All about the GED English Writing Test

Part I—Multiple choice

You’ll have 50 multiple choice questions to answer in 75 minutes. That means, on average you’ll have about 1½ minutes per question. But, what you’ll find is 6 or so long readings, with about 8 or 9 questions about each. Like the reading test, because you’ve got a pretty big reading to deal with, it’s better to think of your time in chunks per reading than per question. For 6 readings, you’ll have about 10 minutes per reading, with 15 minutes or so left over. For the writing test, even more than in the reading test, you might not need to read through the whole reading. Most of the questions focus on one or two sentences. Read the question first, and use the longer reading for reference about what it’s talking about, or for organization questions.

The readings on this test should not be difficult to read. They’ll be workplace and community documents (that is, letters, memos, or similar documents, like the reading test workplace documents), “how-to” texts that have instructions about how to do something, or informational texts, which are like articles that talk about a topic. The texts are 12 to 22 sentences long, about 200 to 300 words. The readings are good writing, except that they have some errors in them, on purpose. The multiple choice questions, for the most part, ask you to identify and fix those errors.

The questions on the test fall into four categories.

* About 7 to 8 questions (15%) will be organization questions.

These questions ask you to add, remove, or move sentences. They’re testing whether you know where a sentence or paragraph belongs. You should understand topic, or main idea, sentences; organizing paragraphs into a beginning, middle, and end; and organizing writing into a beginning, middle, and end. And, of course, the writing needs to make sense!

* About 15 questions (30%) will be sentence structure questions.

These questions have to do with how the sentences are written. You’ll need to identify fragments, run-ons, how to join sentences properly, and other elements that make a sentence correct.

* About 15 questions (30%) will be usage questions. These questions are about using words correctly. You’ll need to identify whether the right verb is used with the right subject. You should be familiar with how to use the right verb tense and how to use pronouns, too.

* About 12 to 13 questions (25%) will be mechanics questions.

These questions are about capitalization, punctuation, and spelling. The spelling questions will only be about possessives, contractions, and easily confused words like “your” and “you’re.”

That’s the content of the questions. The questions themselves are in several different formats.

* About 22 to 23 questions (55%) will be correction questions.

A correction question shows you a sentence (or a part of the reading) and asks you to choose which correction should be made to it. Sometimes, no correction is needed, and that will be one of the choices.

* About 17 to 18 questions (35%) will be revision questions.

These questions show a sentence or sentences with an underlined part. To answer the question, choose the best way to change the underlined portion. You’ll always have the choice to leave it the way it is.

* About 10 questions (20%) will be construction shift questions.

These questions will ask you about rewording a sentence in a different way, or moving or deleting sentences, or changing paragraphs.

The multiple choice section of the writing test expects you to have some knowledge of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. It also expects some common-sense knowledge of organization and what “sounds right” in language. You have a lot of language knowledge, and you can supplement that by learning about some common mistakes. You might find that you know the right answer to some questions immediately. For other questions, you’ll have to think it through.

Part II—Essay

45 minutes

On the GED essay, you’ll need to write a short essay, about four or five paragraphs long. The GED essay gives you a prompt that asks you to talk about your beliefs or something from our life. You won’t need to know anything special or obscure. The goal of the GED essay is to learn whether you can write a basic essay and communicate your own ideas, not whether you have any particular special knowledge.

Understanding what the essay readers expect from you is the first and most important step to passing the GED essay. If you understand what the GED essay readers want, you’ll be able to write a solid GED essay.

How Is the GED Essay Scored?

The GED essay is scored on a scale of 1 to 4. You only need to score a 2 to pass, but your GED essay score will affect your whole GED writing score. If you score a 2 on the essay, you’ll have to do much better on the multiple choice questions to pass than if you score a 3 or 4 on the essay. Since it’s easier to improve your score on the essay than on the multiple choice section of the writing test, learning how to write a great GED essay is definitely worthwhile.

The GED essay is scored on the following qualities:

1. Response to Prompt: Did I answer the GED question and stay on topic?
2. Organization: Is my writing organized?
3. Development and Details: Did I give enough good details?
4. Conventions of EAE (Edited American English): Are there language mistakes, like spelling and grammar?

The GED essay is a timed, 45-minute test, so you’ll need a strategy for finishing on schedule. For many students, writing under a time constraint is a lot more difficult. You don’t have a lot of time to think about what you’re going to write and how you’re going to write it. It helps to time your writing when you’re preparing for the GED, so you’ll be comfortable writing a timed essay on the test.

You’re going to need to write an organized, 4 to 6 paragraph GED essay in 45 minutes. Here’s a time plan for the GED essay test:

• Reading the question and brainstorming: 10 minutes
• Organizing your ideas: 5 minutes
• Drafting your essay: 20 minutes
• Reading and editing your essay: 10 minutes