PTE Write Essay overview
A summary of useful and effective practice tipsPTE Write Essay is one of the only two tasks in PTE practice Writing section, the other task is PTE Summarise Written Text.
The task
In PTE Write Essay task, you will be
- prompted with an essay topic, usually 2 -3 sentences.
- writing a 200 – 300 word essay
- given 20 minutes time limit to answer
Objective
In this PTE Write Essay, you should focus on writing for a purpose. Depending on the subject of essay topic, your purpose for example, could inform readers about a new trend and its implication or persuade readers on the view of a given topic.
To achieve your purpose, the essay content must contain additional information such as supporting your opinion with details and examples or even explanations as long as it could bring strong arguments.
Finally, the goal is to conceptualize and develop your ideas, arguments, examples and combine all aforementioned components to form the complete essay answer.
How to preapre PTE Write Essay for high score?
Planning
The most effective way to plan yourself is to familiarize the common types of topics in PTE Write Essay, as we are the expert in collecting PTE practice questions and our experience tells us that PTE essay topics can be roughly categorized in the following:
- Sport
- Social
- Shopping
- Invention
- law and policy
- Science and Technology
- Education
- Media
- Environment
Obviously, this list is non exhaustive as there are some other odd question topics. so if you want to know more details about the actual topics and answers, please look into our PTE Exam Question Bank as it contains not only just PTE practice essay topics we have collected over the years but also model answers and useful essay template, which will help you to tackle this task.
Structure – 2 points
Good essay writing requires concise and logical structure, PTE essay is no exception. In fact, PTE promotes a systematic structural approach with clear introduction, main body parts and conclusion, all which is designed to make the computerized marking system more effective.
The key feature of a high score essay is to ensure that paragraphs follow a natural flow of development, what it means is that the sequence of your paragraphs should easily identify strong correlations from paragraph A to paragraph B and to paragraph C. The content should be coherent, and you should avoid writing about unrelated loose elements.
Choice of words and sentence structure – 4 points:
Now, you understand the topic, and you have a plan of attack. Your score is determined by how you choose to deliver your response. In PTE Write Essay, you are assessed by using good choice of words and by structuring your response effectively and precisely while delivering your thoughts. In other words, you goal is to demonstrate your capability of using right choices of words (a sound grasp of vocabularies) and arrange them accordingly to eliminate ambiguity.
So you might be confused and say “I’m confused, what do you mean?”, let’s use below 2 sentences to illustrate our choice of words and observe the difference.
“Large shopping mall is making small shops lose sales and it’s causing them to close down.”
“Business for small shops is diminishing at an alarming rate and large shopping malls are the major contributor to this decline.”
Despite telling basically the same story, there is a striking contrast in the quality just by using a different sentence structure with right choice of words, if you could construct your response in a similar manner then it certainly would alleviate your score.
Content - 3 points:
The “main course” of the PTE Write Essay is to produce content that could address all aspects of a given topic and support your response with adequate examples or explanation. This is where your brain switches on and get creative on the subject. But wait. Before you put yourself too deep in the train of thoughts, it is very important to read the prompt and make sure you FULLY UNDERSTAND the question.
Before you write anything, note key words in the prompt. Find out the topic, what key points you should focus on to answer the question and any points of view to present and discuss:
Analysing these four areas will help you to approach the task, structure your essay and decide on your main ideas.
2. Take the time to plan your pointsYou may need to argue for and against an opinion or discuss advantages and disadvantages of a situation. If there is a statement followed by a question, read the question very carefully and note key words. Make sure you know what to do.
If it is an “agree or disagree” topic, you can either support or go against the topic when structuring your essay. Whatever side you choose, make sure you stick to it. Changing the mind halfway or wandering off topic will only waste your valuable time and impact your scores. The only way to stick to your points while writing in PTE exam would be to choose the direction you want your content to sway in and then not digress!
3. Construct your contentFor above topic, firstly you need to you need to discuss whether you agree or disagree with a statement, then you are expected to develop either reasons or examples regarding “Education is a crucial element of the prosperity of any nation” from your point of view.
The content of your essay is crucial, which is scored by determining if all aspects of the topic have been addressed in the response and if provided details, examples and explanations are appropriately supporting the test taker’s point of view.
Be creative, as long as your idea is not off topic! If you do not address the topic, the response will be scored zero on all traits.
Spelling, Grammar, Formal – 6 points
Very simple and self explanatory, you will be awarded :
- 2 points for no spelling error
- 2 points for no obvious grammar mistakes
- 2 points for writing within 200-300 words
These should be easy marks you must capitalize on, especially for writing with in the word limit as there is a word count display during the test.
Sample Write Essay
In a cashless society, people use more credit cards, do you think cashless society is realistic and why? What are the advantages and disadvantages?Cashless society is in the centre of discussion in recent times, substantial arguments have been raised on whether or not we should embrace cashless transaction. Needless to say, cashless movement is inevitable as there has been an upsurge in the adoption of electronic payment from the public. Therefore, both side of the equation associated with such payment method will be discussed to provide detailed insights on the implication in cashless adoption.
To achieve cashless, one must first acknowledge that there is a plethora of benefits associated with cashless transaction. In the modern world where society is moving at increasingly faster pace, convenience is an undisputed selling point in many technological advances. Unlike cash payment, electronic payments not only speed up the action of moving money from one party to another but also eliminate the need to perform difference calculation which is susceptible to human error. As the entire process is computerized in the absence of physical contact, its simplicity therefore allows faster, accurate and most of all, convenient transactional experience.
On the other hand, moving to cashless usually implies surrendering one’s anonymity as each electronic transaction is documented. Generally speaking, most cashless transaction uses credit or debit card issued by financial institutes that profiles individuals spending patterns. The data compiled by these banks could be used for exploitative nature such as targeted advertising or other invasive agendas. Regardless one’s choice between convenience or privacy, its drawback should not be overlooked.
In light of discussion above, it can be concluded that the impact of credit card is prominent, although the way electronic transactions might invade privacy should not be overlooked.
I hope this helps you on your journey to ace this task! Remember, our practice platform provides 100% PTE practice Essay writing questions, and they will actually show up in the exam.
MYPTE has a huge a collection of PTE Essay Writing questions for you to practice.