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The GRE ® General Test

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Overview of the Analytical Writing Measure

Analytical writing measure (beginning september 22, 2023).

The Analytical Writing measure of the GRE General Test administered beginning September 22, 2023, assesses your critical thinking and analytical writing skills by assessing your ability to:

• articulate and support complex ideas
• construct arguments
• sustain a focused and coherent discussion

It doesn’t assess specific content knowledge.

The Analytical Writing measure consists of a 30-minute “Analyze an Issue”  task. This task presents an opinion on an issue and instructions on how to respond. You’re required to evaluate the issue, consider its complexities and develop an argument with reasons and examples to support your views.

You’ll use a basic word processor developed by ETS to type your essay responses. The word processor contains the following functionalities: insert text, delete text, cut-and-paste and undo the previous action. Tools such as a spellchecker and grammar checker are not available.

Analytical Writing Measure before September 22, 2023

The Analytical Writing measure of the GRE General Test administered before September 22, 2023, assesses your critical thinking and analytical writing skills by assessing your ability to:

• construct and evaluate arguments

The Analytical Writing measure consists of two separately timed analytical writing tasks:

• The "Analyze an Issue" task presents an opinion on an issue and instructions on how to respond. You’re required to evaluate the issue, consider its complexities and develop an argument with reasons and examples to support your views.
• The "Analyze an Argument" task requires you to evaluate an argument according to specific instructions. You’ll need to consider the logical soundness of the argument rather than agree or disagree with the position it presents.

The two 30-minute tasks are complementary. The Issue task requires you to construct your own argument, while the Argument task requires you to evaluate someone else's argument.

Preparing for the Analytical Writing measure

Everyone — even the most practiced and confident of writers — should spend time preparing for the Analytical Writing measure to understand the skills measured and how the tasks are scored. It may also be useful to review the scoring guides, sample topics, scored sample essay responses and rater commentary for each task.

The tasks in the Analytical Writing measure relate to a broad range of subjects — from the fine arts and humanities to the social and physical sciences — but don’t require specific content knowledge. Each task has been tested by actual GRE test takers to ensure that it possesses several important characteristics, including the following:

• GRE test takers, regardless of their field of study or special interests, understood the task and could easily respond to it.
• The task elicited the kinds of complex thinking and persuasive writing that university faculty consider important for success in graduate school.
• The responses were varied in content and in the way the writers developed their ideas.

Published topic pools for the Analytical Writing measure

To help you prepare for the Analytical Writing measure, the GRE Program has published the entire pool of tasks from which your test tasks will be selected. You might find it helpful to review the Issue and Argument pools:

• Issue Topic Pool (PDF)
• Argument Topic Pool (PDF)  (the Argument task was removed from the General Test beginning September 22, 2023)

Test-taking strategies for the Analytical Writing measure (in the General Test beginning September 22, 2023)

• Before taking the GRE General Test, review the strategies, sample topics, sample essay responses with rater commentary, and scoring guide for the task. This will give you a deeper understanding of how raters evaluate essays and the elements they're looking for in an essay.
• It is important to budget your time. Within the 30-minute time limit, allow sufficient time to consider the issue and the specific instructions, plan a response, and compose your essay. You want your essay response to be the best possible example of your writing that you can produce under the testing conditions.
• Save a few minutes at the end of the timed task to check for obvious errors. An occasional spelling or grammatical error won’t affect your score, but serious and persistent errors detract from the overall effectiveness of your writing and lower your score accordingly.

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How to Write a Great GRE Argument Essay

When you take the GRE , you’ll have to write two essays : an Issue essay and an Argument essay. In your GRE Argument essay, you’ll get to demonstrate how well you can understand, analyze, and evaluate an argument. Here are ten GRE Argument essay tips you should know.

Fact #1: It doesn’t matter who is right

Fact #2: you'll have just 30 minutes for the gre argument essay, fact #3: graders will not pore over your essay, fact #4: quality matters, but so does quantity, fact #5: the prompt will tell you everything you need to know.

Make sure you read the prompt two or three times. You’ll want to make sure you truly understand it. Pay attention to what evidence is provided, what is stated in the prompt, and what is claimed by the author. A great way to identify fallacies is to determine what the author has assumed, and then try to explain why that assumption may be wrong. Here are four things to look for:

• Lack of evidence to support an assumption : You’ll want to mention this dearth in your essay—and note the type of information that would strengthen the argument.
• Non-specific language : Does the author make generalizations without providing specifics? You will want to point that out!
• Jumping to conclusions : Most Argument prompts will jump to conclusions at least once. As you read each sentence in the prompt, look for the author’s reasoning. If you can’t find a clear line of argument, you should note that the author has jumped to conclusions.
• Data values : Just because the author provides numbers doesn’t mean they’re necessarily objective or even true. Consider—and discuss within your essay—the reliability of any data, or data collection methods, that are presented in the prompt.

Fact #6: Structure will save you

After you read the prompt, brainstorm the logical fallacies you want to address. Then, choose your top three or four, and formulate a brief outline before you start your essay. There is nothing worse than having to stop writing your essay to come up with new ideas, so you’re going to want to follow a strict organizational format. Here’s a good general template to keep in mind:

• Intro : This should consist of three or four sentences in which you provide an overview of all the fallacies you plan to address.
• Fallacies : Each should get its own indented paragraph. You’ll want to discuss it in detail, and you may even opt to quote from the prompt in making your case.
• Suggestions for improving the prompt argument : Time-permitting, you’ll ideally want to include a paragraph in which you detail how the author could make a stronger case.
• Conclusion : As short as the introduction, this should summarize your body paragraphs (the fallacies and suggestions) and tie up any loose ends. Don’t skip this part! Even if you only have time for a single sentence, write one. An essay without a conclusion will almost certainly receive a lower score than one that is finished.

Fact #7: Clear writing is key

Fact #8: you’ll get one combined score for both essays, fact #9: you don’t have to be perfect to earn a perfect score, fact #10: you can plan ahead.

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20+ PROVEN ways to boost your GRE essay score (backed by data!)

Looking for ways to improve your GRE Analytical Writing scores? In this post, we’ll teach you some simple GRE essay tips to give you an edge over the competition – backed by real graded essay data.

There are a lot of opinions out there on what makes a good GRE essay, but we wanted to know for sure. Studying for the GRE is stressful enough, and you deserve to know exactly how to ace every section. So, we paid several GRE instructors to hand score 1,000+ GRE essay examples and determined empirically, without a doubt, the keys to writing the perfect GRE essay.

Using these GRE analytical writing examples, we trained a machine learning model capable of accurately predicting your score and letting you know exactly how you can improve. 

Here are the top 5 keys our model said have the biggest impact on getting a top analytical writing GRE score:

• Total word count
• Total noun count
• Prompt keyword usage
• Total adjectives count

Sentence variety

In this article, we’ll outline the process we took to build the machine learning-backed essay grader and answer the question of how to write a great GRE essay once and for all.

The GRE analytical writing section

The gre essay grader, analyzing the ets gre resources, nlp and key entity extraction, machine learning, gre essay score analysis results, beeswarm plot, waterfall plot, top findings, prompt keywords, adjectives count, spelling error rate, average sentence count, thesis word count, thesis sentence average word count, thesis people count, body paragraph word count, body paragraph quotation count, body paragraph exclamatory sentence count, conclusion word count, conclusion sentence word count, case study: a high-scoring gre issue essay example, case study: a medium-scoring gre argument essay, summary of results: gre essay tips for a great gre analytical writing score.

Essay writing can be a difficult skill to master , and to ace the GRE you’ll need to write two: the argument essay and the issue essay. These essays test your critical thinking and analytical writing skills, your ability to communicate complex ideas, develop logical arguments, and maintain a focused discussion. Although the GRE issue essay and the GRE argument essay follow different GRE essay prompts, the criteria they’re graded on and the way to write these essays are basically the same.

With only 30 minutes to complete each essay, you need to be efficient. But what if you had analytical writing GRE tips that could basically guarantee a high essay score, because they were reverse-engineered using machine learning? It would make getting that perfect 6.0 GRE analytical writing score Achievable 😉

Each GRE analytical writing section consists of a topic of discussion and specific instructions on how to respond. In the allotted 30 minutes, GRE takers must be able to analyze the prompt, plan a relevant response, and write an organized and coherent issue essay or argument essay supported by evidence.

Needless to say, every second counts. To help set up Achievable’s GRE course customers for success, we’ve built a machine learning-based essay grading system trained on thousands of professionally graded GRE essays, using real GRE essay prompts. Let’s dig into how it works and how we learned the most important factors for getting that perfect 6.0 GRE essay score.

The Educational Testing Service (ETS), the creators of the GRE, provide some information on how to score a perfect 6.0 on the essay sections. They mention that writers should “articulate a clear and insightful position”, “develop the position fully”, give “compelling reasons and/or persuasive examples”, and “convey ideas fluently and precisely”. It’s great that ETS is trying to give students some direction on how to get a good GRE essay score, but none of these tips are quantifiable. How do you know if an argument position is “clear and insightful,” or if an example of an issue is persuasive?

We don’t like leaving things to chance or rule-of-thumbs, and in building our GRE essay grader we dug into the details to figure out what issue essay and argument essay characteristics are empirically, data-backed, and without a doubt, the keys to getting the best score on the GRE essay sections.

We hired professional GRE instructors from different firms to hand score our essays, and analyzed the results to determine the key features leading to a high GRE essay score. Using a variety of different technologies, we built a best-in-class GRE essay grading tool that can help take your GRE essay writing skills from a 0 to a 6. We want to share the details of our process so that you can feel confident in using the Achievable platform to pass your exam without breaking a sweat.  

Let’s take a look under the hood.

The first step in building our GRE essay grader was to comb through every resource the ETS had on GRE analytical writing. Since our GRE essay grader is tailor made to help you score high on the GRE writing sections, the information provided by the creator of the test is by far the most valuable. 

We poured through ETS GRE resources, looking for the characteristics that make up a great GRE essay. We did the boring work so you don’t have to, reading through every single line of their GRE issue essay examples, their GRE argument essay examples, and the result was a document almost twenty pages long detailing our findings.  

We looked at everything from the obvious characteristics (also called traits or features ) like word count, to details like the number of adjectives used. Of course, at this point we were making intelligent guesses about what was important. The real judge of what to focus on when writing a GRE essay response would be our machine learning model.

Having twenty pages of notes was a great start but the next step would be the major challenge. We needed a reliable way of extracting these traits from a piece of English writing. Unfortunately for us, computers don’t understand English, which meant we needed to dive into the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). 

NLP is a subfield of linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence that is helping to bridge the gap between the language used by humans, and the way computers process information. 

Luckily, we love to learn here at Achievable, and after a whole lot more research we were ready to build software that could take an essay and dissect it into a list of features. This process, called key entity extraction , was fundamental to building our GRE essay grader. Now that we could reliably process GRE essays and get our feature data out the other end, we were almost ready to train our model.

The last step before training was to prepare the extracted data. Machine learning is very good at one thing, and that’s discovering relationships between sets of data – otherwise it’s not as smart as you’d think. Outliers in the dataset can skew the results, especially when the outliers are very large or very small compared to the average. This meant that the data provided to the ML algorithm had to be pre-processed, or normalized .  

Data normalization usually involves rescaling the data such that all values are between 0 and 1. Using the results of our previous analysis, we determined lists of trait values that could be used to normalize the data.  

For example, most GRE issue essay templates and GRE argument essay templates follow  the conventional essay writing advice of using a 5 paragraph essay structure. This GRE essay template format includes a thesis, 3 body paragraphs, and a conclusion. Normalizing the paragraph count by 5 would create a trait that the ML algorithm could use to work its magic. If we provided more traits to the model, such as the paragraph count normalized by 3, and also by 10, the model could give us more information, and a high degree of confidence, whether 5 paragraphs is the way to go to get a high score. Following this approach, we normalized our dataset of GRE essays and provided hundreds of traits for the machine learning model to analyze.  

With our key entity extraction software ready to go, and our sample GRE essay data normalized, we were ready to train a machine learning model using the thousands of hand scored, real-world GRE issue essay examples and GRE argument essay examples. 

We built our machine learning model using TensorFlow, and in the training stage, passed huge amounts of data through neural networks resulting in a model that could reliably predict the score of a GRE essay. Using a variety of data science tools we generated charts to help describe the results.  These charts help illustrate how each trait affects the predicted score of an GRE essay. We can see which traits have the most significant effect, and by how much, making it very clear how to write a GRE essay.

The chart shown below is called a beeswarm plot and it represents the combined results of the thousands of GRE essays graded by the machine learning model.  Here’s how to read it:

• Each row in the plot corresponds to a specific feature
• The rows are ordered from top to bottom starting with the feature that had the biggest impact
• Each colored dot in the row represents a single instance of the feature, i.e. the value of the feature for a specific GRE essay
• The dots are colored according to the size of their value, where the lowest values are blue and the highest values are red
• The gray line down the middle is the zero-impact-line, with values falling to the right having a positive impact on the predicted result and the values falling to the left having a negative impact

Now with that explained, here is the beeswarm plot results from our GRE essay research:

For example, we can see from the plot that the total number of words used in the essay had the biggest impact on the score. Because the impact of a feature increases as the distance of the dots from the zero-impact-line increases, the blue dots extending far to the left indicate that low essay word counts have a large negative impact on score. On the other hand, the red dots tend to cluster slightly to the right of the zero-impact-line, indicating that writing a longer essay can help, but the impact is much smaller. The takeaway here is that you should avoid writing too short an essay, rather than trying to write a very long one. 

The chart below is called a force plot and it gives a general idea of how each feature affects the machine learning model’s predicted result for a specific GRE essay.

• The base value (4.339) is the average predicted score across all graded GRE essay examples
• The actual prediction for this essay is shown at f(x) (5.00)
• Each feature has a positive contribution (red) or negative contribution (blue) to the final score

Examining the force plot quickly tells us about the rough impact of each feature and if any stand out. We can see that the weight distribution is fairly gradual, with no single feature having an extraordinary impact. The force plot gives us a good summary of a specific GRE essay scored feature results, but isn’t very actionable. Our next chart, the waterfall plot, gives us a much more detailed explanation.

The chart below is called a waterfall plot and it gives us a more detailed view of how each feature affects the predicted score for a specific GRE essay.

• The starting value E[f(x)] (4.339) is the average predicted score across all graded GRE essay samples
• The features are ordered from top to bottom by the magnitude of their impact, which can be either positive (red) or negative (blue)
• The final value f(x) (4.999) is the predicted score

For this GRE essay, we can see that a low spelling error rate, i.e. having a low number of spelling mistakes, had a significant positive impact on the score (+0.11). On the other hand, a low word count (-0.11) essentially neutralized the positive contribution of the low spelling error rate. Similarly, a good usage of nouns throughout the essay positively contributed (+0.07) to the score, while a low word count for the body paragraphs (-0.07) basically negated this impact.

Our top findings for what you can to do impact your GRE essay score, listed in priority order:

• Higher values for word count have a positive effect on the predicted score while low values have a significant negative effect. 
• Low word counts were more significant in their negative effect on score, so rather than trying to write a long essay, focus on not writing one that is too short. In fact, we can see that high values also had a negative effect for some essays, likely when the essay was long but low in quality. In other words, a short essay will tend to bring down your score .
• A higher value for noun count contributes positively while low values contribute negatively.  
• Since nouns identify a person, place or thing, an essay lacking in nouns would be unfocused and imprecise. It’s hard to score a 6.0 on a GRE essay if no one knows what you’re talking about! So, a low number of nouns contributes significantly to a lower score .  
• Measuring the presence of keywords found in the GRE essay prompt throughout the essay it was clear that an absence of prompt keywords contributed to a lower score .  
• This was especially true for the thesis paragraph, where the goal is to clearly specify your main position on the issue or argument topic. Using keywords from the GRE essay prompt guarantees that your response is focused on the given topic.  
• For the adjectives count we saw only a minor and somewhat ambiguous negative contribution by low values while higher values strongly contributed to a higher score.
• A higher number of adjectives indicates a more descriptive essay. Since being descriptive helps to develop and clarify your response, be sure to use lots of adjectives alongside your nouns.
• Looking at the number of short, long, and very long sentences, and the ratios between these values, we found that long sentences (16 to 49 words) were the optimal choice for sentence length. We also saw that a higher proportion of short sentences to long sentences contributed to a lower score .  
• This suggests that you should prefer more long sentences than short sentences in your writing . However, using solely long sentences can also lower your score, so be sure to include the odd short sentence to establish variety.
• A high spelling error rate contributed to a lower score.
• No surprises here, making spelling mistakes will bring your score down!
• Paragraphs with too few or too many sentences had a slight negative impact on the score.
• A GRE essay paragraph should strike a balance between accurately introducing and supporting a point, without rambling or going off topic. We found the sweet spot to be around 8 sentences per body paragraph and about 5 for the thesis and conclusion paragraphs.
• Thesis paragraphs under 100 words contributed to a lower score.
• The thesis paragraph should be long enough to describe the focus of your response and your main reasons for supporting it.
• Short sentences in the thesis paragraph showed a slight negative contribution.
• It is especially important that the thesis paragraph provides enough context to effectively introduce and focus the essay response.
• The GRE essay grader found a relationship between mentioning a person’s name in the thesis paragraph and a higher score.
• Whether you are repeating a name found in the GRE essay prompt, or trying to provide context, try to reference a person’s name in your thesis paragraph.
• Body paragraphs under 150 words contributed to a lower score.
• The body paragraph is the meat of your GRE essay and should be long enough to introduce a point, provide and analyze evidence, connect to the thesis statement, and transition to the next paragraph.
• Surprisingly, using quotations in body paragraphs contributed to a lower score.
• While quotations may help provide evidence in general essay writing, when writing a GRE essay, focus on concisely responding to the prompt.  
• The use of exclamatory sentences (those ending with an exclamation mark) contributed to a lower score.
• Exclamation marks are generally not used in academic writing. WHY??!?! They just don’t feel that professional!!!
• If you need to emphasize a point make sure you do so with your language.
• A concise conclusion (about 100 words) contributed to a higher GRE essay score.
• A conclusion should wrap up your GRE essay, and not introduce more information. Make sure to focus the conclusion on summarizing the GRE essay topic, the essay’s main points, and making the connection to your thesis clear.
• Conclusions composed of fewer but longer sentences contributed to a higher score.
• Sentence variety doesn’t play a big role when it comes to the conclusion paragraph. Focus on using long sentences to summarize your main points and tie everything together.

The following is an example of a high scoring GRE essay submitted by an Achievable user. Our human GRE instructors, as well as our machine-learning GRE essay grading system, score this as a perfect 6.0.

Here is the GRE issue essay prompt:

And the corresponding GRE essay example:

The names of the greatest rulers, artists, and scientists is what is taught in most history classes. Little attention is given to the common people. Despite the fact that the most prolific and talented members of a society have a profound effect on their nations, it is the common people that truly embody the nation and it is them who keep it running. From the plumber, to the lawyer, to the homeless person; they all contribute their grain of salt to the identity and strength of the nation. The purpose of a nation is to create a just society in which every individual can enjoy the wealth and resources of the nation. A nation without a solid base will never be able to allow artists and scientists to create their most innovative and creative master pieces. Without the combined effort of all its people, there will be no Albert Einstein or Mozart, because there will be no resources to encourage these geniuses to develop their talents to their highest potential. The only way a nation can have a solid base is by guaranteeing the well-being of all its citizens. With happy citizens, nations have the solid foundation needed to produce the greatest achievements humanity can accomplish. Thus, the greatest of all nations are those in which the general well-being of its population is at its highest because happy citizens are more productive, more generous to each other, and more knowledgeable. 

First, citizens living in a society that ensures their well being become much more productive than in a nation in which their well-being is not guaranteed. Dr. Friedman, in Berlin in the year 1975, conducted a controlled random experiment in which he tested the effects that well-being had in the production level of the subjects of the experiment. He created a control group and an experimental group, and assigned members to each group randomly. The experimental group was in a room that was very hot, whereas the control group was in a well ventilated room. Next, both groups were given simple tasks such as cutting squares out of circles and coloring an image. After 30 minutes had passes, Dr. Friedman evaluated who was able to complete most tasks in the 30 minute time window. He noticed that the experimental group completed only 80% of the tasks compared to the control group, which completed 100% of the tasks. As per Dr. Friedman: “the results of this experiment show how well-being has a negative effect on the productivity of individuals”. Less productive individuals are going to achieve less at work, meaning companies in general will be less productive and less competitive in the global market. In an increasingly competitive world, less productive companies will bring less resources to the nation, making it less likely to invest in the talent of its people. 

Second, well-being is directly related to generosity. The more generous citizens of a nation are to each other, the more likely they are to help those in need around them. This, in turn, leads to a collective effort to lift each other up, making the nation more productive and wealthy. Thomas Frank and Imelda Seo developed a randomized experiment in which they tested the relationship between well-being and generosity. The study was conducted in Seoul in 1994 in a public university. The subjects of the test were randomly selected from different levels of the class in an effort to eliminate as many confounding variables as possible. The experimental group was told the very bad news that they had just failed their most recent test. After receiving this news, they were given a limited amount of chocolate and they were told to pick as much as they needed but to think that someone else will come after them and pick what is left from the chocolate. The person that will come later will not know how much chocolate was in the box originally. In contrast, the control group was told the same regarding taking as much chocolate as needed and to be mindful of the person coming behind them, but they were not given the initial bad news that they had failed their test. The results of the experiment show that the experimental group was 70% more likely to take all of the chocolate in the box than the control group. As per Imelda Ser: “this is indicative that when a person’s well-being is jeopardized, they are less likely to be generous.” This study shows how well-being can have a positive impact on the citizens of a nation, and this generosity can lead to citizens helping each other out more and creating a more cohesive and productive society and nation. 

Third, citizens living in a nation in which their well-being is adequate are more knowledgeable. More knowledge can lead to greater discoveries. Great artists, scientists, and rulers all require proper education during their early years to achieve the success. If society as a whole is more educated, it is much more likely for a nation to be able to cultivate the talents of their next genius. For example, Amadeus Mozart was the son of a talented musical father that lived in Vienna, the classical music capital of the world at the time of this life. If Mozart would have been born in an empoverished family with no resources and no knowledge of music, who is to tell Austria would have produced such a notable musical expert. The father of Mozart lived a comfortable life that allowed him to develop his own talents, and later pass his new found knowledge to his son, who later took this knowledge to never before seen levels of musical prowess. To guarantee that the knowledge is passed on to the greatest individuals of a nation, it is necessary to ensure the general well-being of its citizens. Only then will a great nation be able to produce a Mozart, an Albert Einstein, or a Napoleon.

In conclusion, a nation can only be great if it can guarantee the well-being of all its citizenry. This is the only way a nation can ensure that the individual talents of certain prolific people can flourish. These individuals require a strong enough safety net that will allow them to pursue their dreams without having to worry about heating the house or finding the next meal. Also, citizens that are happy and living comfortable can produce more for the nation as a whole, and lift each other out of poverty, thus creating a great nation .

This GRE essay received a perfect score ( f(x) = 5.999 ) and the waterfall plot below describes what features had the biggest impact:

In this case, the feature with the biggest impact was the number of adjectives used . If you read the essay, you probably noticed how descriptive it was. The author provided plenty of detailed examples to support his thesis.  

At 1,083 words, the GRE issue essay was a good length, and this helped boost the score.

The author added excellent context to the thesis paragraph by including the names of two prominent creatives: Albert Einstein and Mozart . These names were relevant to the response and supported the idea that when a nation guards the well-being of its citizens it fosters creativity and innovation.

Using plenty of nouns relevant to the prompt, the author was able to keep the essay focused and coherent. We can also see a good use of long sentences, giving the author the space needed to elaborate on and support the thesis. An overall low spelling error rate contributed positively to the score. Interestingly, we can see that the use of places in the body paragraphs (e.g. Berlin ) helped to boost the score.

The author received a minor penalty for the overuse of verbs in the thesis paragraph as well as a few spelling mistakes throughout the GRE essay. These negative contributions were ultimately insignificant compared to everything else that the author did right, clearly illustrating how focusing on the right characteristics can guarantee you a high scoring GRE essay.

The following is an example of a medium-scoring GRE essay submitted by an Achievable user. Our human GRE instructors, as well as our machine-learning GRE essay grading system, score this as a 3.5 with room for improvement.

Here is the GRE argument essay prompt:

And the corresponding essay:

More information is needed to accurately determine if the recommendation from the regional manager of Hamburger House should be followed. Information detailing the reason for changing to canola oil, the cost of canola oil, the effect canola oil has on the taste of french fries and other foods, if the public was made aware of the switch to canola oil, public’s perception of canola oil, if the customer reviews over the past two months were about the taste of the fries, any operating changes made at the company that could have affected sales, other factors that could have increased sales, Hamburger house expanding their locations and customer base, the effects on net profits are needed. Additional evidence is necessary to evaluate Hamburger House’s internal memo to franchises.

The reason for why Hamburger House switched to canola oil is the first piece of missing information needed. If canola oil was chosen because it is cheaper than vegetable oil, it would be a sensical choice to reduce costs and choose the cheaper oil. If canola oil were the more expensive option, there must be non-cost-related reasons that justify the switch. In either of the aforementioned scenarios, one must examine if the canola oil makes the fries and other foods taste the same, better, or worse. If canola oil makes all foods taste better and has a net positive effect on profits, franchises should follow the recommendation. If canola oil makes some but not all foods taste better, franchises should only use canola oil in foods that taste better and if there will be a net positive effect on profits.

The second piece of information needed to evaluate Hamburger House’s recommendation is the public’s perception of canola oil and vegetable oil and whether the public was made aware of Hamburger House’s switch to canola oil. If canola oil is perceived to be a healthier option or vegetable oil is perceived as an unhealthier option, it can be expected that the public would react positively to Hamburger House’s use of canola oil and increase foot traffic to its locations. However, if the public was not made aware of the switch in oils, information regarding the content of the positive reviews that Hamburger House has received in the past two months and if those positive reviews were all for locations that switched to canola oil are needed. If the reviews mentioned that the foods that contained canola oil tasted better, it would be reasonable for franchises to switch to canola oil to make their food taste better and, thereby, increase sales.

The third piece of information needed is whether Hamburger House expanded its locations and customer base in the past two months. An increase in french fry sales and average unique customers would naturally increase french fry sales.

The most important aspect as a business is the impact that canola oil has on earnings. It is necessary for a business to be financially profitable to survive. Therefore, if the switch to canola oil allows franchises of Hamburger House to be financially viable, franchises should make the switch if doing so if there is a positive effect compared to keeping vegetable oil.

This essay received a low score ( f(x) = 3.503 ) and the waterfall plot below describes what features had the biggest impact:

The feature with the biggest impact for this GRE essay was the total word count (-0.29). At 526 words, this example illustrates how dramatically a short GRE essay can affect the predicted score. In fact, we can see that the argument essay is penalized for low word count in various ways by other features, such as the body paragraph average word counts, total sentence counts, etc. Writing a longer argument essay is a straightforward way to guarantee a higher score and gives you more space to elaborate on and support the position from your GRE essay topic.  

The second feature in the list measures the negative impact (-0.14) of the ratio of short to long sentences in the conclusion. In this case, the author used too many short sentences resulting in a lower score. The conclusion is meant to summarize the essay’s main points and tie them together with the thesis statement, a task that typically requires longer sentences. The conclusion of this argument essay could have been improved by using longer sentences to explain specifically how the thesis and supporting points are connected in addressing the issue laid out in the prompt.

The plot shows a high thesis noun count contributing to a lower score (-0.11). If we examine the thesis we can see the author uses an extremely long sentence that repeats many of the same nouns over and over again (e.g. canola oil). While using nouns is important to keep an essay focused on the topic, the nouns should be both relevant to the GRE essay topic and varied. Simply stuffing nouns into a paragraph will not have the desired effect. This thesis could have been improved by introducing fewer points while elaborating on how each point supports the thesis statement.

While the author did a few things right, it is clear that this GRE argument essay’s low score was majorly due to a low word count, weak use of nouns, poor sentence variety, and an overall lack of focus and specificity. Catching issues like these before the exam can help you improve your writing skills and boost your score by multiple points.

So if you want to improve your GRE analytical writing essay skills, what do you need to do?  

• Make sure your essay is long enough to avoid being penalized for a short essay
• Ensure your essay is focused by using plenty of nouns that relate to the topic
• Write a descriptive essay by using lots of adjectives to describe your position, evidence, and ideas
• Read the prompt carefully, highlight keywords, and use these keywords throughout your essay, most importantly in your thesis paragraph
• Vary your sentence length, but in general favor the use of longer sentences
• Avoid making spelling mistakes
• Aim for 8 sentences per body paragraph and 5 sentences for thesis and conclusion paragraphs
• Keep your thesis and conclusion paragraphs concise but use at least 100 words
• Reference a person’s name in your thesis paragraph if it’s relevant
• Keep your body paragraphs above 150 words
• Avoid the use of exclamation marks and quotations 

Our Achievable GRE course offers hundreds of GRE essay prompts and GRE essay topics for the GRE issue and argument essays, giving you the opportunity to practice your analytical writing skills until you are 100% confident in getting a top GRE essay score. Your work is automatically saved as you write and includes a timer to keep you on track. 

Achievable’s proprietary GRE essay grading system uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to analyze your GRE essay writing and provides instant feedback on exactly what you can do to boost your score. Backed by our vast amount of data from real-world GRE issue essay examples and GRE argument essay examples, we’ve created the smartest GRE essay grader that exists, included with your purchase of Achievable GRE .

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How Long Should GRE Essays Be?

We take a head first dive into how long the gre essay should be.

Perhaps you’ve been studying for the GRE for weeks and are feeling pretty good about the verbal and quant sections. So finally, you turn your attention to the analytical writing section. You understand what’s being asked of you in terms of the analytical writing task, but the question naturally becomes how long do this essay need to be?  That question is answered in detail below.

About The GRE Essay

In considering the different sections on the GRE, it’s easy to wrap our heads around the Verbal and Quant sections . They’re well defined, objective and quantifiable. You’re presented a question, you analyze and solve it, enter your answer, and move on. These parameters give us comfort .

But the Analytical Writing (AW) section is open-ended and students are given limited information and guidelines in terms of essay length , structure and content. There is no maximum or minimum word count for the essay and no concrete direction on these points.

In addition, Educational Testing Service (ETS) , the administrators of the GRE , have been very reluctant to share any secrets in terms of their preferences on essay length and structure. We know the essays are co-graded by a human and a computer (e-rater), but we don’t know exactly what criteria they’re looking at.

How To Write A GRE Essay

Never fear! We’ve done the hard work for you by collecting and analyzing all the available data we could get our hands on to help you optimize your essay length. Here are the main takeaways:

• Longer is generally better
• 550 to 650 words is ideal
• Scores go up with length, then drop off

Longer is Better

One of the main conclusions from our analysis is that longer essays are generally better. And this makes sense — on the whole, longer essays are more likely to be better reasoned , contain examples and support the points being made. In addition, it gives the writer more opportunity to showcase their writing skills and ability to thoroughly think through a range of issues in less time.

Give Me 600 Words

For whatever reason, the magic number seems to be around 600 . To be more precise, it’s more of a magic “range,” and that window falls between 550 and 650 words . This seems to be the ideal length to most effectively draft an introduction, make and support your points with well-reasoned arguments and examples, and wrap it up with a tidy conclusion.

This also seems to be a result of the nature of GRE essay prompts . Any shorter and your essay lacks reasoning and support; any longer and you risk rambling. Which brings me to the next point.

What Goes Up, Must Come Down

While the data shows that longer is better, that only holds true to a certain point. After 650 words, the average AW score starts to drop off . It’s not a cliff drop-off, but there is a very real and significant decline in average score. Longer is better, but too long and you begin to ramble .

Your sentences turn into run-ons, your reasoned points become clouded and jumbled, and the grader loses interest. This makes sense. Students can’t be reasonably expected in 30 short minutes to read a prompt, analyze it, outline an answer, and draft a well-crafted 800+ word essay with reasoning and examples. There’s just no way .

Quality, Not Just Quantity

Now that you know more is better (up to a point), do not fall into the trap of just thinking that if you slap 600 words on a page you’ll get a decent score. That would be a serious mistake. Like many things in life, quality is equally as important (if not more) as quantity . The content of your essay must still be top notch.

To substantiate this point, check out this in-depth post from prep company Achievable on GRE essays. They took over 1,000 student essays and had them graded by multiple GRE tutors, then crunched the numbers using machine learning to determine what has the biggest impact on a GRE essay score . Their findings are packed with data and some awesome visuals. I highly suggest you check it out.

GRE Writing Tips

Clarity & Reasoning.  Perhaps the most important overarching goal of the AW section is to write a coherent, well-reasoned essay with supporting points and examples. Despite everything said above, this is more important than the length of the essay. After reading the prompt, develop your positions fully and organize the essay coherently. Explain your reasoning for the positions you take. Don’t just make statements and move on, provide clear, well-reasoned arguments to support it.

Structure.  There is nothing that makes an article or essay more unreadable that large blocks of text. People see a large text block and immediately fall half-asleep. Spoon-feed the reader in short, digestible, easy-to-read chunks. Start with a brief introductory paragraph, with four to six short body paragraphs making your points (i.e. the meat) and a short concluding paragraph to summarize everything. Follow this simple formula and you’ll be fine.

Diction & Sentence Variety.  Toss out the thesaurus. You don’t need to use large, fancy words or scientific terminology on the GRE to get a better score . Use intelligent, to-the-point vocabulary. This will help make your writing clear and won’t give your grader pause. Additionally, break up your sentences. Don’t use the same compound sentence time and time again. Mix in short punchy sentences and different sentence structures. This will keep your writing interesting.

Spelling & Grammar.  Although ETS says that small typographical and grammatical errors that do not interfere with the substance of the essay do not affect your score, I’d still recommend steering clear of relying on that assurance. Human graders are just that — human. If you have a couple errors in the first paragraph or two, they will notice this and could likely jade their impression of your writing. Take the time to make sure your spelling and grammar is on point before submitting.

Time Management.  Finally, make the most of your test time by managing it properly. Read the question and specific instructions carefully to ensure your understanding of what is expected in your response. Take a few minutes to plan your response before composing it. Allow for a few minutes at the end to review, proofread and correct any spelling or grammar errors that might be a distraction to the reader.

To sum it up, keep your essay in the 550- to 650-word range , follow the tips above, and you’ll be just fine.

GRE Writing Prompts & Examples

For reference, here is one example of an issue essay question :

“We learn our most valuable lessons in life from struggling with our limitations rather than from enjoying our successes.”

Write a response in which you discuss the extent to which you agree or disagree with the claim. In developing and supporting your position, be sure to address the most compelling reasons and/or examples that could be used to challenge your position.

Writing plan. Before writing, carefully read the issue and the specific instructions that follow it. Think about the issue. If it is broad in scope, narrow it down to something specific. Think about your own feelings and experiences and draw from them. Make notes and develop your position . When writing your response, be sure not to deviate from the question. The key is stay focused and present a cogent argument, yet still infused with reason and experience.

How long should a GRE essay be?

After considering average grades and self-reported data, it appears the ideal length of a GRE essay is 550 to 650 words. Any shorter and you risk the essay being underdeveloped. Any longer and it is likely rambling.

What is the right GRE essay length?

When it comes to the AW section of the GRE, longer is better, until a point. The perfect length of GRE essays is somewhere between 550 and 650 words. But any longer and you may be hurting your score.

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How Long Should Your GRE Essay Be? [A Data Driven Answer]

By Jitta Raghavender Rao • GRE Writing

Every so often when I’m writing the GRE essays, I’ll think: Should I really be writing so much?

I tend to get carried away. And when that happens, it would be great to know if all this extra writing is actually helping me score better or hurting my AWA score. Of course, I want to impress the essay graders, but I want to do it the right way.

Students often ask me, how long their GRE essays should be because there is no concrete information out there about the “perfect” length of a GRE essay, and even if there is, much of that data is conflicting.

Some say essays aren’t graded mostly on length but the higher grades for a longer essay is a mere correlation between essay length and grades.

When it comes to the Analytical Writing section, essay length is very important, so if you are planning to get a perfect score, you might as well do it right.

But before we come down to the ideal length for an essay, let’s first crush this shocking myth that has been around for sometime:

[tweet “Ever wondered what the ideal length of a GRE essay is? Here’s the answer and much more..”]

Myth #1: Longer essays are the only way!

On the GRE, essay length is not only one of the factors taken into consideration. You have to check a host of other factors, if you are looking to get a perfect score. All the following factors affect your overall AWA score:

Clarity in Ideas – This is the most basic of all considerations. What are you trying to say? What’s your main point? This should be very clear by the time the grader finishes off reading the essay. Substance and content of your essay matters more than any other factor. Also, every logically supporting reason or example that you make use of should ultimately connect to this main idea. If it isn’t explicit, you are losing points!

Structure – The way an article is formatted, has a massive impact upon its readability. It’s important to break up your essay into paragraphs so the essay graders can easily scan it.

The general structure is to start with an introductory paragraph followed by 3-4 body paragraphs and finish off with a conclusion paragraph. So, make sure there are at least 5-6 paragraphs in your essay.

Sentence Variety – Consecutive sentences with the same structure and length can sound monotonous and lifeless. Instead of sounding repetitive and boring, use sentence style skillfully.

You should vary the sentence flow and the rhythm by switching between short and long sentences. You should also make use of transitional and signal words to vary sentence openings.

Vocabulary – Another myth about GRE essays is that the usage of GRE words in the essay has a correlation with the essay score. Not really! As long as you use proper grammar and defend your point intelligently and use precise vocabulary to convey meaning effectively, you should be alright. It is not needed that you use heavy vocabulary or GRE words.

Language and Grammar –  Though ETS says you may have minor errors in the essay copy that do not interfere with overall meaning and coherence, the time you make your first error, the grader will notice it and this can have a negative impact on your AWA score. So, make sure your essay is as spotless as possible, and eliminate all errors before submitting.

Reasoning – You should include as many logically compelling reasons as you can to support your stance.

One of the most important aspects about a compelling essay is its ability to convince the reader by means of sound logical reasoning. So, you should be able to connect your ideas properly to the central theme or idea of the essay, and convince the reader to agree to your point of view. If the essay doesn’t sound logical or reasonable, you will pay the penalty, no matter how long the essay is.

By no means am I saying that essay length isn’t important. I am only saying that essay length on the GRE isn’t the only thing you should be concerned about. I am also saying that essay length is just one of the factors out of many others that influence your AWA score.

Myth #2: ETS uses e-Rater software which grades essays on their content length

This is the most egregious of the myths, and it’s been around for a long time.

Recently, I read a post on Quora which asks “Do humans readers grade my GRE essays?” The top answer said, “They don’t.” His/her point was that a computer software called ‘e-rater’ scans your essay based on preset rules (natural language processing algorithms) and prints out a score, using a 6-point holistic scale.

That’s just not true.

In fact, E.T.S. claims this grading software is used today, along with human raters, to grade GRE and TOEFL examinations, and without human raters in various practice tests.

I want you to understand that if ETS were to use an automated essay grader to evaluate your essay then don’t you think gaming a software would be too easy? You must keep in mind that there is a human reader who will also grade your essay along with the e-rater, and both their scores are averaged to obtain the final AWA score. So, even if you try and game the software, the human reader will give you the actual score you deserve, which will bring down the average. So, there is no point in trying to game the e-rater. Instead, you should try other tactics, such as using impressive AWA quotes , or writing coherent paragraphs, which will naturally raise your score.

So to sum things up, both of these myths should be shunned in favor of a more strategic approach to essay length. Longer is not necessarily better. Shorter is not necessarily better. And human readers do actually read your essays.

So what’s the ideal length?

I see students wondering about this all the time and I am sure you are here to find out the same.

ETS has written about the ideal length nowhere, and still remains tight lipped on this. Also, there is no word limit as such. But there seems to be a pattern that appears on GRE sample essays that come along with the ETS official guide to the GRE.

When closely observed, there is a significant increase in the number of words from a 5.0 graded essay and a 6.0 graded essay.

Longer is usually better

To analyze further on this topic, we have done a bit of research, and found out an interesting relation between essay length and the final score. If you look at the statistics below, you will have to concur with me. Longer essays usually score better on every essay topic.

If you are a long-essay fan and insist to pen a high scoring AWA essay on the GRE, you should write anywhere between 500-600 words. Don’t ask me why. The research shows that’s how it is, and if it true for a sample of 500 students, it must be true on a larger scale as well.

A column chart with average word count for essays from 500 students

As you can see, the longer the essay, the higher the grades. Notice that a 5+ point essay has length exceeding 500 words. Another interesting fact is, it seems as if 600 is an upper limit for word count. If you go beyond 600 words, you can see how the scores go down. This isn’t surprising, though. Almost no student on this planet can write a perfect 800 word essay under pressure in 30 minutes. If someone is shooting for a high word count, they are surely sacrificing on quality. So, it’s safe to say that 500-600 is what you should be looking at.

Now It’s Your Turn

In the end, I warn you against getting stuck up on essay length. If you focus on word count only, then you would be scribbling gibberish and unnecessary sentences hoping to get a perfect 6.0 score. The essay substance and content matters more than the essay’s length.

There’s no magic number on word count that’s going to get you the perfect AWA score. At the same time, the statistics from the above analysis proves that longer essays tend to get higher scores.

If you’re still looking for word count, an essay that has around 500 – 600 words with around 5 paragraphs, and quality content, seems to be the ideal GRE essay length.

How long are your regular essays? What differences have you noticed between a long essay and short ones? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section.

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6 Comments to “How Long Should Your GRE Essay Be? [A Data Driven Answer]”

Thanks a lot!!! The article was very powerful, and interesting!!!

Hey Grisha, glad you found it helpful. 🙂

Thank you for the research you conducted and for the valuable as well as helpful information you provided.

I love this. Why isn’t this site more popular?

Truly speaking this research is well done, it covers all necessary points for passing the GRE test

This is awesome, thanks for sharing.

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Score Your GRE Essay

The content in this post applies in 2024 to the new, shorter GRE!

How do I score my GRE essay?

Plenty of students want to improve their GRE analytical writing skills, and the only real way to do so is writing, and writing a lot.

But there is a catch-22 here: how do you improve your writing if you aren’t a good writer? How can you identify places to improve if you don’t know what needs improvement? How can you identify an error if you commit the error? These are all valid concerns, but trust me, you just need to start writing.

But we won’t send you out to sea without a life vest. We now have an essay rubric that breaks down the four aspects of writing that count towards your score—Quality of Ideas, Organization, Writing Style, and Grammar & Usage.

If you don’t know what those are now, you will soon. Each column represents one aspect of writing and each row represents a level from 0 to 6. Each cell of the rubric describes a specific aspect of writing at a specific level.

How to Use the GRE Essay Grading Rubric

After completing the essay, you’ll need to check the four aspects of your writing. Even better, ask a friend to look over the essay and provide you a score. Give each aspect of your essay a score ranging from zero to six.

Total all four scores and find the average. Now you have a sense of your writing score. Round scores up as follows: Round a score of 4.25 to 4.5 and a score of 3.75 to 4.

Of course evaluating your own writing will be hard if you don’t know what to look for, but this is a perfect time to improve and practice. Taking a break between writing your essay and evaluating it will help to give you a more objective eye. Also, reading the essay aloud will help you to hear errors.

If you are unsure about your style, grammar, and usage, plug your essay into the Hemingway App . This is not a perfect piece of software, but it’s better than nothing and will catch a lot of grammar and usage errors.

Quality of Ideas:

• Are the ideas creative, compelling, and relevant?
• Did you use an expected, typical example?
• Did you talk about two sides of the issue or just one?
• Were you attacking the major components of the argument or just the minor ones?
• Were the reasons feasible, believable, and relevant to the topic?

Organization:

• Is there an introduction and conclusion?
• Does the response flow from paragraph to paragraph?
• Are there a lot of structure words to guide the reader, such as “for example,” “first,” or “further”?
• Is it easy to find the main idea of a paragraph and determine what the specific details supporting that idea are?
• Is it easy to understand the development of an idea and how it relates to the passage as a whole?

Writing Style:

• Are there a mix of short sentences and long sentences?
• Are there a variety of sentence structures—simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex?
• Are the same words often repeated or are there a lot of synonyms and rephrasing?
• Are the sentences easy to read?
• Can the reader understand the ideas in a sentence?
• Do readers have to re-read a sentence multiple times to understand it?

Grammar and Usage:

• Are there misspelled words?
• Are the lists and comparisons parallel in structure?
• Are there any subject-verb agreement errors or pronoun-antecedent errors?
• Are there any run-on sentences or sentence fragments?
• Are commas, dashes, and semi-colons used correctly?
• Are there any modification problems—dangling modifiers or ambiguous ones?

Go to the Source

All the information that you see in our rubric is based on information published by ETS. If you need sample essays at different score levels or want to read more about the AWA and how it is graded, I highly recommend reading through An Introduction to the Analytical Writing Section of the GRE .

This is a long document and contains a lot of detail. If you want to see the different scoring level descriptions used to create our rubric, here they are:

• Score Level Descriptions
• GRE Scoring Guide – Analyze an Issue
• GRE Scoring Guide – Analyze an Argument

I recommend taking the time to become familiar with the difference between a “3” essay and a “4” essay. To truly become a better self-grader, or to even become a better grader for someone else, you need to become more familiar with the particular grading requirements of ETS.

If you don’t know a lot of the phrases and questions above, you’ll have a lot of practice and learning to do. But better to do it now, then wait until you have to write a paper in your grad school class.

Most people fired from a job aren’t surprised. They know where they have slacked and why they lost their job. I am sure that you can read your writing and know that there are problems (or that everything is great). I hope the rubric gives you a little more traction for evaluating your writing so that you know what you need to work on to improve.

Note: Some students might wonder why the rubric is for the GRE and GMAT. Both test evaluate essays in the same way, so the rubric will work for either test. 🙂

At UC Santa Cruz, Kevin Rocci began a decade of teaching and tutoring with the Stevenson College Junior Fellow and Writing Assistance programs . He has worked with adults and kids, tutoring the GRE, GMAT, and SAT at Kaplan and teaching English as a Second Language in the JET Programme and at the Intercultural Institute of California . At Magoosh, he expanded beyond teaching, building and managing teams, like Student Help and Content. When he’s not Magooshing, you can find him spinning his toddler in circles. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter .

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27 responses to “Score Your GRE Essay”

Thanks for the rubric, Kevin! I think at my current level, I can manage a 5 on the GRE. Trying to push it further to maybe hit that 5.5 (hopefully 6) mark!

Good luck, and keep up the hard work!

Tiny typo, where “their” should be “there:”

“Writing Style:

Are there a mix of short sentences and long sentences? Are their a variety of sentence structures—simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex?”

AHHH! Thanks for letting me know. I’ve fixed it. 🙂

Can you please share a website or link where I could find a pool of AWA topics to practice?

Thanks, Ishani

You don’t need to look anywhere except at the official website! 🙂 https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/analytical_writing/argument/pool and https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/analytical_writing/issue/pool are your resources.

I need to know Is there any website where it can evaluate my essays on issue and argument tasks?

Hi Praveen,

Yes, I would check out this blog post that will help you with this!

i want to know that from where i can get lots of samples of Issue and Argument essay. And another thing that i’d like to ask that after finishing Magoosh GRE vocabulary flashcards apps from where i should continue to learn words. However, is reading Manhattan GRE books good for both verbal and quantitative section?

Hello! Thank you for a very thorough explanation on GRE AWA scoring and tips!

Just wanted to point out that the link to “An Introduction to the Analytical Writing Section of the GRE” doesn’t work properly; although can be found easily on ETS website 🙂

Glad to hear that the post helps! 😀

And thank you for letting us know about that link not working. I changed the URL, so it should work now! 😀

Dear Chris, Please could you tell me as to how can we get our essays graded.

Hi Shashi! 😀

If you’d like to get your essays graded (but not by us), this post will help with that:

How to Get Your AWA Practice Essays Graded

Hope that helps! 😀

I’d love to download the pdf, but the links don’t seem to be working…?

Hi Cornelia, Can you give it a try again? I just tried it and it worked for me. I am using a Chrome browser on a Mac. Let me know if you are still having trouble. 😀

I have consistently scored 4.0 in the AW section in the past three tests. I want to improve my score and would like to score between 4.5 to 5.0. To let you know haven’t got help from anyone beside Princeton’s GRE practice material or/and GRE AW instructions.

Do you have any special program to assist me?

Congrats on your score of 4.0! That’s admirable and something to be proud of! 😀

If you are looking to push your score to the 5.0 level, you’ll most likely need to work on creating more sophisticated responses and eliminating errors from your writing. You’ll need to do this with lots and lots of practice! 😀 I recommend that you work through the AWA prompts listed on the ETS website. Here are the links:

https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/analytical_writing/issue/pool https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/analytical_writing/argument/pool

You should spend time learning these prompts and writing essays for these prompts since they might appear on the test. Outline your ideas, work on examples, and practice writing balanced responses to each prompt. From there, you can use this post to evaluate your writing and look for ways to improve. 😀

I hope this helps!

Happy Studying!

Hi Kevin! Thanks for the great tips. Above, you mentioned the Hemmingway App. Do you recommend purchasing this product to help improve my writing for the AWA? The product is $6.99.

I am glad you liked the post! 😀 You probably don’t need to purchase the app. You can use the web version to help you evaluate the writing. But if you think it is a great app and you really like it, you could purchase the desktop version to support the people who built it. 😀

Thanks in advance for your help.

Question: do we have to worry about the difference between the Issue Task questions that ask about “field of inquiry” vs “field of endeavor”? I’m unclear as to what the difference between these are, but I’m wondering whether I should even worry about what the differences are. I appreciate your input.

Hi Clare! Happy to help! 🙂 The difference between those terms are very small. I would not worry too much about the language. Both refer to similar activities—either asking questions or trying to reach a goal. Usually, though, asking the questions, inquiring, is meant to reach some goal. So the difference is slight, and ultimately, won’t affect the essay you write. 😀 I hope that helps.

I took the GRE and met the requirements for the program at my school for verbal and quantitative, but I needed 4 on the writing and I only got a 3.5. I figured the writing part would be the easiest, so I barely prepared for it! The second time I took it I just focused on studying for the writing part. I went through and read the entire pool of questions on the ETS website and timed myself and practiced writing different essays. I was so upset when I got my score back and it was even worse than the first time, I got a 3! Now I’m freaking out. Any advice?

Hi Jane! Thanks for reading! 😀

I am sorry to hear that you are still struggling with the writing section. That’s frustrating, especially if you went through the whole pool of essays! That’s a lot of work you put in. Without seeing your essay, I have to make some assumptions about why you are falling in the 3 range. Either you are not writing enough and not coming up with enough detail, or you are committing a lot stylistic and grammatical errors, or you are not organizing and completing your essay. Does any of this sound like your essays that you wrote on the test?

I think the best thing to do would be to look at the sample essays that ETS provides and study the difference between a 3 essay and a 4, 5, and 6, essay. This will give you a sense of what you need to do in your own writing to boost your scores. Here are links to the sample essays from ETS:

List of AWA Issue Sample Responses LIst of AWA Argument Sample Responses

I hope that this helps! 😀 Happy studying!

Thank you for this wonderful post. I have a question: Does a major difference in the Issue grading and the Argument grading affect the overall score in any way? I find the Argument essay easier and easy to score a 4/5, the issue is not always easy and expecting a 2/3 on average. Is the overall score always the average of the two, irrespective of the score difference?

Happy to help! I am glad to hear that you enjoyed this post. 🙂

According to ETS, your writing score is the average of the scores for your two essays. This is what they say: “The scores given for the two tasks are then averaged for a final reported score.” So two readers graders will read and grade each essay, and then the scores are averaged to give you a Writing Score. 🙂

Does that make sense? Let me know if I can be more clear. 🙂

Thank you. I’d like to incorporate more writing into my daily GRE schedule. Any thoughts on how to do that constructively?

Hi Dan, happy to help! 🙂

First, I definitely recommend working through the Issue and Argument Essay prompts on the ETS website. These are all the possible prompts that you will see on the test, so the more familiar you are with them, the more prepared you will be for the essay part of the test.

–https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/analytical_writing/issue/pool –https://www.ets.org/gre/revised_general/prepare/analytical_writing/argument/pool

With those in hand, the best way to practice is just start writing. The more timed writing you do, the better your essay will be and the more that you’ll be able to write on test day.

I know that writing an entire essay everyday might be too much to take on, so I recommend simplifying it. I would suggest two times a week writing a complete argument and issue essay, but the rest of the time, shorten your time limit and only write part of the essay. For example, set a timer for 10 minutes and try to brainstorm and then write 2 strong body paragraphs of an issue essay. Or set a timer for 5 minutes and try to outline an essay and write the introduction. In this way, you become familiar with the different prompts and practice timed writing without committing to a full essay.

Lastly, I recommend looking at some of our other articles on the AWA section. There are sample essays and other great tips and strategies that I am sure you will find useful. 🙂

–https://magoosh.com/gre/category/writing/

I hope that his helps! Let me know how it goes. 🙂

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• School Education /

Essay on My Car in 500 Words in English for School Students

• Updated on  
• May 7, 2024

Essay on my car: My car transcends mere metal and wheels; it’s an extension of my identity, a trusted companion in the journey of life. From the comforting rumble of its engine to the worn embrace of its leather seat, my car is more than just transportation; it’s a vessel of exploration and a repository of cherished memories. These have been the most thrilling and tranquil moments that life can provide.

Table of Contents

• 1.1 My First Family Car
• 1.2 Memories of My Car
• 1.3 Features of My Car
• 1.4 Conclusion
• 2 PDF Essay on My Car
• 3 Top 10 Places to Visit by Car

Essay on My Car in 500 Words

My car is more than just four wheels and some metal; it’s an extension of who I am and a reliable ally on life’s journey. My automobile is more than simply a means of transportation—from the cosy growl of its engine to the worn-out hug of its leather seat—it’s a journey companion and a storehouse of treasured memories. 

                Quick Read: Essay on the Role of Youth in Nation Building

My First Family Car

My inaugural family car wasn’t a flashy sports model or a sleek sedan; it was a vibrant blue Chevy Blazer, affectionately dubbed the “Blue Streak” for its occasional bursts of speed. Beyond its utilitarian function, the Blue Streak was a catalyst for unforgettable experiences. Whether venturing to the mountains or embarking on mundane errands, it was a stage for laughter-filled road trips and imaginative play, where spilled snacks fueled epic battles in the backseat fort.

Memories of My Car

Amidst late-night drives with the world blurring by, the rhythmic purr of the engine served as a comforting backdrop to cherished memories. Despite its quirks and imperfections, like rattling on uneven roads or unreliable radio reception, the Blue Streak remained steadfast, faithfully ferrying us through rain and shine. Its versatile features, from foldable rear seats for impromptu picnics to a leaky yet invigorating sunroof, transformed mundane outings into thrilling adventures.

Quick Read: Essay Topics for in English

Features of My Car

My trusty SUV is tailored to accommodate my adventurous spirit and evolving needs. With its spacious interior and flexible seating arrangements, it effortlessly accommodates my family and all our gear, facilitating spontaneous excursions without compromise. Elevated ground clearance affords a commanding view of the road, while advanced safety features provide peace of mind, ensuring a vigilant guardian on our travels.

Reflecting on the Blue Streak evokes a tapestry of memories: of family bonds, laughter, and the thrill of exploration. Though it’s long departed, its legacy endures as a testament to the transformative power of even the most ordinary vehicles, reminding us that amidst life’s journey, the simplest of cars can become extraordinary companions.

PDF Essay on My Car

Top 10 places to visit by car.

• Delhi to Leh Ladakh – 21 hours, 22 minutes (934 km)
• Delhi to Spiti Valley- 14 hours, 17 minutes (684.4 km)
• Delhi to Jaipur- 5 hours, 26 minutes (314.9 km)
• Delhi to Dehradun- 5 hours, 5 minutes (251.8 km)
• Delhi to Chandigarh- 4 hours, 27 minutes (243.5 km)
• Delhi to Mussoorie- 6 hours, 34 minutes (324 km)
• Delhi to Udaipur – 11 hours, 52 minutes (728.3 km)
• Mumbai to Goa – 13 hours, 6 minutes (600.3 km)
• Manali to Leh Ladakh – 11 hours, 19 minutes (427.0 km)
• Bihar to Darjeeling- 11 hours, 14 minutes (452.1 km)

A.1 A car is a means of transport used for travelling from one place to another. This is a four-wheeler used by individuals or family members. We all use cars in our daily lives to go from one place to another for work. A car is a beautiful vehicle that has comfortable seats, AC, and windows.

A.2 A car, or automobile, is a motor vehicle with wheels. Most definitions of cars state that they run primarily on roads, seat one to eight people, have four wheels, and mainly transport people, not cargo.

My favourite mode of transport is a four-wheeler because it enables all our family members to travel together. It is a black car, and my father bought it last year, exchanging our old red car.

Popular Essay Topics

For more information on such interesting topics, visit our essay writing page and follow Leverage Edu.

Aayushi Vardhan

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In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.

By Zadie Smith

A philosophy without a politics is common enough. Aesthetes, ethicists, novelists—all may be easily critiqued and found wanting on this basis. But there is also the danger of a politics without a philosophy. A politics unmoored, unprincipled, which holds as its most fundamental commitment its own perpetuation. A Realpolitik that believes itself too subtle—or too pragmatic—to deal with such ethical platitudes as thou shalt not kill. Or: rape is a crime, everywhere and always. But sometimes ethical philosophy reënters the arena, as is happening right now on college campuses all over America. I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:

There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.

If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.

The first principle sometimes takes the “weak” to mean “whoever has the least power,” and sometimes “whoever suffers most,” but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals, among whom two of the most famous are, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr . In the pacifist’s interpretation, the body that we must place between the gears is not that of our enemy but our own. In doing this, we may pay the ultimate price with our actual bodies, in the non-metaphorical sense. More usually, the risk is to our livelihoods, our reputations, our futures. Before these most recent campus protests began, we had an example of this kind of action in the climate movement. For several years now, many people have been protesting the economic and political machinery that perpetuates climate change, by blocking roads, throwing paint, interrupting plays, and committing many other arrestable offenses that can appear ridiculous to skeptics (or, at the very least, performative), but which in truth represent a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.

I experienced this not long ago while participating in an XR climate rally in London. When it came to the point in the proceedings where I was asked by my fellow-protesters whether I’d be willing to commit an arrestable offense—one that would likely lead to a conviction and thus make travelling to the United States difficult or even impossible—I’m ashamed to say that I declined that offer. Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet. I’d just about managed to stop buying plastic bottles (except when very thirsty) and was trying to fly less. But never to see New York again? What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)! Falling at the first hurdle! Anyone who finds themselves rolling their eyes at any young person willing to put their own future into jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments lie—also whether they’ve bought a plastic bottle or booked a flight recently. A humbling inquiry.

It is difficult to look at the recent Columbia University protests in particular without being reminded of the campus protests of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, some of which happened on the very same lawns. At that time, a cynical political class was forced to observe the spectacle of its own privileged youth standing in solidarity with the weakest historical actors of the moment, a group that included, but was not restricted to, African Americans and the Vietnamese. By placing such people within their ethical zone of interest, young Americans risked both their own academic and personal futures and—in the infamous case of Kent State—their lives. I imagine that the students at Columbia—and protesters on other campuses—fully intend this echo, and, in their unequivocal demand for both a ceasefire and financial divestment from this terrible war, to a certain extent they have achieved it.

But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas— it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone. If the concept of safety is foundational to these students’ ethical philosophy (as I take it to be), and, if the protests are committed to reinserting ethical principles into a cynical and corrupt politics, it is not right to divest from these same ethics at the very moment they come into conflict with other imperatives. The point of a foundational ethics is that it is not contingent but foundational. That is precisely its challenge to a corrupt politics.

Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands. (Those brave students who—in supporting the ethical necessity of a ceasefire—find themselves at painful odds with family, friends, faith, or community have already made this calculation.) This flexibility can also have the positive long-term political effect of allowing us to comprehend that, although our duty to the weakest is permanent, the role of “the weakest” is not an existential matter independent of time and space but, rather, a contingent situation, continually subject to change. By contrast, there is a dangerous rigidity to be found in the idea that concern for the dreadful situation of the hostages is somehow in opposition to, or incompatible with, the demand for a ceasefire. Surely a ceasefire—as well as being an ethical necessity—is also in the immediate absolute interest of the hostages, a fact that cannot be erased by tearing their posters off walls.

Part of the significance of a student protest is the ways in which it gives young people the opportunity to insist upon an ethical principle while still being, comparatively speaking, a more rational force than the supposed adults in the room, against whose crazed magical thinking they have been forced to define themselves. The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.

To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment? They are putting their own bodies into the machine. They deserve our support and praise. As to which postwar political arrangement any of these students may favor, and on what basis they favor it—that is all an argument for the day after a ceasefire. One state, two states, river to the sea—in my view, their views have no real weight in this particular moment, or very little weight next to the significance of their collective action, which (if I understand it correctly) is focussed on stopping the flow of money that is funding bloody murder, and calling for a ceasefire, the political euphemism that we use to mark the end of bloody murder. After a ceasefire, the criminal events of the past seven months should be tried and judged, and the infinitely difficult business of creating just, humane, and habitable political structures in the region must begin anew. Right now: ceasefire. And, as we make this demand, we might remind ourselves that a ceasefire is not, primarily, a political demand. Primarily, it is an ethical one.

But it is in the nature of the political that we cannot even attend to such ethical imperatives unless we first know the political position of whoever is speaking. (“Where do you stand on Israel/Palestine?”) In these constructed narratives, there are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said. Once these words or phrases have been spoken ( river to the sea, existential threat, right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist ) and one’s positionality established, then and only then will the ethics of the question be attended to (or absolutely ignored). The objection may be raised at this point that I am behaving like a novelist, expressing a philosophy without a politics, or making some rarefied point about language and rhetoric while people commit bloody murder. This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.

It is in fact perhaps the most acute example in the world of the use of words to justify bloody murder, to flatten and erase unbelievably labyrinthine histories, and to deliver the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity to the many people who seem to believe that merely by saying something they make it so. It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately. They are shibboleths; they describe a people, by defining them against other people—but the people being described are ourselves. The person who says “We must eliminate Hamas” says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that. The person who uses the word “Zionist” as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920—that person does not so much bring definitive clarity to the entangled history of Jews and Palestinians as they successfully and soothingly draw a line to mark their own zone of interest and where it ends. And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us—while we do all that, bloody murder.

And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein—by my stating of a position—you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do. Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead. ♦

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Gre prep online guides and tips, how is the gre essay scored.

Your GRE Writing score is a kind of cyborg measurement that averages together both human and machine ratings and melds them into an Analytical Writing score on a scale of 0-6. But how does a human grade the essay? Is the computer grader trustworthy?

In this article, we’ll explain the details of the GRE essay scoring process and the rubrics used by the human graders to derive your two essay scores.

Feature image credit: Seems Legit – panel 3 of 6 /used under CC BY-SA 4.0 /Cropped and resized from original.

GRE Writing Scores: A Roadmap

The GRE essay scoring process is a little complicated because it involves both human and computer graders . Each essay (analyze an issue and analyze an argument) is first graded by a trained human grader on a scale of 1-6. The scale used for essay scoring is holistic, which means you won’t automatically get points off after a certain number of errors. Instead, you’ll be graded on the overall quality of your essays.

Your essay is next sent through the e-rater , which is described on the GRE website as “a computerized program developed by ETS that is capable of identifying essay features related to writing proficiency.” The e-rater program likely grades essays on quantifiable metrics like level of vocabulary difficulty, sentence structure, length of essay (word count and number of paragraphs), and so on. Because it’s pretty difficult to write a program that can judge an essay based on content, it’s possible you could fool the e-rater with a long off-topic essay that uses high-level vocabulary.

But that’s where the human essay graders come in. If the human and computer graders “closely agree,” then the average of their two scores is the score you receive for that essay task. However, if the two scores do not “closely agree, ” then a second human is brought in to grade and the final score is the average of the two human-assigned scores . So if you tried to sneak an off-topic essay by the e-rater, it would be caught by the human grader and a second human grader would be brought in. Even if the human grader scored your essay way higher than the e-rater, you’d still end up with two human graders.

After both of your essays have been scored by e-rater and human grader(s), your overall GRE Writing score is then calculated. To get this number, your scores on the Issue and Argument task are averaged together to give you a final Analytical Writing score on a scale of 0-6 (with 0.5 increments). For instance, if you got a 4/6 on the Issues essay but a 5/6 on the Argument essay, your total GRE Analytical Writing score would be 4.5.

Quick side note: we've created the world's leading online GRE prep program that adapts to you and your strengths and weaknesses. Not sure what to study? Confused by how to improve your score? We give you minute by minute guide.

You don't NEED a prep program to get a great GRE score. But we believe PrepScholar is the best GRE prep program available right now , especially if you find it hard to organize your study schedule and don't know what to study .

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GRE Essay Scoring: Issue Task

The Analyze an Issue task on GRE Writing asks test takers to read a statement about an issue, take a position, and develop and support that position with evidence and reasoning. For your essay to score highly, you’ll need a clear thesis statement presenting your point of view and multiple examples that back up your claims . How well you accomplish this task dictates how well you’ll do on the Issue essay.

Fortunately, ETS is very up front about what specific benchmarks Issue essays need to meet to reach each score level. Below, I’ve listed the descriptions for 6-, 4-, and 2-scoring Issue essays.

As the above table shows, the holistic GRE Writing score is arrived at by assessing an essay’s quality across many different dimensions: analysis, ideas, development, support, organization, vocabulary & sentence structure. The guiding principle that is used to differentiate between different score levels across all areas, however, is precision .

The more precise you are in formulating an opinion on the issue, in developing and supporting your thinking, in organizing your thinking, and in choosing your words to convey your thinking, the better GRE Writing score you’ll get.

GRE Essay Scoring: Argument Task

The GRE argumentative essay task requires test takers to read an argument and analyze it. The specifics of how this analysis should be done varies from task to task (read more about the eight different kinds of argumentative essay prompts in this article ), but basically you’ll have to evaluate the position or recommendation put forward and decide whether or not it’s reasonable .

Below are the different characteristics of essays scoring a 6, 4, or 2 on the Argument task . As you go through, you may notice some similarities between it and the rubric for the Issue task.

Again, as with the Issue task, the main dimension that separates different score points for the GRE Argument task is level of precision . Instead of being judged on precision in formulating an opinion on an issue, your essay will be judged on precision in analyzing and explaining your analysis of the given argument. Similar to the Issues essay, however, high-scoring Argument essays will still need to demonstrate precision in ideas, development, support, organization, and vocabulary.

How Are GRE Writing Scores Evaluated by Grad Schools?

Now that you understand how the GRE essay scoring works, the question becomes how much grad schools care about GRE Writing scores. The near-unanimous answer, based on the number of schools and programs I researched, seems to be a resounding “not much.”

If schools really want applicants to have specific test scores, they’ll list GRE Writing score cutoffs on their websites (more about what a good GRE Writing score is here ). For the most part, though, as long as you get a 4.0 or above, you’ll be fine, even for the most competitive programs. Find out more about how your GRE score plays into graduate school admissions here .

What’s Next?

Want to learn more about how scoring works on the GRE? Try our complete guide to GRE scoring . If you took the old GRE, you can follow our instructions to learn how to convert your old GRE score to its equivalent new GRE score .

Hoping for more essay-specific scoring advice? We tell you how to get a perfect six on the Issue and Argument essays here .

Need some quick tips to boost your GRE Writing score? Then you should be sure to read our collection of the best strategies and tips to improve your score here .

Ready to improve your GRE score by 7 points?

Author: Laura Staffaroni

Laura graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College with a BA in Music and Psychology, and earned a Master's degree in Composition from the Longy School of Music of Bard College. She scored 99 percentile scores on the SAT and GRE and loves advising students on how to excel and fulfill their college and grad school dreams. View all posts by Laura Staffaroni