When you were in elementary school, teachers asked you to bring short five-paragraph essays about your home pet or summer holiday. English composition in high school was a little bit more sophisticated and involved writing essays on topics that required some preliminary research and analysis of related material. Besides, the teachers were already expecting a more complicated language. As a college student, you cannot obtain a degree without a fair deal of writing and this is when academic essay templates come in handy.
Summarizing an average college student’s life in four words would be: writing and more writing. Students have to submit papers almost every day, so be prepared to write during classes and after school. Too bad for learners who are not fond of writing because they will be involved in this activity on a regular basis. If you are not much into writing and look for some help or if you simply want to improve your writing skills, reading a couple of samples, such as persuasive essay template, GRE issue essay template or SAT essay template will be helpful. You do not have to aim for an essay that will be top of the class but it is imperative to learn to write papers that are, at the very least, readable.
You are likely to come across this essay type during test because it is used to evaluate the analytical skills of learners. Similar to other essay types, GRE requires presenting a passage of a particular length on the assigned topic. However, this passage will be evaluated against numerous criteria, so it is very important for an aspiring student to make sure the essay adheres to the standards.
GRE tests usually have two sections: argumentative and issue essay. The latter requires discussing a controversial topic, which means that there are at least two perspectives to explore. An issue essay reflects the way you perceive the topic. A strong issue essay uses extensive evidence to explain each position and draws on persuasive facts and appeals to explain the author’s opinion. Along with facts and evidence, students are encouraged to share their experience and examples from life to support their point of view.
Explaining your stand effectively means making the paper eloquent and strong, so be sure to back up your opinion with good examples. Apart from being convincing, your writing should be spellchecked and proofread as well as logically organized and properly structured. Avoid jumbled paragraphs, repetitions, and rambling ideas. Do not say something just for the sake of increasing the word count. Rather, try to make your writing succinct and to the point. Students tend to get carried away as they explain their topic and no reader will appreciate such writing. To stay focused in the topic, keep the essay prompt in front of your eyes and be ruthless when you have to delete a sentence or paragraph that does not contribute to the meaning of your essay.
GRE essay tests are designed to evaluate different skills of a learner and writing skills are among them. Expressing one’s thoughts clearly is absolutely necessary for a student, so spare some time to study academic essay templates and to see how good essays should be written.
This is another name of an argumentative essay in which a writer draws on reason and logic to prove that his/her point of view is correct. The persuasiveness of such an essay depends on the quality of evidence the writer uses as well as on his/her writing skills, i.e. ability to present this evidence in the way that supports his/her thesis.
One more critical aspect to pay attention to when writing an essay is format. There are different formatting styles and guides, so read the requirements provided by your instructor.
Usually, instructions require some of the traditional styles, such as APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian, or Harvard. However, it might happen that students have to follow some other format, for example, IEEE or ACS. Following the correct formatting style is important because test takers will lose points if there are mistakes in formatting, so be sure to check the requirements.
This is an optional service that entails additional costs. Only 25 colleges and universities across the country ask the applicants to submit this essay, so you should choose this option if you are planning to apply for studying in one of them. However, keep in mind that the score for this essay will appear in each report automatically no matter whether a college requires the essay or not.
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Scholarships are a brilliant opportunity for students to relieve the financial burden and continue pursuing their degree. Because the cost of education is so high and the number of students competing for scholarship is so big, creating an essay that will actually win the competition seems next to impossible. Moreover, a single essay plays the decisive role in the application process, so a student has to invest a lot of time and efforts to produce an essay that makes them stand out from the crowd. A scholarship essay is an applicant’s chance to let their enthusiasm and strong character traits shine through and this is exactly what the committee is looking for.
Scholarship application process is a lengthy and complicated procedure, where essay format provides applicants with an opportunity to showcase their uniqueness and good qualities. A well-written and compelling scholarship essay significantly raises your chances of winning and if the scholarship really matters to you, do your best when writing this essay.
Unlike issue essays, where you have to take a stand on an issue and support it with your arguments, GRE argument essay requires reading someone else’s argument, analyzing it, and commenting on the flaws you notice, such as weak evidence, bias, faulty assumptions, wrong conclusion, etc. Most importantly, an author of such an essay should not take sides.
Instead of trying to fix the argument, you simply have to evaluate it in an objective and impartial manner. Your opinion should be limited to saying if the argument is flawed or correct and if the author’s conclusions are worth being accepted. Remember that in such essays, you should neither try to improve the argument nor draw new conclusions. In a nutshell, argument essay should be an objective critique of another writer’s opinion.
GMAT section is designed to measure the applicants’ ability to analyze the information, formulate personal opinion and explain it clearly and concisely. To some extent, it is similar to other essays, as can be seen from a GRE essay template. The primary task in such essays is providing a critical analysis of an argument and evaluating the reasoning behind it. Students have 30 minutes to complete this task.
The criteria that will be used to evaluate essays:
In particular, an applicant should:
The requirements to this essay type are not as strict as to the previous ones because applicants are allowed to incorporate different styles. You will be given a prompt, usually asking to discuss a person you respect, significant period in your life, etc. The goal of such an essay is to express the ideas in a way that allows the readers fully understand your experience.
This is a piece of explanatory communication, which means that an applicant is expected to produce a text that explains an issue or phenomena to the audience that has been defined. Such essays are usually included in SAT exams.
Reflection essay writing typically requires sharing personal opinion about a book, movie, a recent event, etc. For some applicants, this essay type seems easy because it is based on one’s personal opinion. However, remember that this is not just a piece of prose consisting of different thoughts of other people. Instead of quoting someone else, share your own opinion.
Regardless of the content of a narrative essay, there is one thing that never changes – its structure.
When writing a SAT essay or GMAT AWA essay, applicants might be asked to write an essay that tells a story. This is a personal essay assignment that asks to share a story about personal experience. Things to remember when writing such an essay:
There are numerous online sources offering essay templates free of charge, so you can use these resources to help you prepare for the exam. Keep in mind that essay writing is not simply an exam assignment but a chance to become one step closer to you career goal, so spend a couple of days reading good academic essay templates, use your time wisely and plan ahead.
