Liz’s World

The GED essay is scored on five criteria. (1) Did you answer the prompt and stay on topic? (2) Is your essay well organized? (3) Is your writing developed well, with good details and examples? (4) Did you follow the conventions of Edited American English grammar and spelling? and (5) Did you use good word choices to say what you mean?

I’m going to look at each of these GED essay scoring criteria in detail in its own post. The first one is answering the prompt, and staying on topic.

Your most important task on the GED essay is to really answer the question that’s asked. You won’t know what the question is in advance, so you’ll need to think on your feet a little bit. But the questions won’t be too difficult. They’ll ask you about your opinions and experiences, so you won’t need any information except for your own thoughts and memories.

The GED prompt is really the blueprint for your GED essay. It tells you exactly what to write. Make sure that you answer everything that it asks, and you’re a good part of the way to passing.

Here’s an example of a GED essay prompt:

What event from your childhood taught you an important lesson that you use today?

In your essay, tell about the event, and explain how what you learned affects your life today. Use your personal observations, experience, and knowledge to support your essay.

The prompt gives you everything you need to create your GED essay. First, it asks you a main question. What event from your childhood taught you an important lesson that you use today? You’ll need to think about your experiences and figure out one thing that happened to you that taught you something.

The next part of the prompt tells you what to put in your essay. First, tell about the event. That’s easy. You’ll tell the story of what happened. Then, explain how what you learned affects your life today. That has a couple of parts. First, you’ll need to identify what, exactly, you learned. Then, you’ll tell how that changed your life or affects your life. That’s your whole essay.

The last part of the question is important, and it’s something you’ll see in all GED prompts: “Use your personal observations, experience, and knowledge to support your essay.” That means, you need to use details about what you know. For this topic, that’s fairly easy. You need to tell a story from your life, and that will include details of what happened to you. You also need to tell how you use the lesson you learned. Again, you’ll need to tell details from your current life.

Let the prompt guide you about what to write, and you’ll score well on the GED essay.

Next time I’ll talk some about organizing your GED essay.

For more information about the GED test and GED test preparation, visit the GED Academy at http://www.passGED.com.