Writing intro | Analytical writing

The GRE exam always begins with an essay, called the Issue Essay.

The GRE used to include two essays, but the Argument essay section was removed with the launch of the new shorter version!

You’re given 30 minutes to write the essay. We’ll discuss more details on the content in the upcoming chapters, but first, it’s important to understand how this essay is graded.

Generally, you’re graded along two categories: your essay writing skills, and your English writing skills. Here are the benchmarks by which you’re graded, in order of importance:

Essay writing skills

Answer the question and stay on topic
Use clear, logical, and convincing points to defend your position
Have an effective logical flow to the essay

English language skills

Use correct spelling
Use correct grammar
Use a variety of sentence structures

Sidenote

Writing more is better!

Although it isn’t explicitly listed in the table above, it’s crucial you write as much as possible. Many studies have been done on essay grades in the GRE, and they all have found that writing more strongly correlates with getting higher scores.

Your essay will be graded by a human and a computer, and your final grade is the average of the two scores. The ETS doesn’t publish specific details on how their grading works, but most likely, the computer will be focused on your use of the English language, while the human will be better equipped to grade the aspects relating to your general essay writing and reasoning skills. Regardless, try your best to fulfill each requirement and write as much as possible.

All official GRE essay prompts are publicly available to be used and studied. When you take our essay exam sections, we’ll randomly pick one of these prompts for you. There are hundreds of prompts in the pool, but if you’re lucky, you might end up seeing the same GRE essay prompt that you practiced with on test day!

How to write a good GRE essay

There are a lot of writing tips out there that might be good ways to write a good essay generally, but they aren’t necessarily the best tips when we’re talking specifically about writing your GRE essays.

We’re extremely data-focused here at Achievable, so we wanted to know for sure what are the most important factors to get a top score. Understandably, the ETS will never tell anyone their exact scoring criteria, but after analyzing thousands of essays using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, we have a very strong understanding of the traits of high-scoring essays.

Beeswarm chart of machine learning traits that impact GRE analytical writing essay scores

Here are the top ways to write a high-scoring GRE issue essay or GRE argument essay:

Make sure your essay is long enough to avoid being penalized for a short essay (write 800+ words)
Ensure your essay is focused by using plenty of nouns that relate to the topic
Write a descriptive essay by using lots of adjectives to describe your position, evidence, and ideas
Read the prompt carefully, highlight keywords, and use these keywords throughout your essay, most importantly in your thesis paragraph
Vary your sentence length, but in general, favor the use of longer sentences
Avoid making spelling mistakes
Aim for ~8 sentences per body paragraph and ~5 sentences for thesis and conclusion paragraphs
Keep your thesis and conclusion paragraphs concise but use at least 100 words
Reference a person’s name in your thesis paragraph if it’s relevant
Keep your body paragraphs above 150 words
Avoid excessive use of exclamation marks and quotations

If you’re interested in the full analysis, you can find the complete article 20+ proven ways to boost your GRE essay score on our blog!