Caddy+Quentin4ever

I would just like to point out something that no one has mentioned. The "people" reading your GRE AW essay are actually a person and an "e-rater®," i.e. a computer. From the ETS website: The essay score is assigned by a trained reader, using a 6-point holistic scale. The essay response is then reviewed by e-rater®, a computerized program developed by ETS, which is being used to monitor the human reader. If the e-rater evaluation and the human score agree, the human score is used as the final score. If they disagree by a certain amount, a second human score is obtained, and the final score is the average of the two human scores. http://www.ets.org/gre/institutions/scores/how/This is all to say that one person glances at your essay, then a computer glances at your essay to confirm the score. As an instructor who has had to grade mountains of freshman comp essays for department-wide semester assessments, I can tell you that the "6-point holistic scale" is basically a snap judgment system for categorizing the masses. You do not "read" essays, you look at them, keeping an eye out for key requirements which include (in this order) 1.) Word count, 2.) Organization, and 3.) Coherency (sentence structures that are complex but not too complex are best). If the human reader is using a programmed approach to scoring your essay, you can bet the e-rater® isn't mulling over your thoughts with a glass of merlot. I paid for that silly ETS ScoreItNow! http://www.ets.org/gre/general/prepare/scoreitnow online writing practice service (which is graded only by an e-rater®-- no homo sapiens involved) and it did help me in that that it drilled into my head the fact that in evaluating my essay, no one would be agonizing over my words, so why should I? In a nutshell, the higher the word count, the higher the score. A few other things, like organization and sentence structure, can hurt or help you, but not as much as you’d think. As for creativity, razor-sharp wit, and scholarly incisiveness, they’ll get about as much appreciation as a great novel at a NASCAR rally. I know it’s not a pleasant reality, but there you have it.