Overview of the GRE essays

- [Voiceover] So, the first section of the GRE is the analytical writing assessment, which is better known as the essays. In this video, I'll go over the basics of both essays and give you an overview of how to prepare for them. So, there are two separate essay assignments on the GRE. There's an Issue essay, in which you'll provide your point of view on a prompt, and an Argument essay, for which you'll analyze a brief argument. Once you take the real GRE, each of your responses will be scored from 1 to 6, and then those scores will be averaged, rounded to the nearest half-point.

So, the first thing that I recommend you do to prepare for the essays is to read what ETS, the creator of the GRE, has to say about them on its website. So there, you'll find an overview of both types of essays, sample essay responses, with some greater commentary, and a complete listing of all possible prompts for each type of essay. So once you've started to read through this site, start to brainstorm some prompts, too. Just pick a prompt and pretend you're preparing to write an essay about it. Write down whatever ideas you think you can come up with, and just do this for as many prompts as you possibly can, so that you increase the chances that the prompts you see on test day will be familiar to you.

Next, actually begin writing some essays of each type. Don't worry about timing at first, just write them untimed, and then practice more timed essays as you feel more and more confident. Compare your essays to the sample ones on ETS' website and if you can, get someone you know who's a good writer to critique your responses, or work with a tutor who specializes in the GRE. So finally, make sure that you practice the essays. For most people, it's really not fun to sit down and write for 30 minutes. But since ETS publishes all possible essay topics on its site, this is a section of the test that you can really prepare well for.