2019-03-15 TOEFL: ind writing practice

Video: history of surfing
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Writing practice: ETS Guide 1, ETS 1.3
Email your responses to me when you’re finished.
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BREAK
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With your partner, read the sample responses to the second task and decide what score each one should receive (from 1 to 5).
A - 1 - No development, many grammar problems, and doesn’t actually answer the question of which option is better.
B - 5 - There are small mistakes, but none of them make anything difficult to understand. This is clear and well developed. There are a variety of sentence structures. Alhough the vocabulary is not very high-level, it is almost always correct.
C - 1 - This kind of mentions an answer to the question (“I insiste that young adults have to live without parents.”), but it’s not developed at all and language errors make it very hard to understand.
D - 2 - The answer is clear and is somewhat supported and developed. However, the language level is pretty bad and makes a lot of the ideas difficult to understand.
E - 3 - There is pretty good development of the ideas, though the ideas in paragraphs 3 and 4 are not connected very well. There are also language errors that obscure meaning.
F - 2 - There are not many grammar mistakes, but all of the sentences and vocabulary are very simple. There is not much development or organization. There is almost no support for the general statements and unclear connections between ideas.
G - 3 - There’s not really a clear overall thesis, it’s just advantages and disadvantages of both sides. Organization is a little bit unclear or incomplete. There is redundancy (repeating the same information), and there are a number of errors that make some sentences harder to understand. (Some typos are fine, but when you type a different word like “along” instead of “alone”, it obscures meaning and can reduce your score.)
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If timing is a problem, make sure to write your main points and examples first. You can come back later and finish up the details or add to your introduction if you have time.
When you’re first writing your body paragraphs, force yourself to move to the next one after 5 minutes.
You can go to http://www.typingtest.com/ to test and improve your typing skill if that’s part of the problem.
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Homework (optional): If you want more feedback than a score and one sentence, email me this weekend with your own self-evaluations of your writings from today. What did you do well? What do you need to work on for next time? Did you do anything better or worse than your last writing for me? You can use the official score guide at https://www.ets.org/s/toefl/pdf/toefl_writing_rubrics.pdf to give you ideas.