Improve Your TOEFL Writing by 3 Points - Start STRONG

[Applause] alright what's up guys so Topher writing how to improve your score by three points let's start talking about it immediately and I assume you already know a little bit about the TOEFL writing section is that there's two essays the integrated and independent essay we're going to talk about the independent essay and this one kind of I wouldn't say strategy but way of thinking about your TOEFL writing is how you're going to improve by three points and let me just tell you right now what you have to do you have to start strong your introduction is the most important paragraph in your essay there's a kind of famous expression where it's something like you only okay how guys that you'd never get a second chance at a first impression so your introduction is your first impression so there are a couple graders grading your essay there's a couple humans doing it like me and you and a couple well not a couple but then a computer that's also grading your essay now as a grader as a teacher when I see a poorly written introduction I see structural errors I see that the student didn't really put organized things very well it hurts my opinion of the rest of their essay even if their essay is perfect I still get that kind of bad taste that the bad impression from the first introduction so you want to make sure that your introduction is really spot-on it's perfect okay now I'm not talking about having great vocabulary I'm not talking about having perfect grammar you can have grammatical and vocabulary mistakes and spelling mistakes and still score very high on the TOEFL writing much more important is something called clarity is your topic development and organization and so I'm going to talk about those things today that's how you're gonna improve your score is by having a clear structure that is organized and properly introduces your essay so let me stop talking and let me just jump right into this okay by the way I'm gonna shamelessly promote my website right now we do writing evaluations total speaking teacher dot-com if you need any writing help we can help you out okay so TOEFL writing how to improve now we're going to talk about your introduction writing the perfect introduction and I wanted to write actually my whole introduction here but I didn't have enough space it didn't look very good on this board so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put sentences below here after filming this so you'll you'll see it and so I'll put sentences below so you can see what I wrote and show you how this works okay here's the question the question is is do you agree or disagree the best way to improve the quality of the deck of education at a university is to increase the salaries of teachers so is the best way to improve education to increase the salary of teachers now have your opinion I'm a teacher so of course I think it's a great idea but you know it's up to you you agree or disagree so this is how you're gonna start your first sentence is going to be a general statement okay and it's a let me read my general statement to you know here it is universities compete for students but trouble but struggle to distinguish their offerings from others okay now if you notice I haven't talked about teachers getting paid more yet I haven't even mentioned that yet instead what I'm doing is I'm giving a general kind of topic a general statement about this topic okay that I'm going to later I'm gonna get more focused on it but for now I kind of give this general outline now why do I do that I that because I'm trying to warm up the reader I'm trying to get them to want to know more this sentence is very general it's like okay so universities they struggle to find students okay so what I want to know more the reader should want to know more some teachers recommend that you do a hook here a hook is like something that's like a catchy or interesting way to grab the reader's attention a lot of people tell you to write like a question you could do that like is is improving teacher salaries the best way to improve the quality of education you could say that but that's not very academic and also it's a little confusing I don't want to read something that starts with a question it's it's weird to me instead how do you hook the reader you hook them by making something very general a kind of general topic where people have different opinions okay yeah universities do struggle what are you talking about exactly I want to know more because it's general that hooks the reader and then that leads to the second sentence where you narrow it down and let me read my second sentence here so just two I'll read my first and second universities compete for students but struggle to distinguish their offerings from others almost every educational institution agrees that the quality of education must be improved to attract the new students okay so now I'm getting closer to the subject closer to the topic the topic again is teacher salaries to improve quality of education I'm talking about quality now what's the so general statement universities have trouble getting students to come to their school one way to get them to come to the school is to improve the quality okay getting closer right getting closer to the actual question and then we start to restate the question now there's a couple different ways you can do this you can do something very simple where you say something like some people believe that the best way to improve the quality of education is to increase teachers salaries and which is what I pretty much wrote what I wrote is the conflicting opinions the people who disagree with each other because there's two sides for this with almost any independent essay there's gonna be two sides two opinions there's some problem and people have different ideas of how to solve it so here's what I wrote I wrote some academics believe that the best way to improve the university's offering is to increase teacher salaries others in academia feel that professors are paid enough and that to improve the quality of education the money should be invested in improving facilities so I restate the question by showing the two different sides of the coin some think it's a good idea giving teachers more money some think it's a bad idea it doesn't really matter if we give teachers more money it doesn't improve the quality so that's how I do that now what you notice is that there's a clear progression there's a clear structure I'm building and building I'm building on something this is how you develop topics in your writing this is how we structure our writing in university is that we kind of just we start general we get more specific getting more specific then we restate the question so we everybody understands okay the reader understands what I'm about to talk about right you definitely don't want to start by answering the question I know it's the TOEFL I know that the readers know the question but you have to imagine that the the graders have no idea what the question is and so you have to lead them to it all right so then you kind of build this structure all right and then after you restate the question you state your opinion now I haven't even said my opinion yet right I've been talking for three four sentences have any said my opinion yet and you have to give two specific reasons why I'll explain that in a minute so these two are connected into one sentence so let me read that sentence I say that here we go I believe increasing the salary of professors is the best way to improve the quality of education because okay so there's my opinion I do believe that because why higher salaries will attract superior teachers okay so higher salaries better teachers and provide them with more time to focus on building dynamic courses so more time to build better quality courses okay so those are my two specific reasons some of you follow a templates templates are okay if you want to score less than a 23 or 24 if you want to get to that higher level of writing you're gonna have to ditch the template some people for the last sentence of their writing say I believe that improving the teacher salaries will help improve the quality of education for two reasons tell me the reasons specific reasons say them write them down in your writing the reason is is because we don't say that there's no point for me to say there are two reasons why I feel this way it doesn't do anything what are the reasons tell me okay I'm waiting what are the reasons it doesn't do anything when you just say things like that I believe this for two reasons the first reason I believe this is weak no say what you mean be direct when you are writing in academia it's very important to be clear and to keep developing keep progressing keep moving the essay forward and when you say there are two reasons why I feel this way you're not really moving anything forward and you're also sound like it's a script it sounds like a temp and the toefl graders no templates okay they know they exist so it's very important that you show your fluency and show that you understand how to talk how to write like a college student in America two specific reasons and that's it that is the structure for your introduction make sure you follow this kind of template I don't I don't know how is to call it really but this kind of organization every time you write a independent essay because it'll help you build your fluency and will help you become much clearer when you write and that's how you're gonna improve your TOEFL writing by three points all right thank you guys for staying to the end that's amazing if you're here I'm gonna promote my TOEFL emergency course as I always do at the end three days you will know everything you need to know about the TOEFL I go through every single paragraph of the independent and integrated si there and you can find a link below for the TOEFL emergency course but thank you guys I appreciate you and

Channel: TST Prep TOEFL

Views: 128,629

Keywords: How to Improve your TOEFL writing, TOEFL writing, TOEFL writing help, TOEFL writing section, TOEFL witing three points, TOEFL writing 3 points, TOEFL Josh, Josh MacPherson, TOEFLSpeaking Teacher

Id: aFTtn4y5-RY

Length: 12min 26sec (746 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 03 2018