How to improve PTE Writing score: 9 Best Tips

If you are aspiring to study abroad in a reputed university and build a career there, then you might be aware of English language testing exams. 

All the universities abroad require you to give one of these exams and submit a valid test result. Various English language testing exams are accepted by reputed universities. Some of the most popular are PTE, IELTS, TOEFL, and the Duolingo test. 

You just need to give one of these tests. PTE is one of the popular exams among Indian students. Pearson Test of English (PTE) tests your knowledge of English in 3 sections of PTE Academic: The writing and speaking section, the reading section, and the listening section. 

Although PTE is an easy exam, you must work smartly to score well and stand out in the high competition. One of the most important sections is the writing part of the PTE. 

In this blog, I will give you a detailed strategy for how to improve PTE writing score.

How to improve PTE Writing score

Students do different kinds of things and follow various tips and strategies but fail to get succeed. This happens because they just read the tip and start working on that without learning the best way to implement that strategy.

Here you will get the best ways to implement a strategy for the best result. Read the complete blog!

• Know The Format of PTE writing
• Familiarize Yourself with the Scoring Criteria
• Improve your Grammar and Vocabulary
• Practice writing within a short time limit
• Organize your thoughts 
• Develop Effective Paraphrasing Skills
• Practice on various topics
• Practice Regularly with Mock Tests
• Review your essay

Know The Format of PTE writing

The first step in how to improve PTE writing score is to understand the format of the writing section. The writing section in the PTE is merged with the speaking section. 

This is quite unusual as most English exams have two different sections for writing and speaking. Even though the writing section is merged with the speaking section, you have to prepare separately for these sections. 

The writing section in the PTE consists of two main tasks: Summarize the given text and write an essay on the given prompt.

The first task requires you to summarize a text that has been provided. This is comparatively the easier task, you just have to quickly go through the text and identify the main points in the task, and try not to skip any main points. 

You then have to write a summary of the text. This task needs to be completed in 10 minutes.  

The second task, and the harder one, requires you to write an essay. You will be given 20 minutes to write this essay. 

The topics of the essay are always general and related to education, environment, and other general topics. You need to give your opinions in the essay with logical reasons backing them up. 

Familiarize Yourself with the Scoring Criteria

To improve your PTE Writing score, it’s crucial to understand the scoring criteria used by the examiners. So let’s look at the factors considered for marking PTE writing:

• Content: Ensure your response addresses the given task’s questions and provides a relevant and well-developed answer. Stay focused on the main idea and support it with appropriate examples.
• Coherence and Cohesion: Organize your ideas logically and present them in a clear and cohesive manner. Use proper paragraphing, transitional words, and phrases to create a proper flow and coherence between sentences and paragraphs.
• Grammar: Use accurate grammar and a wide range of sentence structure.
• Vocabulary: Use a wide range of vocabulary in PTE writing, as it is also an important factor considered while marking scores in PTE writing.
• Spelling: while writing, don’t make any spelling mistakes, as if you make spelling mistakes, it can cause you score deduction. If you are unaware of the spelling of any word, then use its synonym instead.

Improve your Grammar and Vocabulary

The next step towards how to improve PTE writing score is improvement in grammar and vocabulary. This is the part where most of the students lose marks in the writing section. 

Grammar is the most important part of the writing section, as it changes the meaning of your sentence, and it also gives the examiner an impression of how good the essay is. 

You can refer to some of the grammar for PTE books which are available on Amazon, you can also look at the PTE website to search for their official reference books. 

These books must contain the basic concepts of grammar like active passive voice and tenses. Most students make mistakes in using tens which affects their scores the most. 

Try to improve your grammar by referring to books and solving basic grammar questions. Improving your grammar will not only help you how to improve PTE writing score, but it will also be helpful in all the sections. 

The vocabulary used in the PTE is as important as the grammar. Most students ignore vocabulary and do not prepare for it, but it can make your score very high, especially in the PTE (Pearson Test Of English) writing section. 

Vocabulary refers to the collection of uncommon words that you use in your writing and speaking. It is usually all the hard words that are not often used, but it makes your essay look more aesthetic and professional. 

You can try to learn 10 new words every day till the day of your exam. You should also learn the usage of the new words you are learning. You have to use the words correctly, or the whole meaning of the sentence changes.

Read our other blog to learn how to get 70 in PTE Academic.

Practice writing within a short time limit

There is a high possibility that you will not be able to complete both tasks in the writing section if you do not practice under the time limit. 

The next step in how to improve PTE writing score is thus to practice writing under time constraints. You will be given 10 minutes to complete the task 1. 

Writing a summary is not hard in 10 minutes, but reading and understanding and then writing the main points can be difficult. 

One technique you can adopt in writing the given time is to just quickly go through the text once to get the idea of the plot and the topic of the text and then give a detailed reading, but do not spend more than 3 minutes in this. 

After you have gotten an idea of what the text is about and what are the main points, start writing a summary in such a way that it includes all the important points only. Most students write long summaries, which leads to the deduction of marks.

Writing an essay in 20 minutes in task 2 is an even harder task. To complete the essay in the given time, you should limit the number of points that you are going to cover in the essay. 

Do not pull on a point unnecessarily, write about the point in such a way that it is easy for the examiner to understand what you are trying to say. 

In case you are writing an opinion, simply state it, back it up with a logical one-line argument, and then you make give a short real-life example to validate it. 

Organize your thoughts 

The next step towards how to improve PTE writing score is to organize your thoughts before starting to write the essay. Students do not take time to think about the topic and the essay that they are going to write, they just start writing, which leads to a unorganized essay. 

An organized essay consists of a clearly defined instruction, a body, and a conclusion. Introduce the topic in a few lines, and talk about the points that are needed to be discussed. 

In the body part, discuss in detail all the topics that you stated in the introduction. In concussion, do not just repeat the whole essay, just give a gist of the essay. 

Before writing take some minutes and think about the topics and the points that can be covered when discussing the topic you are given. 

You may end up with a lot more thoughts and points than you can include in the given time. In this case, filter out your points and write about only the important ones. A neatly organized essay always gets more scores. 

Read our other blog to learn about the PTE reading test format.

Develop Effective Paraphrasing Skills

A great paraphrasing skill is essential to score better in PTE writing so you can properly explain the topic without repeating the lines in the question.

Here are some tips that students can follow to develop effective paraphrasing skills;

• Firstly you must understand the actual meaning of the question so that while paraphrasing, you don’t change the meaning of the context.
• Secondly, use synonyms and different sentences to paraphrase the given topic. 
• You can also change the sentence from active to passive or passive to active voice to paraphrase it.
• Practice regularly by paraphrasing the different sentences, and you can ask to review your work from your friends or any language expert. 
• Finally, it is important not to change the meaning of the sentence while paraphrasing so always keep in mind the original meaning of the sentence.

Practice on various topics

Practicing writing an essay on various topics is another important step in how to improve PTE writing scores. 

Look for the official website and search for official practice tests for PTE. By that, you can get a clear idea of what type of texts are given to summarize in the actual exams. You can also look over the internet for a variety of texts to summarize. 

The essay writing part is harder because you can be given any topic and thus you need to be well prepared for all kinds of topics. 

Look for essay-writing questions on health, education, technology, environment, and politics. When you look for questions, try to write a full-length actual essay. 

This will help your mind to train to think creatively about new points and linking points. Practice is the key to improving your PTE writing score. 

Read our other blog to know how the PTE score calculation is done.

Practice Regularly with Mock Tests

Another one of the most important and must-used tips on how to improve PTE writing score is taking mock tests and practicing regularly.

It benefits the most for you to improve if you practice PTE writing on a daily basis. By doing this, you will know where you are making mistakes causing you to score deductions. 

Along with the daily practice of all types of PTE writing questions, don’t forget to take the mock test once or twice every week,

To better understand your PTE writing preparation, you can take our free PTE mock test with an accurate and in-time AI score.

Review your essay

Reviewing your essay is one of the most important steps while you are writing the actual exam. Reviewing your essay may be your one-word answer to how to improve PTE writing score. 

Most students do not keep some time for reviewing the essay. When you are writing the essay in haste, you will make some spelling mistakes and maybe some grammar mistakes. 

You won’t recognize these mistakes at the time of writing, and if now corrected, these mistakes can reduce your scores in the writing section. 

To avoid this, you will have to plan your essay well. Plan every minute of the essay writing. You should have a clear idea of how many minutes are you going to think about the topic and how many minutes are going to the introduction, body, conclusion, and review part. 

The review may take 2 minutes. You just have to look at your essay for spelling and grammar mistakes quickly.

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Conclusion (How to improve PTE Writing score)

The PTE writing section is often the hardest for students due to the time constraint and the unexpected nature of the topics asked. You can follow the above-given steps and strategies to improve your writing score in the PTE. 

You just need to practice more and more and improve your grammar and vocabulary. Reviewing is one technique that many students find helpful in improving their scores. 

You can also give full-length practice tests and then analyze your results. Work on your weaknesses after the analysis. I hope this blog has given you a clear understanding of how to improve PTE writing score.

If you still have any queries, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our experts and keep visiting CourseMentor™ for more interesting and informative content like this. 

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