GRE Essay Writing Tasks: How to Use the 30 Minutes

The GRE's Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA) measures your analytical writing and critical thinking skills, both of which are crucial to success in almost any graduate degree program. The Analytical Writing Assessment gauges your ability to understand complex ideas and rhetorical techniques and to express that understanding in written form. It does not test your knowledge of any specific academic discipline. It is also not an assessment of talent in creative writing, and even the most gifted writer will falter if s/he fails to focus on meeting the criteria required for a high score.

The Analytical Writing Assessment section of the GRE consists of two separately timed tasks:

• 30-minute "Analyze an Issue" task
• 30-minute "Analyze an Argument" task

GRE assessors consider analysis, supporting points, clarity of meaning, variety in sentence structure, vocabulary, and conventions of usage to arrive at their scoring decisions, and successful GRE essays make effective use of all of these devices. The best approach to GRE essay writing is therefore a structured plan that devotes a small block of time to each component of the writing process.

The following outline will be easy to remember with the mnemonic “RITE”, and can be applied to each 30-minute AWA writing task: