Essay writing is the last question of the speaking and writing sections. The main communicative skill tested is writing, it also contributes marks towards grammar, spelling, vocabulary and the written discourse enabling skills. The test taker has to write a 300-word long essay in 20 minutes.

An essay is meant to comprehensively discuss the given topic and to communicate it in a clear academic professional language. It outlines the main points of the topic from the writer’s perspective outlined to have a coherent flow from one paragraph to the other. The lack of coherence shows that the writer doesn’t understand the topic or cannot the structure the topic according to the appropriate essay type.

 Understand the topic

Understanding the topic or lack thereof can make or break you in essay writing. You need to understand the type of essay required by the question to formulate an answer that addresses all the important points. Read it more than once if you have to, see it in your mind before you write it down.

 Avoid long sentences

Long sentences with a lot of punctuation marks, conjunctions and complex sentences are prone to mistakes and grammatical errors. It is advisable to keep your essay less complicated by using straightforward sentence structure and language. Don’t confuse academic writing with complicated writing. Write your essay as if your reader or audience is an academic who doesn’t have time to be paging through a dictionary or using an online translation tool to understand the content of your essay.

 Familiarize yourself with different essay types popular in PTE Academics

Different types of essays have different structure and layout, they also have a different writing style. With the help of online materials, you can find out the types of essays in PTE Academics and ways to answer them correctly. Examples of the essays include the argumentative essay which normally has a topic that goes “it is argued that”, the compare and contrast essay with the following phrase in the topic “the advantages or disadvantages,” and “do you agree or disagree.”

Structure your essay well

With the above essay types in mind, create an appropriate structure fitting for the particular essay type. The structure of an essay includes introduction, body and conclusion even though the format will depend on the essay type. For instance “do you agree or disagree” essay structure will be different from the narrative essay. You may need 4 paragraphs; introduction, 2 body paragraphs; 1 which supports the topic and the other one in disagreement, then finally the conclusion. The narrative essay, however, puts together point that better explains the topic. Write the relevant points in your notepad.

Stick to the topic

Focus only on the points that give more meaning to your essay than writing unnecessary information which only increases the word count. If you structure your essay well and identify relevant points then straying off-topic can be avoided with ease. After every paragraph go back and re-read your essay to check if there is coherent flow and no jargon information.

 Support your essay with example

Look at the following sentence. “The increased use of social media encourages good business ethics leading to customer satisfaction since business owners or clients aim for excellent service by avoiding tarnished reputation from unsatisfied customers. The point about social media advantages is supported by an example of how clients aim to provide good service.

Proofread

You should wisely split the 20 minutes allocated time to accommodate all the steps to complete your essay and leave a few minutes to proofread. Your work may require editing, therefore, rechecking can help you to avoid losing unnecessary marks.

Use a variety of sentence structure

A well-written essay has a mixture of various sentence structure. The test taker must be accustomed to different forms of sentences and how to use them. Imagine reading a page full of short sentences or sentences with no conjunctions. Always remember the “fanboys conjunctions” which is short for “for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so” and other conjunctions.