TOEFL Essay Tips

Get free TOEFL essay tips to help for your Test of English as a Foreign Language.

TOEFL Essay Tips

These tips will help you improve your writing for your TOEFL essay.

In order to do well on your TOEFL essay, you need to know what examiners look for in a well-written essay.

The six following characteristics of your TOEFL essay will be assessed:

1. Focus and purpose – Your essay should answer the question that has been posed.

You will need to express your main idea in a clear way in the introduction of the essay.

TIP: Be sure that you essay has a thesis statement in the first paragraph.

Remember that the thesis statement gives the main idea or purpose of your essay.

2. Organization – Your essay should be divided into paragraphs, which have been set out in an organized manner.

Each body paragraph should contain a point that supports your main idea.

You should also include a conclusion that reiterates the central points of the essay.

3. Development and support – It is extremely important to elaborate on the main idea of your essay and maintain your point of view throughout your writing.

Your essay should include examples and explanations that illustrate and support your viewpoint. Remember that if your essay topic presents a contentious issue, you need to state both the pro’s and con’s.

4. Sentence construction – You should write long and developed sentences that demonstrate a variety of sentence patterns.
You should avoid repeatedly beginning your sentences in the same way, such as “I think that.”

The software is designed to search for a variety of sentence patterns.

5. Mechanics – Your essay should be grammatically accurate and punctuated correctly. Your spelling should also be correct.

6. Critical thinking – Your essay should demonstrate unity and coherence among the examples that you use to support your argument.

Students sometimes worry about the point of view that they decide to take.

However, you will not be assessed on your opinions themselves, but rather on how well you have expressed, organized, and supported them.

This page gives essay writing advice and tips on essay writing structure.

TOEFL Essay Help

You can get more essay help in our writing download.

Free Grammar Exercises

You can also see some free grammar exercises from our writing practice download.

The grammar exercises in our free samples section will also give you further test practice for the iBT.

Our practice tests and online test free sample will also help you prepare for your examination.

Instant PDF Download – Our essay writing test practice download has four different sections:

Part 1: Grammar

This part contains 15 chapters on grammar, including grammar exercises, answers, and advice.

It includes phrasal verbs, articles, conditionals, and verb tense.

A sample from of the grammar review of our TOEFL writing download is provided at the bottom of this page.

Part 2: Grammar and Vocabulary Review

The second section of the writing practice download has five additional review chapters to check your comprehension of the vocabulary and grammar that you will have learned so far on our  Course.

Part 3: Essay Advice

Want to know what examiners look for in a well-written essay? This part gives tips for preparing a well-structured essay.

Part 4: Sample essay questions

The final section of the writing download has thirty sample iBT essay questions

The sample essay topics are similar to those used on task 2 of past Tests.

The  PDF download is 92 pages long when printed.