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Essay Course and Sample Essays - How to Get a Score of 6.0
Essay - GMAT509 The following appeared in an editorial from a newspaper serving the town of Saluda.
"The Saluda Consolidated High School offers over 200 different courses from which its students can choose. A much smaller
private school down the street offers a basic curriculum of only 80 different courses, but it consistently sends a higher proportion
of its graduating seniors on to college than Consolidated does. By eliminating at least half of the courses offered there and
focusing on a basic curriculum, we could improve student performance at Consolidated and also save many tax dollars."
Discuss how well reasoned . . . Etc.
Required word count: TOEFL, IELTS >=250; GRE, GMAT >=300. Essay length is considered and weighted in the final score.Lexical Density The Lexical Density Test is a Readability Test designed to show how easy or difficult a text is to read. The Lexical Density Test uses the following formula: Lexical Density = (Number of different words / Total number of words) x 100 The lexical density of a text tries to measure the proportion of the content (lexical) words over the total words. Texts with a lower density are more easily understood. As a guide, lexically dense text has a lexical density of around 60-70% and those which are not dense have a lower lexical density measure of around 40-50%.3Sentence length A subtle, but very effective way, to make your writing deadly and monotonous is by never varying sentence length. One short sentence after another makes your prose sound choppy, childish, or like a bad imitation of Hemingway. Conversely, all "long" sentences can make your writing hard to read. However, using all "medium"-length sentences doesn't work, either. Sentences that are all about the same length (and often follow the same grammatical pattern) create monotony. In general, an average sentence length well below 14 words per sentence may indicate that you use too many short sentences and you need to learn how to combine and/or subordinate ideas. If your average sentence length is well above 22 words a sentence, you may be piling too much freight on your sentences and have a prose style that is dense and tangled. If your average word length falls between 14 and 22, you need to look at your sentences to see if there is some variety or if they are all about the same length.2Hard words Hard words are defined as words with three or more syllables. This definition is used in calculating the readability and difficulty of a text, including the Gunning Fog Index.The Fog Index The Gunning-Fog Index is a readability test designed to show how easy or difficult a text is to read. It uses the following formula: Reading Level (Grade) = (Average No. of words in sentences + Percentage of words of three or more syllables) x 0.4 The resulting number is your Gunning Fog Index. The Gunning Fog Index gives the number of years of education that your reader hypothetically needs to understand the paragraph or text. For reference, the New York Times has an average Fog Index of 11-12, Time magazine about 11. Typically, technical documentation has a Fog Index between 10 and 15, and professional prose almost never exceeds 18.3 Word Frequency CloudThe word frequency cloud shows each word in a bigger or smaller text size, depending on how many times it is found in the text. The bigger the word, the more frequently it occurs. Very common words have been removed to allow you to see the key words in the text.3 |