how to succed in gmat writting

8/4/2019 How to Succed in GMAT Writting

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By

Satyadhar Joshi

[email protected]

http://www.wiziq.com/shivgan_joshi

How to Excel AWA, bringing the researchsimplified to the students of GMAT, GRE &

TOEFL
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]


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Contents of Plan

What is E rater

How to optimize you score

Research on the structure of e rater

Basic errors of grammar derived from GMAT Minimizing errors using critical reading of your

own essay

Building basic Pre-knowledge Sample Essays

Conclusion

www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/awintro.pdf

http://www.ets.org/research/capabilities/automated_scoring


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Scoring Graph for GRE

http://www.powerscore.com/gre/help/scoringscale.cfm


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Introduction to E-rater (GRE-

GMAT) Its a software developed by ETS It is used to rate Essays

Very sophisticated techniques used

The E-rater favors transitional words

1. Ordinal numbers that introduce examples or reasons:first, second, third, first of all, etc.

2. Transitional words that relate each sentence to other:since, because, therefore, thus, etc.

3. Mood words that indicate the author's position: fail,

ignore, overestimate, underestimate, exaggerate,misrepresent, overlook, etc.

4. Counter-evidence indicators: actually, despite,admittedly, except, even though, nonetheless,nevertheless, although, however, in spite of, do, does,

may, might, etc.


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Some experts advice that:(i) to use transitional words(ii) to include a topic sentence in every paragraph

(iii) that the e-rater is very sensitive to spelling andgrammatical mistakes (contrary to the real GRE)

and(iv) is not sensitive at all to the intuition of your writing

and to the organization of your essay (e.g. the e-rater never identified my main point).

Taking all these into consideration I took one moretest and guess what.... 6/6 although my ideaswhere a little bid stupid, my examples where out ofplace and the e-rater did not identify any main ideain my essays. Just I had to take care to give aLENGTHY and free of mistakes essay.


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Length First note that your essay will be graded by an e-

rater, which is software that checks your essay forstructural keywords and overall organization.Then it will be graded by a human grader who

has about 2 minutes to read each essay.

According to Princeton Review "Cracking theGMAT," more length is better to get a high score

from the e-rater (software that ). However800score suggests that going on and on willirritate the human grader. I have read in a numberof places that 300-500 words is a good length.


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Criterion (ETS) The Criterion Online Writing Evaluation service

provides instructors and students with reliableevaluations of English-language essays.

It delivers immediate score reporting anddiagnostic feedback that students can use to

revise and resubmit their essays.

Instructors can use their own topics or select fromthe Criteriontopic library of more than 400 essayassignments at various skill levels.

http://www.ets.org/criterion


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Controversial Areas pertaining toEssay

Human vs. Machine It does not assess specific content knowledge

ETS Essay-Similarity-Detection Software

http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/awintro.pdf


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Essay writing has these basicfunctions

Grammar

Content (Examples related to the essay)

Critical Reasoning

Idioms Punctuation

Triggering words

Arguments and counter arguments


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ETS says:


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EST further says:


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Evaluating Multiple Aspects of

Coherence in Student Essays

http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/N/N04/N04-1024.pdf


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Exploring the Feedback and Revision Features of CriterionYigal Attali ETS, Princeton, NJPaper presented at the National Council on Measurement inEducation

Summary

Relation of length to grade

Critique, is comprised of a suite of programs thatevaluates andprovides feedback for errors ingrammar, usage, and mechanics, identifies theessays discourse structure, and recognizes

undesirable stylistic features

The writing analysis tools identify five main typesof grammar, usage, and mechanics errorsagreement errors, verb formation errors, wrongword use, missing punctuation, and typographical

errors.http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdf


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Types of error

http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdf


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Grammar Errors

http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdf


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Three main errors in Grammar Be very careful about fragmented sentences.

Possessive errors of vs. s

Subject Very Agreement

Garbled sentences


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Usage Errors in Essay


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Style Errors


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Devastating errors

Below are the ranking of most costly errors whichcan take your score down:

1. Garbled sentences

2. Repetition of words

3. Missing Apostrophe

4. Fused Words

5. Capital Nouns

6. Inappropriate use of words or phases


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Garbled Words I cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty unesdnatnrd

waht I was rdgnieg>The phaonmneal pweor ofthe hmuan mnid aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at >Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mattaer in whaht

oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnttihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghitpclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you cansitll raed it wouthit a porbelm.


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Framing of Paragraph First and last lines are important Conveying words are important use all of them

Idioms are important

Paragraphs should have sentences of good length

Writing strategy must includes an introductoryparagraph, at least a three-paragraph body with eachparagraph in the body consisting of a pair of mainpoint and supporting idea elements, and a concludingparagraph.

Missing elements could include supporting ideas forup to the three expected main points or a missingintroduction, conclusion, or main point. On the otherhand, identification of main points beyond the

minimum three would not contribute to the score.


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Using pre-knowledge Examples are important One area of each examples that the E-rater

understand


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Idioms Lexicon complexity is an important parameter,

use as many good words as possible

Book: Chandresh Agrawal, CAT Priyanka Prakshan


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Punctuations

One of the most important area of Essays Comma (series, introduction, clauses,

interjections, conjunction)

Use of comma with transition words

Helps in avoided choppy sentences

Page 508 of Book: Novas GRE


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Style Transition Figurative language

Dictions


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Pre-knowledge on USA

Areas to Quote examples in Essay can be:

American freedom History

George Washington ( the first president of USA),current Barack Obama

Abraham Lincoln served as the 16th President ofthe United States from March 1861 until hisassassination in April 1865. He successfully led thecountry through the American Civil War, and ended

slavery. Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American clergyman,

leader in the African American civil rights movement.Worked for civil rights in the United States and

around the world, using nonviolent methods


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Scientist Thomas Alva Edison (American; Bulb, camera,

etc)

Sergey M. Brin & Lawrence E. Page(Google)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton

(English) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6di

nger http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbu

s

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellan

Charles Darwin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newtonhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einsteinhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dingerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dingerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellanhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_Magellanhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbushttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dingerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erwin_Schr%C3%B6dingerhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Einsteinhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isaac_Newton


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Artists Michelangelo (Italy) Pablo Picasso (France)

Leonardo da Vinci (Italy) Painter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_RockwellUSA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Rockwellhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Rockwell


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Politics & Wars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Union

Benito Mussolini (World War 2)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana,_Princess_of_W

ales

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa

World is Flat: Thomas Friedman
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedonghttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Unionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marxhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Leninhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana,_Princess_of_Waleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana,_Princess_of_Waleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Friedmanhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Friedmanhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana,_Princess_of_Waleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana,_Princess_of_Waleshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Leninhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Marxhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_D._Roosevelthttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Unionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong


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Economics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Depression http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_yuan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocol

World Bank and International Monetary Fund http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_yuanhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocolhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyoto_Protocolhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_yuan


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Sample Essay Content

"Societies should try to save every plant andanimal species, regardless of the expense tohumans in effort, time, and financial well-being.

PETA

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People_for_the_Ethical_Treatment_of_Animals

Kyoto Protocol

Global Warming & Carbon Tax

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Fund_for_Nature WWF

Framing/ Grammar/ Punctuations / etc willreduce marks


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GRE Analytical Writing ISSUE

Essay Topic 72 (ETS)

"The true value of a civilization is reflected in itsartistic creations rather than in its scientificaccomplishments.

All planning will help you


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ISSUES & Essay Topics (source

ETS)

"Most societies do not take their greatest thinkersseriously, even when they claim to admire them.

"The best ideas arise from a passionate interest incommonplace things."

"It is more important to allocate money for immediate,

existing social problems than to spend it on long-termresearch that might help future generations.

"A nation should require all its students to study the samenational curriculum until they enter college rather thanallow schools in different parts of the nation to determine

which academic courses to offer. "The most effective way to understand contemporary

culture is to analyze the trends of its youth.

When someone achieves greatness in any field suchas the arts, science, politics, or business that persons

achievements are more important than any of his or her

http://www.testpreppractice.net/GRE/awa-samples/gre-awa-essay-


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More topics It is necessary for everyone to read poetry, novels,

mythology and other types of imaginative literature.

Academic disciplines have become so specialized inrecent years that scholars' ideas reach only a narrowaudience. Until scholars can reach a wider audience,their ideas will have little use.

Governments must ensure that their major citiesreceive the financial support they need in order tothrive, because it is primarily in cities that a nation's

cultural traditions are preserved and generated. All nations should help support the development of a

global university designed to engage students in theprocess of solving the world's most persistent socialproblems.


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Publication Referred

Tetreault, J. & Chodorow, M. (2008). The ups and downs of prepositional errordetection in ESL writing (PDF). In Proceedings of the 22nd InternationalConference on Computational Linguistics(pp. 865-872). Manchester, UK:COLING 2008 Organizing Committee.

Tetreault, J., & Chodorow, M. (2008, August). Native judgments of non-nativeusage: Experiments in preposition error detection (PDF). In COLING 2008:Proceedings of the workshop on Human Judgements in ComputationalLinguistics(pp. 24-32). Manchester, UK: COLING 2008 Organizing Committee.

Chodorow, M., Tetreault, J., & Han, N-R. (2007). Detection of grammatical errorsinvolving prepositions (PDF). In Proceedings of the Fourth ACL-SIGSEMWorkshop on Prepositions(pp. 25-30). Prague, Czech Republic: Association forComputational Linguistics.

Higgins, D., & Burstein, J. (2006). Sentence similarity measures for essaycoherence (PDF). In Proceedings of the seventh international workshop oncomputational semantics (IWCS-7), Tilburg, The Netherlands.

Burstein, J., & Higgins, D. (2005). Advanced capabilities for evaluating studentwriting: Detecting off-topic essays without topic-specific training (PDF). InProceedings of the international conference on artificial intelligence in Education,Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Attali, Y. (2004, April). Exploring the feedback and revision features of Criterion
http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/C/C08/C08-1109.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/C/C08/C08-1109.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/W08-1205.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/W08-1205.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W07/W07-1604.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W07/W07-1604.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_sentence_similarity.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_sentence_similarity.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_burstein_higgins_CR.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_burstein_higgins_CR.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_burstein_higgins_CR.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_burstein_higgins_CR.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_burstein_higgins_CR.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_burstein_higgins_CR.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_burstein_higgins_CR.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_burstein_higgins_CR.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_sentence_similarity.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_sentence_similarity.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W07/W07-1604.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W07/W07-1604.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/W08-1205.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/W08-1205.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/W08-1205.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/W/W08/W08-1205.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/C/C08/C08-1109.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/C/C08/C08-1109.pdf


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Publication Referred continued

Han, N-R., Chodorow, M., & Leacock, C. (2004). Detecting errors in Englisharticle usage with a maximum entropy classifier trained on a large, diversecorpus (PDF). In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on LanguageResources and Evaluation, Lisbon, Portugal: European Language ResourcesAssociation.

Higgins, D., Burstein, J., Marcu, D., & Gentile, C. (2004). Evaluating multipleaspects of coherence in student essays (PDF). In S. Dumais, D. Marcu, & S.Roukos (Eds.), HLT-NAACL 2004: Main Proceedings(pp. 185-192). Boston, MA:

Association for Computational Linguistics. Burstein, J., Chodorow, M., & Leacock, C. (2003, August). Criterion: Online essay

evaluation: An application for automated evaluation of student essays (PDF).Proceedings of the fifteenth annual conference on innovative applications ofartificial intelligence, Acapulco, Mexico. (This paper received an AAAI DeployedApplication Award.)

Burstein, J., & Wolska, M. (2003, April). Toward evaluation of writing style:Finding overly repetitive word use in student essays (PDF). In Proceedings of the10th conference of the European chapter of the Association for ComputationalLinguistics, Budapest, Hungary.

Burstein, J., Marcu, D., Andreyev, S., & Chodorow, M. (2001, July). Towardsautomatic classification of discourse elements in essays (PDF). In Proceedingsof the 39th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics(pp.98-105). Toulouse, France: Association for Computational Linguistics.

Leacock, C., & Chodorow, M. (2001). Automatic assessment of vocabulary usage

without negative evidence(TOEFL Research Rep. No. 67, ETS RR-01-21).Princeton, NJ: ETS.
http://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_NCME_2004_Attali_B.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/han_chodorow_leacock_LREC04.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/han_chodorow_leacock_LREC04.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/han_chodorow_leacock_LREC04.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/N/N04/N04-1024.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/N/N04/N04-1024.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_iaai03_burstein.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_iaai03_burstein.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_iaai03_burstein.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/E/E03/E03-1003.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/E/E03/E03-1003.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/P/P01/P01-1014.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/P/P01/P01-1014.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/research/policy_research_reports/rr-01-21http://www.ets.org/research/policy_research_reports/rr-01-21http://www.ets.org/research/policy_research_reports/rr-01-21http://www.ets.org/research/policy_research_reports/rr-01-21http://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/P/P01/P01-1014.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/P/P01/P01-1014.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/E/E03/E03-1003.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/E/E03/E03-1003.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_iaai03_burstein.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_iaai03_burstein.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/erater_iaai03_burstein.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/N/N04/N04-1024.pdfhttp://www.aclweb.org/anthology-new/N/N04/N04-1024.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/han_chodorow_leacock_LREC04.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/han_chodorow_leacock_LREC04.pdfhttp://www.ets.org/Media/Research/pdf/han_chodorow_leacock_LREC04.pdf


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Books

Book: Novas GRE Barrons GRE


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Resources on internet

http://www.urch.com/forums/gmat-awa/50851-6-0-my-awa-experience.html
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