How to Ace the GED Language Arts Essay

how do you ace the GED Language Arts essay also known as the extended response portion hi I&#39;m Parker from test prep champions comm I worked with GED test takers for several years now and I make youtube videos to help them pass the test and in this video I want to really go through the language arts extended response section for those who don&#39;t really have a clue where to start or those who have never been good writers before but now need to ace the GED language arts section so what I&#39;m going to give you in this video is a step by step approach that you can use to maximize your score on the essay we&#39;re gonna try to help you minimize the pain of writing here and I&#39;m gonna go over things like how long you&#39;ll have to write how many words and how long your essays should be as well as what the essays should be about I&#39;m also going to give you a basic formula that you can use to easily ace the essay section and we&#39;re also gonna look at some specific examples together and I&#39;m gonna throw out many other great tips and tricks and strategies along the way so let&#39;s get started so as we go through the video please note that different people call the section different thing some call it the language arts extended response some people call it the extended response essay and some people just call it the GED essay and throughout the video I&#39;m probably gonna call it by each of these different names so just be aware that I&#39;m talking about the same thing here the GED essay is a major source of stress for many test takers but how much does it really impact your score here&#39;s a valuable insight we get from a GED test teacher in Colorado with the reddit username mr. cohen&#39;s class and this is right off of Reddit he says I will tell you the overwhelming majority of my students who passed the test get 0 points on the essay and he tells most students don&#39;t worry about the essay making the temp definitely and try your best but it&#39;s really the multiple choice questions that are gonna make the difference in you can find them on reddit mr. cohen&#39;s class or on YouTube the youtube user name is David Cole and he&#39;s got an amazing channel with some really brilliant content I hope you pass I highly recommend subscribing to David Cohen&#39;s YouTube channel I&#39;ll link to the down below and you can also search from on YouTube the key point here is not to stress too much about the essay because if you completely bomb it as well that you&#39;ve done really well on the multiple-choice portion there&#39;s still a really good chance that you can pass but that being said you know I really want you to prepare anyway for this because you don&#39;t want to waste your time and you don&#39;t want to waste your money you really want to go in there and be aggressive and go after all the points you can and not leave points on the table for the essay so I&#39;m gonna give you a here and the rest of the video and if you use it you should be in good shape for the essay here but like I said don&#39;t stress it too much it is just a small portion of your score now let&#39;s look at an overview of the extended response section you&#39;re gonna have 45 minutes in total write your essay and don&#39;t worry because I&#39;m going to show you how to budget your time in just a minute a good essay should have between four to seven paragraphs and three to seven sentences per paragraph 70 to 80 words per paragraph is a good amount to shoot for and this will come out to a total of 300 to 500 words now some of you might be panicking a little bit but I just want to remind you please don&#39;t worry absolutely don&#39;t worry we&#39;re gonna go over what all of this means paragraph sentences word counts it&#39;s nothing to stress about I&#39;m going to go over this and I&#39;m going to give you that approach I just wanted to introduce the extended response overview here to write your essay I recommend the following four phase approach first you&#39;re gonna read the two passages that you&#39;re presented with and then you&#39;re gonna come up with a plan and I&#39;m going to give you some things to to look for as you&#39;re reading so you can start your plan while you&#39;re reading and really the planning step is probably the most important step here because you&#39;ve got a good plan which I&#39;m going to show you how to make then your writing should just flow naturally and easily from the plan so the third phase is the actual writing and that&#39;s going to take up most of your time and whatever time you have left is going to be editing your essay for things like clarity and grammar and making sure that your sentences have a logical flow to them having a strategy to budget your time while you&#39;re writing your essay is very very important as I said earlier you&#39;ll have 45 minutes in total to write the essay but how do you divide your time up well that&#39;s what I&#39;m going to show you next I&#39;m going to give you a couple different strategies and you can pick whichever one you think is gonna work best for you method for budgeting your time is what I call the balanced plan and it&#39;s the most balanced plan so you&#39;ll budget ten minutes to read and plan twenty-five minutes to write and then ten minutes to check and edit your work now you can also do a reading focus plan which gives you a little bit less time to check and edit but more time for reading and planning so you would budget fifteen minutes to read and plan twenty-five minutes to write and then five to check and edit now if you want to maximize the amount of time to write then I&#39;d recommend go with the freighting focus plan which has you budgeting ten minutes to read and plan 30 minutes to write and then five to check and edit now again the general theme here is do not worry don&#39;t worry you don&#39;t have to make a decision and commit to it a hundred percent I just want you to understand that these are general strategies and frameworks that you can use you don&#39;t have to follow one of these plans exactly the team I just want you to have some kind of strategy so that when you&#39;re sitting there trying to write your essay in the timers clicking down you don&#39;t panic next let&#39;s move on and let&#39;s talk about the prompt that you&#39;re going to be asked to write about for your essay well it&#39;s impossible to know exactly what the topic is going to be we do know that you&#39;re going to be given two different passages written by two different authors each author is going to be trying to make an argument and you&#39;re going to have to identify the arguments of both authors and identify who is making the stronger argument in your essay let me show you an example and this comes from an extended response prompt and the prompt says analyze the arguments presented in the press release and the letter to the editor and your response develop an argument in which you explain how one position is better supported than the other incorporate relevant and specific evidence from both sources to support your argument this prompt is an example of a typical prompt that you&#39;re going to get on the GED test okay this segment is very important here so when it comes time to trying to decide which author is making the stronger argument there are several factors to consider here so strong arguments include specific examples rather than vague examples and they also include facts data statistics and surveys to back up their claim they may also quote or reference experts and authority figures who have an opinion on the topic strong arguments also will include recent dates so if so a survey from let&#39;s say a couple years ago is probably going to be more credible than something that happened maybe 50 years ago generally speaking of course okay and so also results from research studies and experiments are also a big signs that someone is making a compelling incredible argument what are some signs of a weaker argument well first of all when someone uses an opinion or a lot of opinions but not facts that&#39;s usually a sign of a weaker argument now this can vary if it&#39;s an expert&#39;s opinion like for example if it&#39;s a health topic and a doctoral sharing their opinion or a different authorities in the opinion may be very credible but if it&#39;s just the author of the piece sharing their opinion it&#39;s probably not credible all right also for unnamed experts whenever someone is just saying well experts said this or experts said that but they&#39;re not naming a specific expert or they&#39;re not including whether they got the information that&#39;s generally a sign of a weak argument also any unnamed or unreliable sources whenever somebody makes a claim in a piece but they don&#39;t state evidence or they don&#39;t state their data saying why they believe that well that&#39;s generally a sign of a weak argument also outdated sources very older sources generally make the argument less credible and lastly bandwagon in bandwagon you can think of this as people just jumping on the bandwagon where if an author says well everybody&#39;s doing this or everybody knows that well those words are very very strong and it&#39;s really true in life that everybody believes something or everybody feels something so that&#39;s a sign of a weak argument let&#39;s look at an example of this and here&#39;s the prompt the prompt says to analyze the arguments presented in the two speeches in your response develop an argument in which you explain how one position is better supported than the other incorporate relevant and specific evidence from both sources to support your argument and we&#39;re going to look at some snippets here from both of the speeches and we&#39;ll look at particularly where one are the author&#39;s making weak arguments and one of them making strong arguments so here I&#39;ve given you a snippet from one that from the first passage here and if you want to you can pause the video and you can read this or you can put the link that I&#39;ve included here and your search engine I&#39;ll also put this link down below but that&#39;s not really that important for you to read the whole thing here I just want to highlight a couple things here and then we&#39;re also going to look at the second passage so the first thing that you need to know here though is that the two authors are arguing over the proper age for a child to get a cellphone app and so I&#39;ve highlighted here Deborah&#39;s position and you always want to try to find the author&#39;s position right away whenever or trying to read through your essay and plan out what you&#39;re gonna write so here her position is it depends on the child of course but in general age ten is just about right so she thinks that or she&#39;s trying to argue that ten is about the right age to give a child a cellphone so what kind of evidence does she bring to the table here to support that argument well we see here that she is citing from a survey done by the National Consumer League and it was done in 2012 which makes it a fairly recent survey and we also see that she is quoting from an authority figure who is Carolyn Noor and she uses this quote in her argument here in Kerala Knorr basically saying that we want our kids to be independent and so giving them a cellphone is a good way to help them with that so now we&#39;re gonna look at the other essay here and in this essay the author is arguing that the best age to get a cellphone is 16 so her purpose can be identified here or her position I should say where she says I believe that the best age for a cellphone is 16 the point at which we consider kids grown-up enough to learn to drive and even then parents must set firm limits on phone use so right off the bat we see that her position is 16 versus the other author of your thought that 10 was the best Asia around 10 anyway and so what I want you to note here is a couple things so first of all she uses the words I believe so I believe basically tells us that she&#39;s going to be giving an opinion here she also says that even then parents must set firm movements on phone use and now maybe you agree with that maybe you disagree with that but the point I want to make here is that she&#39;s not making any kind of facts or evidence for why parents must set firm limits on phone use she&#39;s basically just giving her opinion here she&#39;s making a claim without evidence so she goes on to say why are twins with phones less safe for one thing parents may be evolved into a false sense of security if their kids have phones maybe they may become careless about knowing where the child is and who he is with thinking oh I can always reach him on his phone and now the point again here that I want to make is that she might be raising some good points here so maybe you do agree with her on a personal level but since she&#39;s missing facts and evidence data she&#39;s missing results from surveys there are no Authority quotes or quotes from experts here that we can see so unfortunately you know even if you agree with the points that she&#39;s making would want to consider this to be the weaker SI base just off of the first little snippets that I&#39;m showing you here and again the reason is because while she may be making some interesting points here some that you might agree with at the end of the day she&#39;s not giving us facts or statistics or really any kind of evidence for why these claims make sixteen the better age so we would have to consider this the weaker argument so now I&#39;m going to give you a formula or a format that you can follow when you break your essay and this isn&#39;t something that I&#39;ve made up but this is a great structure that will really help you with your writing process and it&#39;s called the five paragraph essay basically how it works is you&#39;ll start off with an introduction paragraph then you&#39;ll have three body paragraphs that are gonna make up the bulk of your essay then you&#39;ll end with a brief conclusion now let&#39;s go more in-depth here on how exactly to do a five paragraph essay so first of all what our paragraphs well a paragraph is just a set of sentences that are all connected to a central idea and when you write a five paragraph essay this is a great formula to used for your introduction here so you&#39;ll start off with the topic sentence which is just one sentence then you&#39;ll state author 8th position and then the other author&#39;s position and then lastly you&#39;ll put one sentence that is your own claim about which position is best supported by the evidence in the text and now this is not the only way to do it there are other ways that you can do it there are other totally valid ways to do it but this is the way that I recommend doing it this is a good approach to maximize your points and it&#39;s just kind of like a formula that you can use here and so let me give you an example here and this comes straight out of those cell phone passages so your topic sentence is just kind of a sentence that just introduces the topic at hand it doesn&#39;t necessarily say anything about which author&#39;s position you thought was stronger it&#39;s just introducing the topic so I said the best age to allow your children to have a cell phone is an important issue nothing fancy just gets the job done you&#39;re right said that&#39;s would be my topic sentence and then the next sentence that I wrote is that Debra Pendergast argues that about 10 is the best age so I&#39;m just stating in the first author&#39;s position here then I state the second after new position and I say on the other hand linda Sydnor argues that 16 is the best age and then lastly I end the introductory paragraph with a claim about which position I believe is best supported so I say while both authors make good points Pendergast makes the strongest argument a write-in so again you know this is just an example I made up off the top my head just drive two points from here this isn&#39;t necessarily the best way to possibly write an essay about this you know I wasn&#39;t trying to win any awards with my essay writing skills here I just wanted to give you an example of a totally valid way to do it where it&#39;s just a formulaic approach just come up with a topic sentence that&#39;s something relevant to the topic being discussed just show that you know what the topic is introduce both authors positions and make the claim about which position you think is best supported and then keep moving just keep it simple so then next what you want to do here is for your body paragraphs remember you&#39;re gonna have three different body paragraphs okay and you&#39;re gonna start off by picking out three reasons why one author&#39;s position is better so during your planning I want you to think about you know three at least three different reasons why the author&#39;s position is better than the others okay they could also be reasons why an author&#39;s position is weaker all right and so each body paragraph is going to start off with a topic sentence and then the topic sentence is going to basically be why you think one of those three reasons makes the gives better evidence for the author&#39;s position okay and the rest of the paragraph is then gonna support that topic sentence so I know that this kind of sounds a little bit confusing but let me show you an example here so let&#39;s say that again here was my introductory paragraph and here&#39;s my example for my introduction then here this is an example of how I could write a body paragraph so my topic sentence would be one reason why around ten is the optimal age is because there&#39;s evidence from surveys that supports the claim and so that would be my topic I&#39;m just picking one reason why I think that authors position is better here it&#39;s because there&#39;s evidence from a survey that supports the claim and then I&#39;m just using the rest of the paragraph to explain what I mean by that using the evidence from the text so I go on to say a 2012 survey done by the National Consumers League tells us that most children from 8 to 12 years old already own cell phones this survey provides evidence that the majority of children around age 10 can have phones since the survey was done in 2012 we know that the evidence is fairly recent while Sydnor makes interesting points she does not include survey results or other data to support our arguments therefore her essay is less credible all right and so again you know this isn&#39;t necessarily the the ultimate or the best way to write this essay by any means I just put this down as an example but this is just a totally valid way of doing it where I&#39;m just picking out one reason why I think that this author is right and so then I just basically explain that in the paragraph and the reason I picked was because she uses evidence from a survey and I just explained why that makes her case stronger and why the other person&#39;s argument was weaker because her essay was less credible and didn&#39;t have these results in it from surveys all right so your conclusion is really then that the simplest part it&#39;s basically you&#39;re just restating the main ideas and this should be very similar to your introduction it shouldn&#39;t take you that long so basically you can always just start by saying any conclusion and so in my example here I say a conclusion about ten years old is the right age for children to get cellphones this argument is supported by fact surveys and expert testimonies in contrast the argument that sixteen years old is weaker is a weaker argument because it is based on opinions in unreliable sources based on the evidence we should thus give our children cell phones around age 10 okay and so I didn&#39;t show you two examples of two other paragraphs for the body so just note that I only showed you one example of a body paragraph because I don&#39;t want you to get bored to death because this isn&#39;t the most exciting topics to know that you would want to do two more and again as I&#39;ve said it ten times here I&#39;ll probably say at another ten times right this isn&#39;t necessarily like the perfect way to do this essay I just wanted to show you one example of how you can use this five paragraph essay approach to write your essays and it&#39;s totally valid approach to doing it it&#39;s simple it&#39;s to the point and really you know you&#39;re gonna be graded on it is there a structure is there an organization is there a logic to your argument and just by following this point these points here are about how to write the five paragraph essay you know you just organize your thoughts here really it really goes back to that planning you want to do that planning so that you identify strong and weak points so that when you go to write you already have a good idea of who is making the strongest argument okay and then from there you&#39;re just going to organize this so that you pick out some reasons why you think that that person&#39;s argument is strongest and that&#39;s going to be in your body and then you know put that intro in that conclusion and then you&#39;re done that&#39;s that&#39;s really yes so after you finish your essay let&#39;s say you&#39;ve got maybe five or ten minutes left to check your work you want to look for grammar mistakes as you&#39;re editing you want to look for places where you&#39;re using periods or commas or question marks in apostrophes things like that you want to make sure that you&#39;re using these correctly you want to look for places where you can take sentences that are very long or very wordy and see if you can break a sentence into two shorter sentences right so take a long sentence and condense it into two shorter sentences if you&#39;re using colons or semicolons make sure that you&#39;re using those correctly this is all stuff that I don&#39;t want to get into in this video here right because this video is about a step-by-step approach and the mechanics of writing the essay so there&#39;s a lot of other things about writing like transitional phrases you&#39;re gonna have to know how to use those right but really if you just take everything in this video and you apply it there&#39;s no reason why you&#39;re not going to get an excellent score so the key is to practice practice practice make sure you understand this stuff and then you&#39;ll want to look over some grammar rules to make sure that you understand those and that stuff&#39;s very important so I&#39;m gonna have future videos coming out on this stuff but this is the video for today I really hope this was helpful if you find anything that was unclear that you want me to elaborate on please let me know down below please let me know in the comments what you think of this please give me a thumbs up and please subscribe to my channel for more content like this I really appreciate your time and best of luck on your test this is Parker from test prep champions calm

how do you ace the GED Language Arts essay also known as the extended response portion hi I&amp;#39;m Parker from test prep champions comm I worked with GED test takers for several years now and I make youtube videos to help them pass the test and in this video I want to really go through the language arts extended response section for those who don&amp;#39;t really have a clue where to start or those who have never been good writers before but now need to ace the GED language arts section so what I&amp;#39;m going to give you in this video is a step by step approach that you can use to maximize your score on the essay we&amp;#39;re gonna try to help you minimize the pain of writing here and I&amp;#39;m gonna go over things like how long you&amp;#39;ll have to write how many words and how long your essays should be as well as what the essays should be about I&amp;#39;m also going to give you a basic formula that you can use to easily ace the essay section and we&amp;#39;re also gonna look at some specific examples together and I&amp;#39;m gonna throw out many other great tips and tricks and strategies along the way so let&amp;#39;s get started so as we go through the video please note that different people call the section different thing some call it the language arts extended response some people call it the extended response essay and some people just call it the GED essay and throughout the video I&amp;#39;m probably gonna call it by each of these different names so just be aware that I&amp;#39;m talking about the same thing here the GED essay is a major source of stress for many test takers but how much does it really impact your score here&amp;#39;s a valuable insight we get from a GED test teacher in Colorado with the reddit username mr. cohen&amp;#39;s class and this is right off of Reddit he says I will tell you the overwhelming majority of my students who passed the test get 0 points on the essay and he tells most students don&amp;#39;t worry about the essay making the temp definitely and try your best but it&amp;#39;s really the multiple choice questions that are gonna make the difference in you can find them on reddit mr. cohen&amp;#39;s class or on YouTube the youtube user name is David Cole and he&amp;#39;s got an amazing channel with some really brilliant content I hope you pass I highly recommend subscribing to David Cohen&amp;#39;s YouTube channel I&amp;#39;ll link to the down below and you can also search from on YouTube the key point here is not to stress too much about the essay because if you completely bomb it as well that you&amp;#39;ve done really well on the multiple-choice portion there&amp;#39;s still a really good chance that you can pass but that being said you know I really want you to prepare anyway for this because you don&amp;#39;t want to waste your time and you don&amp;#39;t want to waste your money you really want to go in there and be aggressive and go after all the points you can and not leave points on the table for the essay so I&amp;#39;m gonna give you a here and the rest of the video and if you use it you should be in good shape for the essay here but like I said don&amp;#39;t stress it too much it is just a small portion of your score now let&amp;#39;s look at an overview of the extended response section you&amp;#39;re gonna have 45 minutes in total write your essay and don&amp;#39;t worry because I&amp;#39;m going to show you how to budget your time in just a minute a good essay should have between four to seven paragraphs and three to seven sentences per paragraph 70 to 80 words per paragraph is a good amount to shoot for and this will come out to a total of 300 to 500 words now some of you might be panicking a little bit but I just want to remind you please don&amp;#39;t worry absolutely don&amp;#39;t worry we&amp;#39;re gonna go over what all of this means paragraph sentences word counts it&amp;#39;s nothing to stress about I&amp;#39;m going to go over this and I&amp;#39;m going to give you that approach I just wanted to introduce the extended response overview here to write your essay I recommend the following four phase approach first you&amp;#39;re gonna read the two passages that you&amp;#39;re presented with and then you&amp;#39;re gonna come up with a plan and I&amp;#39;m going to give you some things to to look for as you&amp;#39;re reading so you can start your plan while you&amp;#39;re reading and really the planning step is probably the most important step here because you&amp;#39;ve got a good plan which I&amp;#39;m going to show you how to make then your writing should just flow naturally and easily from the plan so the third phase is the actual writing and that&amp;#39;s going to take up most of your time and whatever time you have left is going to be editing your essay for things like clarity and grammar and making sure that your sentences have a logical flow to them having a strategy to budget your time while you&amp;#39;re writing your essay is very very important as I said earlier you&amp;#39;ll have 45 minutes in total to write the essay but how do you divide your time up well that&amp;#39;s what I&amp;#39;m going to show you next I&amp;#39;m going to give you a couple different strategies and you can pick whichever one you think is gonna work best for you method for budgeting your time is what I call the balanced plan and it&amp;#39;s the most balanced plan so you&amp;#39;ll budget ten minutes to read and plan twenty-five minutes to write and then ten minutes to check and edit your work now you can also do a reading focus plan which gives you a little bit less time to check and edit but more time for reading and planning so you would budget fifteen minutes to read and plan twenty-five minutes to write and then five to check and edit now if you want to maximize the amount of time to write then I&amp;#39;d recommend go with the freighting focus plan which has you budgeting ten minutes to read and plan 30 minutes to write and then five to check and edit now again the general theme here is do not worry don&amp;#39;t worry you don&amp;#39;t have to make a decision and commit to it a hundred percent I just want you to understand that these are general strategies and frameworks that you can use you don&amp;#39;t have to follow one of these plans exactly the team I just want you to have some kind of strategy so that when you&amp;#39;re sitting there trying to write your essay in the timers clicking down you don&amp;#39;t panic next let&amp;#39;s move on and let&amp;#39;s talk about the prompt that you&amp;#39;re going to be asked to write about for your essay well it&amp;#39;s impossible to know exactly what the topic is going to be we do know that you&amp;#39;re going to be given two different passages written by two different authors each author is going to be trying to make an argument and you&amp;#39;re going to have to identify the arguments of both authors and identify who is making the stronger argument in your essay let me show you an example and this comes from an extended response prompt and the prompt says analyze the arguments presented in the press release and the letter to the editor and your response develop an argument in which you explain how one position is better supported than the other incorporate relevant and specific evidence from both sources to support your argument this prompt is an example of a typical prompt that you&amp;#39;re going to get on the GED test okay this segment is very important here so when it comes time to trying to decide which author is making the stronger argument there are several factors to consider here so strong arguments include specific examples rather than vague examples and they also include facts data statistics and surveys to back up their claim they may also quote or reference experts and authority figures who have an opinion on the topic strong arguments also will include recent dates so if so a survey from let&amp;#39;s say a couple years ago is probably going to be more credible than something that happened maybe 50 years ago generally speaking of course okay and so also results from research studies and experiments are also a big signs that someone is making a compelling incredible argument what are some signs of a weaker argument well first of all when someone uses an opinion or a lot of opinions but not facts that&amp;#39;s usually a sign of a weaker argument now this can vary if it&amp;#39;s an expert&amp;#39;s opinion like for example if it&amp;#39;s a health topic and a doctoral sharing their opinion or a different authorities in the opinion may be very credible but if it&amp;#39;s just the author of the piece sharing their opinion it&amp;#39;s probably not credible all right also for unnamed experts whenever someone is just saying well experts said this or experts said that but they&amp;#39;re not naming a specific expert or they&amp;#39;re not including whether they got the information that&amp;#39;s generally a sign of a weak argument also any unnamed or unreliable sources whenever somebody makes a claim in a piece but they don&amp;#39;t state evidence or they don&amp;#39;t state their data saying why they believe that well that&amp;#39;s generally a sign of a weak argument also outdated sources very older sources generally make the argument less credible and lastly bandwagon in bandwagon you can think of this as people just jumping on the bandwagon where if an author says well everybody&amp;#39;s doing this or everybody knows that well those words are very very strong and it&amp;#39;s really true in life that everybody believes something or everybody feels something so that&amp;#39;s a sign of a weak argument let&amp;#39;s look at an example of this and here&amp;#39;s the prompt the prompt says to analyze the arguments presented in the two speeches in your response develop an argument in which you explain how one position is better supported than the other incorporate relevant and specific evidence from both sources to support your argument and we&amp;#39;re going to look at some snippets here from both of the speeches and we&amp;#39;ll look at particularly where one are the author&amp;#39;s making weak arguments and one of them making strong arguments so here I&amp;#39;ve given you a snippet from one that from the first passage here and if you want to you can pause the video and you can read this or you can put the link that I&amp;#39;ve included here and your search engine I&amp;#39;ll also put this link down below but that&amp;#39;s not really that important for you to read the whole thing here I just want to highlight a couple things here and then we&amp;#39;re also going to look at the second passage so the first thing that you need to know here though is that the two authors are arguing over the proper age for a child to get a cellphone app and so I&amp;#39;ve highlighted here Deborah&amp;#39;s position and you always want to try to find the author&amp;#39;s position right away whenever or trying to read through your essay and plan out what you&amp;#39;re gonna write so here her position is it depends on the child of course but in general age ten is just about right so she thinks that or she&amp;#39;s trying to argue that ten is about the right age to give a child a cellphone so what kind of evidence does she bring to the table here to support that argument well we see here that she is citing from a survey done by the National Consumer League and it was done in 2012 which makes it a fairly recent survey and we also see that she is quoting from an authority figure who is Carolyn Noor and she uses this quote in her argument here in Kerala Knorr basically saying that we want our kids to be independent and so giving them a cellphone is a good way to help them with that so now we&amp;#39;re gonna look at the other essay here and in this essay the author is arguing that the best age to get a cellphone is 16 so her purpose can be identified here or her position I should say where she says I believe that the best age for a cellphone is 16 the point at which we consider kids grown-up enough to learn to drive and even then parents must set firm limits on phone use so right off the bat we see that her position is 16 versus the other author of your thought that 10 was the best Asia around 10 anyway and so what I want you to note here is a couple things so first of all she uses the words I believe so I believe basically tells us that she&amp;#39;s going to be giving an opinion here she also says that even then parents must set firm movements on phone use and now maybe you agree with that maybe you disagree with that but the point I want to make here is that she&amp;#39;s not making any kind of facts or evidence for why parents must set firm limits on phone use she&amp;#39;s basically just giving her opinion here she&amp;#39;s making a claim without evidence so she goes on to say why are twins with phones less safe for one thing parents may be evolved into a false sense of security if their kids have phones maybe they may become careless about knowing where the child is and who he is with thinking oh I can always reach him on his phone and now the point again here that I want to make is that she might be raising some good points here so maybe you do agree with her on a personal level but since she&amp;#39;s missing facts and evidence data she&amp;#39;s missing results from surveys there are no Authority quotes or quotes from experts here that we can see so unfortunately you know even if you agree with the points that she&amp;#39;s making would want to consider this to be the weaker SI base just off of the first little snippets that I&amp;#39;m showing you here and again the reason is because while she may be making some interesting points here some that you might agree with at the end of the day she&amp;#39;s not giving us facts or statistics or really any kind of evidence for why these claims make sixteen the better age so we would have to consider this the weaker argument so now I&amp;#39;m going to give you a formula or a format that you can follow when you break your essay and this isn&amp;#39;t something that I&amp;#39;ve made up but this is a great structure that will really help you with your writing process and it&amp;#39;s called the five paragraph essay basically how it works is you&amp;#39;ll start off with an introduction paragraph then you&amp;#39;ll have three body paragraphs that are gonna make up the bulk of your essay then you&amp;#39;ll end with a brief conclusion now let&amp;#39;s go more in-depth here on how exactly to do a five paragraph essay so first of all what our paragraphs well a paragraph is just a set of sentences that are all connected to a central idea and when you write a five paragraph essay this is a great formula to used for your introduction here so you&amp;#39;ll start off with the topic sentence which is just one sentence then you&amp;#39;ll state author 8th position and then the other author&amp;#39;s position and then lastly you&amp;#39;ll put one sentence that is your own claim about which position is best supported by the evidence in the text and now this is not the only way to do it there are other ways that you can do it there are other totally valid ways to do it but this is the way that I recommend doing it this is a good approach to maximize your points and it&amp;#39;s just kind of like a formula that you can use here and so let me give you an example here and this comes straight out of those cell phone passages so your topic sentence is just kind of a sentence that just introduces the topic at hand it doesn&amp;#39;t necessarily say anything about which author&amp;#39;s position you thought was stronger it&amp;#39;s just introducing the topic so I said the best age to allow your children to have a cell phone is an important issue nothing fancy just gets the job done you&amp;#39;re right said that&amp;#39;s would be my topic sentence and then the next sentence that I wrote is that Debra Pendergast argues that about 10 is the best age so I&amp;#39;m just stating in the first author&amp;#39;s position here then I state the second after new position and I say on the other hand linda Sydnor argues that 16 is the best age and then lastly I end the introductory paragraph with a claim about which position I believe is best supported so I say while both authors make good points Pendergast makes the strongest argument a write-in so again you know this is just an example I made up off the top my head just drive two points from here this isn&amp;#39;t necessarily the best way to possibly write an essay about this you know I wasn&amp;#39;t trying to win any awards with my essay writing skills here I just wanted to give you an example of a totally valid way to do it where it&amp;#39;s just a formulaic approach just come up with a topic sentence that&amp;#39;s something relevant to the topic being discussed just show that you know what the topic is introduce both authors positions and make the claim about which position you think is best supported and then keep moving just keep it simple so then next what you want to do here is for your body paragraphs remember you&amp;#39;re gonna have three different body paragraphs okay and you&amp;#39;re gonna start off by picking out three reasons why one author&amp;#39;s position is better so during your planning I want you to think about you know three at least three different reasons why the author&amp;#39;s position is better than the others okay they could also be reasons why an author&amp;#39;s position is weaker all right and so each body paragraph is going to start off with a topic sentence and then the topic sentence is going to basically be why you think one of those three reasons makes the gives better evidence for the author&amp;#39;s position okay and the rest of the paragraph is then gonna support that topic sentence so I know that this kind of sounds a little bit confusing but let me show you an example here so let&amp;#39;s say that again here was my introductory paragraph and here&amp;#39;s my example for my introduction then here this is an example of how I could write a body paragraph so my topic sentence would be one reason why around ten is the optimal age is because there&amp;#39;s evidence from surveys that supports the claim and so that would be my topic I&amp;#39;m just picking one reason why I think that authors position is better here it&amp;#39;s because there&amp;#39;s evidence from a survey that supports the claim and then I&amp;#39;m just using the rest of the paragraph to explain what I mean by that using the evidence from the text so I go on to say a 2012 survey done by the National Consumers League tells us that most children from 8 to 12 years old already own cell phones this survey provides evidence that the majority of children around age 10 can have phones since the survey was done in 2012 we know that the evidence is fairly recent while Sydnor makes interesting points she does not include survey results or other data to support our arguments therefore her essay is less credible all right and so again you know this isn&amp;#39;t necessarily the the ultimate or the best way to write this essay by any means I just put this down as an example but this is just a totally valid way of doing it where I&amp;#39;m just picking out one reason why I think that this author is right and so then I just basically explain that in the paragraph and the reason I picked was because she uses evidence from a survey and I just explained why that makes her case stronger and why the other person&amp;#39;s argument was weaker because her essay was less credible and didn&amp;#39;t have these results in it from surveys all right so your conclusion is really then that the simplest part it&amp;#39;s basically you&amp;#39;re just restating the main ideas and this should be very similar to your introduction it shouldn&amp;#39;t take you that long so basically you can always just start by saying any conclusion and so in my example here I say a conclusion about ten years old is the right age for children to get cellphones this argument is supported by fact surveys and expert testimonies in contrast the argument that sixteen years old is weaker is a weaker argument because it is based on opinions in unreliable sources based on the evidence we should thus give our children cell phones around age 10 okay and so I didn&amp;#39;t show you two examples of two other paragraphs for the body so just note that I only showed you one example of a body paragraph because I don&amp;#39;t want you to get bored to death because this isn&amp;#39;t the most exciting topics to know that you would want to do two more and again as I&amp;#39;ve said it ten times here I&amp;#39;ll probably say at another ten times right this isn&amp;#39;t necessarily like the perfect way to do this essay I just wanted to show you one example of how you can use this five paragraph essay approach to write your essays and it&amp;#39;s totally valid approach to doing it it&amp;#39;s simple it&amp;#39;s to the point and really you know you&amp;#39;re gonna be graded on it is there a structure is there an organization is there a logic to your argument and just by following this point these points here are about how to write the five paragraph essay you know you just organize your thoughts here really it really goes back to that planning you want to do that planning so that you identify strong and weak points so that when you go to write you already have a good idea of who is making the strongest argument okay and then from there you&amp;#39;re just going to organize this so that you pick out some reasons why you think that that person&amp;#39;s argument is strongest and that&amp;#39;s going to be in your body and then you know put that intro in that conclusion and then you&amp;#39;re done that&amp;#39;s that&amp;#39;s really yes so after you finish your essay let&amp;#39;s say you&amp;#39;ve got maybe five or ten minutes left to check your work you want to look for grammar mistakes as you&amp;#39;re editing you want to look for places where you&amp;#39;re using periods or commas or question marks in apostrophes things like that you want to make sure that you&amp;#39;re using these correctly you want to look for places where you can take sentences that are very long or very wordy and see if you can break a sentence into two shorter sentences right so take a long sentence and condense it into two shorter sentences if you&amp;#39;re using colons or semicolons make sure that you&amp;#39;re using those correctly this is all stuff that I don&amp;#39;t want to get into in this video here right because this video is about a step-by-step approach and the mechanics of writing the essay so there&amp;#39;s a lot of other things about writing like transitional phrases you&amp;#39;re gonna have to know how to use those right but really if you just take everything in this video and you apply it there&amp;#39;s no reason why you&amp;#39;re not going to get an excellent score so the key is to practice practice practice make sure you understand this stuff and then you&amp;#39;ll want to look over some grammar rules to make sure that you understand those and that stuff&amp;#39;s very important so I&amp;#39;m gonna have future videos coming out on this stuff but this is the video for today I really hope this was helpful if you find anything that was unclear that you want me to elaborate on please let me know down below please let me know in the comments what you think of this please give me a thumbs up and please subscribe to my channel for more content like this I really appreciate your time and best of luck on your test this is Parker from test prep champions calm

Transcript for:How to Ace the GED Language Arts Essay

Transcript for:
How to Ace the GED Language Arts Essay