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.
