A Supplement to Greg Mat’s essay guides

By Pranav Bijwe
The Issue Guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhzlaHXHaK4
The Argument Guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFa8oeXXuoA

A Supplement, why would I need that?

Fair question. I decided to write this document to present a sort of a “coda” to Greg Mat’s
step-by-step essay guides. I give the advice in this document to everyone on the GRE
Subreddit Discord Group (https://discord.gg/xARFrt), who seek help and ratings for their
essays. I found this formula to be useful and it helped me score a 5.5 on my first GRE
attempt (His issue essay template is more or less completely applicable in the TOEFL
Independent essay, which culminated in me scoring a full 30 in the writing section). What I
believe helped me the most was designing a simple progression curve to writing essays.
Start humbly, end ambitiously. I don’t try to impose very much of my own structure to what
is already a self-contained elucidation by Greg Mat. It’s simply a bit of advice to help you to
add some routine, structure or plan to your AWA prep.
Why Greg’s Template?
Short answer, it’s the best. Long answer; it follows the instructions of the essay prompt
invariably, it does not restrict your flow of ideas, and it allows for good development of
content – start to finish. Greg’s templates seek to be a simple solution to a complex problem
– the GRE AWA section. Indeed, they are, especially for the argument essay. The issue essay
guide leaves a bit of room to adapt to personal writing structures and styles in the form of
the strongly agree/disagree style or the mostly agree/disagree style. I will exclusively talk
about the latter in this document since I not only find it challenging (and fun!) but also, with
recommendation from Sir Greg of Mat himself, it is the style that commonly yields scores on
the higher side.
The Progression Curve:
Since it is a common trend for essays rated 5 and above to exceed word counts of 500, most
people with no prior experience of writing essays under thirty minutes would find this
daunting. This is a clear-cut logical progression or plan to solve this problem. Its not a
shortcut and you will have to practice this to get better at it. To write long essays (500+
words) you need to first develop a habit of writing long essays. I suggest, start by ignoring
the thirty-minute time limit completely and write long essays (while following Greg’s
templates). Forcing yourself to writing long essays untimed will develop a mindset that you
can adapt to a time-pressure situation like the test day. After you find yourself to be in a
comfortable spot to come up with content while being able to articulate it in the format
shown in the videos, you can introduce a “soft time limit” to judge your standing. This
means setting a time limit for 30 minutes without care for whether or not you are able to
complete the essay. However, I advise you to wrap up your essay as soon as possible after
the 30 minutes are up. In this “soft time limit” phase of preparation you will be forced to
think for yourself to speed up parts of your essay writing procedure, cut corners where you
can (in terms of quantity not quality) and allow yourself some time to read the essay to
make corrections. The third phase of your prep would be the “hard time limit” phase. It’s
simple, you stop when the thirty minutes are up. Hopefully by the time you reach this
phase, not only are you able to write long essays, but also revise them in order to eliminate
as many mistakes as possible. After you are able to shatter the word count recommendation
and write 550 or 600+ word essays in thirty-minutes while maintaining the baseline format,
you can consider adding your personal idiosyncratic writing style, phrase, structure or
paradigm to the already neat template, not before.
Why I prefer the mostly agree/disagree style for the issue essay:
The Issue Guide for this style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWOBlYGzSc8
As stated earlier, this style is highly recommended by Greg and according to the maestro
himself, it’s the style that’s more likely to yield a score on the higher side. I adopted this
style quite late into my prep for the first attempt, nevertheless, I can attest to its efficacy for
two reasons. It adds nuance and depth to your content, and a qualified position is far more
defensible in terms of its logical coherence and analysis. In this style, one of your body
paragraphs (ideally the first one) is a concession or a nuance (not a contradiction to your
position). I start my first body paragraphs like this:
Firstly, it would be fair to concede that…
Followed by the extreme or particular situations where I would allow the nuance in my
position to exist.
Here’s an easy example. Let’s say the prompt is the government should basically support
poor people. Seems like an obvious support, right?
My concession paragraph always tackles extremes
However, to be fair, if the government were to support a significantly large impoverished
population, the government would bankrupt itself and cease to function.
Something like that.
The structure remains the same, beginning with the mini-thesis, a bit of elaboration,
followed by the specific example, a bit of elaboration and wrap it up.
Your following paragraphs would be the ones that align with your position on the prompt.
You could switch it up and add the qualification paragraph after your supporting paragraphs,
up to you.
Advice for the Argument essay?
Its straightforward, stick to Greg’s template and writing formula. The key to success in this
essay is to follow the prompt’s instructions completely.
Additional points:
Keep it simple: start your body paragraphs with firstly, secondly, thirdly (applicable for both
essays). Try to incorporate discourse phrases like however, moreover, for instance,
furthermore.
Real life examples are the best albeit not necessarily the norm, you can construct logically
coherent and relevant hypothetical examples that don’t break the laws of this universe. Do
this when you cannot think of a real life, historical or scientific example.
Write down your thoughts on the screen, use shorthand to note down the ideas that you
will use in your essay. This will give you some sense or idea of going about the development
of your essay. Typically, I note down my position on the issue, examples and clever phrases
or statistics if I can think of any. You can delete this stuff when you’re done writing your
essay (DO NOT FORGET TO DO THIS!).
Start your AWA prep as soon as possible. Do not put it off till the end.
Develop your ideas, don’t leave a sentence hanging or open to interpretation. Elaborate on
your sentences especially when they begin with a new idea in this chain of ideas. Elucidate
with detail as much as you can before proceeding to the connecting idea.
Closing Words:
As a non-native speaker of English, I found Greg Mat’s essay guides to be the sole reason for
my high AWA score. Follow his guides religiously with my advice for a routine and
progression curve for optimal results. I find this to be the most logical way to develop the
habit to practice essay writing using a template that will most assuredly help you to get the
score that you desire. I would be happy to answer your questions regarding the AWA
section on the GRE Subreddit Discord Group.