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As your instructor is my job to make sure you're getting the best score possible.

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And in order to do that, you have to really understand the scoring rubric.

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Everybody wants to be able to move their score up the scale.

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And in this lecture, I'm going to show you exactly how to do that.

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When we talk about moving up the scale, everybody is normally stuck at a certain score.

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Some of you have taken the exam three, four or five times and you keep getting the exact same score.

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What that means is you are not able to move your score from one rubric box to a higher rubric box.

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To be able to do that, you have to know.

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You have to have strategies, tactics, tips to be able to really, really do that very well.

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So the reason why I created this lecture was so that you know exactly what you need to do when you're

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practicing to be able to really move up that scale.

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The first aspect we're going to consider deals with content development and unity.

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All of these are related, so I'll talk about them together.

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First.

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When it comes to content, we should think about these five factors.

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Number one, introductions.

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Introductions affect the content and development of your essay.

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A lot of students just blow it off.

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And they think the introduction is not really important.

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But the introduction contains the most important sentence of all the thesis statement.

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Number two relevant information.

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If you are having a lot of digression in your essay, which means you're going outside of the thesis

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statement, going outside of the essay question, you are damaging your content development and unity.

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Number three, you must be able to extend your answers.

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You cannot surrealist details.

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You have to be able to explain explain the detail.

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How does it support the topic sentence position?

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How does this support the overall thesis statement?

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Number four topic sentences.

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Topic sentences have a dual role.

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They support the thesis statement and they control the idea of the paragraph.

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If you don't have properly written topic sentences, you are destroying your score.

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And finally, number five balance.

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Many of these questions have multiple parts, and you need to address each part of a question with balance.

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If you implement these five criteria, you're going to improve your content and development score by

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leaps and bounds.

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Some other things to consider in terms of content and development.

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Give fully developed responses.

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Connect your examples.

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If you don't connect your examples.

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And what I mean by that is people sometimes just give an example without truly explaining how that example

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supports or answers.

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The question or the examples does not support the detail.

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If you want to improve, go back and look at some of your old essays.

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Make sure that you check the topic sentences and the details in your paragraphs.

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Do the do the details support the topic sentence?

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Also, think of sentence functionality.

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When you're in practice mode, right?

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Not not necessarily doing time testing right now, but really just in practice mode.

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Learning to write better.

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Think about sentence functionality.

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What are the sentences in that paragraph doing?

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What's the purpose of that sentence?

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What does that sentence doing there?

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Why is it there?

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And then another great idea is to always refer back to your outline while you're writing.

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Constantly looking back at your outline while you're writing, keeps you focused, it allows for your

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mind to not drift off in another direction.

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That destroys the unity and the coherence of your essays.

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So unity.

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What does it mean?

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Right.

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Unity is so important.

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Unity deals with your body paragraphs being about one idea.

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So what I want you to do is look at these two paragraphs.

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Write the following paragraph lacks unity.

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Right.

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If you look at the topic sentence, the topic sentence tells us that this paragraph is about human benefits.

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That's the controlling idea.

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This is what I see people doing a lot of their essays.

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The topic sentence is about human benefits.

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That means everything in that paragraph must be about human benefits.

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But then the student goes ahead and writes about trees providing animals with benefits, and discusses

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how animals need to have a place to live.

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You have just created massive incoherence.

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There's no unity here because half of the paragraph is unrelated to the controlling idea.

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That's why knowing how to write topic sentences is so important.

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Knowing how to write thesis statements is so important.

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Now, here's a more unified version of the paragraph here.

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You can see that all of the sentences are related to the controlling idea of human benefits.

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Everything's related to the controlling idea.

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That's how you have great unity.

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Now let's talk about development.

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What does development mean?

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Well, when it comes to development, look at these paragraphs here.

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This paragraph lacks development.

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The student here wrote a topic sentence, then detail one, then detail to.

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You might look at that and say, Yeah, that's a good paragraph.

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But that's that's really that's a six.

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That's a six.

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That's a 5.5 or six.

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Here is a more developed version.

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Here you can see a topic sentence detail number one, explaining or expanding detail number one.

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Then detail number two.

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And we're expanding or explaining detail number two.

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That is what that's what it means to develop.

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Right.

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That's what it means to develop.

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If you're not doing that, you're not going to move up the rubric scale.

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Now let's look more specifically at coherence and cohesion to improve your score.

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Number one is your writing, are your sentences comprehensible?

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When you have very bad word, order or sentence structure, it makes it difficult to understand what

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you're trying to say.

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If a person has to if an examiner like myself has to read what you're saying, you know, two or three

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times that to read what you're saying two or three times, right.

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Is you you really have a comprehensibility problem.

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Having a plan helps coherence that deals with outlining number three logic.

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There should be a logical order to your writing.

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There should be an obvious and apparent connection between your ideas.

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And then another great tool to improve your coherence and cohesion is called concept mapping.

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Concept mapping deals with doing a reverse outline, a reverse outline, and with a reverse outline

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that means really the best way to do this.

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Go back and look at some of the old essays that you've written, and from the essay that's already written,

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tried to reverse engineer an outline and see if it's really a coherent outline that will help you to

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be able to look at yourself and what you're doing.

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Now let's talk about linguistic range.

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Yes, I know you don't see that on your rubric, but is there it's a part of the scoring in terms of

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your linguistic range?

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Precision.

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Right.

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Precision, precision, precision.

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Don't write with general words.

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Be very precise in your vocabulary, eliminate any ambiguity.

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Right.

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The examiner should not have to address how or why.

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Why did he say that?

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How is it?

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How is that how is that important?

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How is that connected with answering the question?

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Sequencing is important ideas go from general to specific.

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And then to repeat the precision that I stated in number one, be accurate.

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Do you want to sound amazing with big, ridiculous words, or do you want to communicate clearly?

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Very often students want to, quote, sound amazing.

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I'm going to sound amazing with this really big word.

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And they end up sounding ridiculous because it's completely out of context and makes no sense for being

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there.

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That's not how you improve your score.

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You improve your score by using great word combinations three or four vocabulary words that are string

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together properly.

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Which equals to equals having really good collocations.

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Now here is some more information about what do I mean by precision?

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Linguistic range.

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Right.

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Small range.

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I was very tired after the match.

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Higher range.

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I was exhausted after the match.

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Exhausted as more precise small range coffee walked slowly along the road, swinging his school bag

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higher range coffee strolled along the road.

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That's much more precise.

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When I say somebody walk slowly, that's very general.

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Strolling gives a completely different picture and it's much more precise.

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Small range.

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We had a nice evening with our friends.

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Higher range.

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We had a pleasant evening with our friends.

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With our friends.

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When we're talking about linguistic range, we're talking about precision.

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Now let's move forward and talk about vocabulary or lexical ability and improving your score.

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When it comes to your vocabulary.

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You want to utilize a range of vocabulary.

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This means that you should not repeat the same words over and over and over again.

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Paraphrasing synonyms, collocations, increase the score.

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Some more tips for your your your vocabulary range.

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Uncommon lexical items or phrases.

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So language like eye catching statistic indicate sustainable development, vast improvement.

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This is what they're talking about in terms of uncommon lexical items or phrases.

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They're not talking about big, ridiculous giri words that you never use in real life.

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That's not what they mean.

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Making sure that your advert placement is correct is very helpful.

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And also.

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Improving your lexical range can simply be done by changing, showing the change in word form.

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Going from the word health.

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From poor health.

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Going from poor health.

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In number three, poor health.

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And then in the next sentence, shifting to unhealthy.

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So what does what what do specific when we say when we say subject, specific vocabulary and variety

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of vocabulary, what does that mean?

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We can look at the following paragraph and have a really good idea.

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When you look at this paragraph, the words in red are showing variety or range, human shifting the

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form humanity, mankind, earthlings.

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And then this paragraph is talking about human benefits from trees.

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And then look at all of this specific subject vocabulary about trees, shade, bark, trunk, branches,

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arborists, types of trees, sap.

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That's all considered subject specific vocabulary.

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Now, some of you may be asking me or some of you may say to yourself or say to me, I don't know anything.

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I don't have a lot of vocabulary.

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Well, you have to read more.

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Right.

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Stop watching TV.

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Stop watching movies.

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Read, read, read, read, read, read.

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The more you read, the better, the better vocabulary you're going to have.

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Watching TV, watching movies is not really the best way to improve your vocabulary, your subject,

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specific vocabulary.

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Right.

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That comes from reading.

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Now let's talk about grammar range and accuracy and improving your score.

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You want to be able to master all of these sentence types.

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Simple.

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Compound.

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Complex.

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Compound, complex.

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Always use the proper verb tense.

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Right.

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And then you have to work.

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This is what's really important here.

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You have to work at breaking the habits, breaking bad habits.

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Very often I see students make the same mistake over and over and over again, and somehow they magically

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think that if I just keep on writing essays, 20 essays, 30 edits, keep on doing it, I'll get better.

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No.

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That's not how you get better.

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You get better by breaking bad habits.

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That means taking one essay.

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And working the heck out of that one essay correcting and breaking bad habits you've heard me say before.

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A great tool to use is the premium version of Grammarly.

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There are other grammar applications like white smoke and others pro writing, but my favorite one is

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Grammarly.

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WW Grammar Telecom is a great tool for those that are trying to improve your grammar and you need a

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grammar coach.

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But again, like I said, the premium version, they have a free version, but the premium version is

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really for those that are preparing for this exam because it will correct all of all of your grammar

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mistakes and it will tell you exactly what you need to do to make the correction.

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Then you make those corrections, then you write the whole thing over again and see if you can write

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it on your own without making those exact same mistakes.

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And then you just keep doing it and keep working it until you stop making the same mistakes over and

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over and over again.

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Right.

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You can go ahead and pause the lecture right here if you want to really get a good idea on the for different

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sentence types, your simple compound complex and your compound complex.

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There are some great videos by Khan Academy on YouTube and they really break these down even more,

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more for you.

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You've heard me say before, you can improve yourself, improve your your score by writing mistake free

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sentences.

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The majority of your sentences should be make mistake free, avoid those run on and fragment sentences.

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Fragment sentences that happened many times when students start sentences with and or they are writing

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complex sentences and putting a period after the dependent clause.

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This is just a short a short little explanation about changing parts of speech, fluctuating slightly

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to slight fluctuation that really impresses them in terms of the grammar and also probably even more

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so for vocabulary.

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And then, of course, parallelism.

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Parallelism is really important.

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A lot of students mess up with their parallel writing within their sentences.

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Like, here's an example of a sentence that has poor parallelism.

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Successful people tend to plan their day working long hours, and they never give up.

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That's a really bad.

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It should be successful.

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People tend to plan their day, work long hours and never give up.

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That is consistent.

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That's the way you have to write it.

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Prepositional phrases are sometimes very helpful in terms of writing since the beginning.

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That's a prepositional phrase.

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After the next decade.

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Prepositional phrase with regards to.

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With this in mind, all of those are the types of phrases that show more range in your in your grammar.

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All right.

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So thank you so much.

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I hope this information was helpful.

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Coming up next, we're going to get into the question analysis and then we're going to move into outlining

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essay questions.

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It's been a pleasure teaching you.

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I'm happy to be helping you as you move along on your journey in getting that great score.

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Take care.

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I'll talk to you as the.