Unfortunately, there’s no real quick way to learn things like which words go where and when. The best thing I can suggest is to spend as much time as you can reading professional writing, such as newspaper and magazine articles, or non-fiction books (fictional novels sometimes have a “voice” in them that’s not always the proper way to write in an essay). The more you read good writing, the more your own writing will resemble it. You might actually even want to keep away from reading internet forums or comments, as those usually have a lot of slang and word shortcuts you don’t want to use.

Also make sure to sit down and write once a day. Get someone else to look over your writing and tell you what might not sound right. It’s always difficult to tell what doesn’t fit in your own writing, so having someone else point things out will help.

Finally, use a dictionary or dictionary.com to look up words you don’t know. If you gloss over words you don’t recognize, you’ll never learn them and be able to use them in your own writing.

Good luck with your test! Let me know how it turns out!

If you’re finding it difficult to think of things to talk about in the middle paragraphs, one good thing is to ask yourself what an argument against your topic might be. So if the question was, “Do you think global warming is effecting us today?” and one of your answers is, “Yes, because the winters are getting longer each year.” What might be an opposing argument? Maybe someone could say, “Well, throughout the last century, winters have been long and short, so how do you know that the long winters lately are a direct result of global warming?” You can use that to strengthen your paragraph by bringing up the opposing argument, then explaining why it’s not a good argument against your point.

If you can’t think of a good reason why the opposing argument is a bad one, then the point you brought up initially isn’t very strong and you might want to think of something else all together.