible but don't get stressed out if you're finding that you're getting feedback from your teachers with your grammatical errors try to make less alright so let's take a look at our question now here it is do you agree or disagree with the following statement the government should always tell the truth use specific reasons and examples to support your answer be sure to use your own words do not use memorized examples very key important thing there don't just take ideas you've read and copy them verbatim into your answer now at e2 we have a number of lessons that go into the various ways that you'll organize and write your essay how to do the introduction the body paragraphs and the conclusion today we're really mostly going to look at the body paragraphs and one of the techniques that you can use is to extend your ideas with the idea of effect and in effect it may look like this you might use a phrase like as a result or consequently now these are more basic structures they're a little bit simpler and you can use them and it's not a problem slightly more advanced forms might look like this full stop this can lead to and then you express the idea you could also change it to comma which can lead to so there's many ways that you can show effect and in our course we have all these different ways that you can extend your ideas this is one grammatical structure we'll look at specifically here today you'll see it shortly now the first thing we'll do and this is very important to remember uh in your introduction is you do want to have a clear position so here's our introduction telling the truth is one of the most important aspects of running a government full stop it helps build trust and public confidence all right so i've introduced the topic although governments should always try to tell the truth comma there are times when it may be appropriate to conceal it so in the introduction i've now said i disagree yes they should try to tell the truth but there are times when they cannot now let's take a look at our first body paragraph the first sentence here governments should always have the goal of telling the truth so here is the position the rest of the paragraph will extend on this idea this is because telling the truth builds public trust so i've explained why next i will explain how it works the idea i've expressed is now going to get extended with an idea that shows exactly how this will happen as governments are funded by citizens through their taxes to do otherwise would be a crime now in this paragraph i've got a very specific example for example comma every year the australian government publishes their budget and then at the end of the year publishes a report detailing whether or not their goals were met and if they overspent all right so i've given a real-life example and i know a lot of times toefl students and students of all test prep courses love to give real examples we're going to take a look at a bit of a variation on that so instead of a specific example we're going to express this as a global example the rest of the paragraph reads like this if governments make a habit of lying the government will quickly lose faith the more accountable the government is the more citizens will trust it so in this case i have now concluded the point that yes if the government is not honest it will not help them and it is better for them to be honest tell the truth be accountable but let's look at how i've changed this paragraph to use a global example instead of a specific example in this paragraph in the fourth sentence i've changed it to say governments should publish their plans and budgets comma continue to provide updates on the progress of their projects comma and be transparent about how the money is spent including being honest about when mistakes are made so in this example i've used a more global example instead of coming up with a specific one now both are fine there is no penalty for using a different kind of example the only thing is often it's difficult in the moment to think of an example so it might be better to just present your idea instead of trying to think of an example i think this works quite well and i don't want you guys to get stressed out trying to invent an example in the moment really this test is allowing you to express your ideas if you're trying to prepare for this in your test just make sure that you know what you believe about how government should work it's a very good idea to make some notes about that really reflect on your ideas before sitting a test like toefl or any of the other english language tests now moving on to the second paragraph one reason however to conceal parts of the truth is that there are many dishonest people who will exploit government honesty now here my first sentence very clearly states the position and the topic people will exploit it sadly many people are only interested in their own ends and do not care about hurting others to achieve them then i explain how this works in government initiatives if secrets are not kept criminals could exploit the information to make a quick profit now here i do again have the chance to give an example now personally i don't know a lot about how organized crime works so it's difficult for me to put this example in so instead i'm going to use effect i will explain the effect of the previous sentence this costs governments time and money which could have real life negative consequences for citizens including job losses or inadequate funding for important projects again here i might have said as a result governments will waste time and money i've kept this a bit more simple and a bit more flexible by just saying this costs governments time and money and then extending based on effect so this whole paragraph has stated my position then i explain how it works and then i extend with effect in the final part i simply conclude my point and say if governments want to protect the public good it may occasionally be necessary to hide the truth simple concludes my point now we'll look at the final body paragraph as always you guys i've got three body paragraphs here sometimes we might have two you might have four there is no rule i'm simply trying to present as many different examples as i can another reason to hide the truth is that people may misinterpret the information so again i've stated my position here people might misinterpret the information there we go then how does it work or explain it having recently gone through a global public health crisis it is clear that sometimes people do not fully understand the information they are given or they draw wildly unexpected conclusions so again i've explained how it works then effect this can lead to panic after that i conclude the point therefore there may be times when governments may choose to delay the release of the truth while they find a way to clarify it which is technically lying now i've actually made a few changes here because as i was reading this i thought you know i feel like the idea is not completely done here now remember i did say that governments should always try to tell the truth and so i've added a little bit more here and let's take a look at how that changes the paragraph admittedly this is not an ideal situation so this is really good this connects back to my introduction admittedly this is not an ideal situation and so therefore thus governments must be careful to not do this too often or it could erode the public trust the more transparent the government is the more trusting citizens will be so in this case in this essay i've stated that yes they should always tell the truth or at least that should be their goal however there may be times when they can't i've also extended the ideas using global examples the effect and by explaining how something works so let's take a look at the criteria again for a four it mentions here addresses the topic and task well i have done that does not fully elaborate in these paragraphs i've done a fairly good job of elaborating if i'm aiming for a 5 i am going to probably want to demonstrate a greater lexical or vocabulary range and remember that the the better range your vocabulary has the more you can say with fewer words and that's a really important thing about vocabulary the more you read and the more you're able to use in your writing the higher the score you can get because you're able to say more also well organized and well-developed using appropriate and sufficient explanations i've done that i've taken my idea i've explained how i came to that conclusion next displays unity progression and coherence though it may show occasional redundancy or unclear connections that hasn't happened much tier the ideas are clear and they progress quite quite neatly finally demonstrates syntactic variety so i have a range in grammatical structures so you saw that we had if we had this can lead to we had various different types of grammatical structures so that should get the score of a four possibly higher for the essay all right so that's all we're looking at here today that is extending ideas particularly in your body paragraphs i hope you found that helpful please as always remember first of all get practice you want to start writing very soon you want to start writing right after this video secondly you'll want feedback this is extremely important if you get it from us at e2 which we love to do for you or you have your own teacher wherever you are that's fine you want to get as much feedback as possible see what mistakes you're making and then fix those mistakes and finally read and build your vocabulary as i was saying before the more range in vocabulary you have the more you're able to say with fewer words remember it's not about trying to get more words into your essay to increase the word count it's actually trying to say more with fewer words all right everybody that's it for today i hope you found that helpful uh please like share subscribe do all those wonderful things and we'll see you again soon [Music] you

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Id: y08UkYSDwfE

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Thu May 20 2021