Follow the 4 Cs.

conciseness, cohesion, coherence and composition. Each needs to

be employed properly if you want to score well on your essay.
(1) conciseness. Unlike other languages which prize long and very elaborate sentences,
proper written English is language that says a lot in few words. Students often falsely believe
that the longer a sentence is the more academic it sounds. Writing longer sentences in your
response is problematic for 2 reasons. The first is it heightens the chances of errors related to
coherence. The second is it makes it more difficult for you to control the grammar of the
sentence, leading to silly grammatical mistakes.
So how long should a sentence be? Including cohesive phrases (the second C in our list),
typical sentences are somewhere between 8 and 15 words.
(2) Cohesion refers to words and phrases that help ideas link together. Cohesive phrases
include wordings like
Because of this,
As this shows,
As can clearly be seen from this example,
It is clear that
Thus, the idea that
To illustrate this,
After analyzing both points of view,
To provide a summary,
Without a doubt, this causes
Other transitional adverbs moreover, furthermore, besides, however, nevertheless, yet,
undeniably, on the contrary, in contrast
(3) Coherence is the notion that all ideas you present in your essay should be easily
understood by your reader. As you can probably guess, using the cohesive phrases above
correctly can really help to boost the coherence in your essay as they clarify your ideas.
Coherence is also greatly improved by proper grammar, so make an effort to brush up on this
prior to your examination.
(4) Composition refers to employing a proper essay structure. This means including a thesis
(in the case of an argument essay), at least 2 supporting ideas, real-life examples, proper
discussion of those examples as well as some kind of summary and finally a reasoned
conclusion. To break it down, an argument essay is most likely going to contain 15 sentences
partitioned into 4 paragraphs and follow a pattern like this:


Introduction paragraph
A background sentence giving some background information on the essay topic.
A thesis that presents your point of view on your given topic.
An outline sentence declaring the 2 points you are going to use to support your thesis.
Supporting paragraph 1
A topic sentence illustrating the first point you will be presenting to support your
thesis (this point taken from your outline sentence).
A sentence showing a real-life example of this topic in action.
A discussion sentence that shows how your example links or proves your topic
sentence.
A conclusion sentence that links this entire paragraph back to your thesis.
Supporting paragraph 2
A topic sentence illustrating the second point you will be presenting to support your
thesis (this point taken from your outline sentence).
A sentence showing a real-life example of this topic in action.
A discussion sentence that shows how your example links or proves your topic
sentence.
A conclusion sentence that links this entire paragraph back to your thesis.
Conclusion paragraph
A summary sentence that briefly states the 2 points you discussed in your supporting
paragraphs.
A restatement of your thesis using different words.