Writing - Composing and Crafting Text
Writing - Composing and Crafting Text tests your ability to shape writing for a purpose and audience, not just to produce correct sentences. Expect tasks that require a controlling idea, deliberate organization, developed evidence, coherent paragraphs, and revision choices. Conventions matter, but they are judged alongside clarity, voice, and fit to form.
Establish the rhetorical situation
Name the purpose (inform, explain, argue, narrate, describe, reflect), the audience's knowledge and likely objections, and the required form (essay, letter, speech, report, narrative). Register follows: a speech to peers and a letter to a trustee may share a claim but not the same diction. A thesis or controlling idea should be specific and arguable, not an announcement of topic.
Build paragraphs around a job
A topic sentence names the paragraph's claim. Evidence and commentary follow: introduce the evidence, quote or paraphrase only what is needed, then explain what it shows and why it matters. A closing sentence links the paragraph to the larger argument. Cohesion comes from logical transitions ('however,' 'therefore,' 'for example'), repeated key terms, and pronouns with clear referents-not from filling space with 'also' and 'another.'
Revise before editing
Revision addresses thesis, order, evidence, clarity, and audience fit. Editing addresses sentence boundaries, agreement, punctuation, and spelling. Read aloud to catch comma splices and vague pronouns. In narrative writing, control pacing: scene for turning points, summary for transitions, and concrete detail rather than general adjectives.
Worked example
Weak paragraph: 'Uniforms are good. Many schools have them. Students like them. It saves money.' Reasoning: 'good' is a vague claim; 'many schools' is unquantified; 'students like them' needs evidence; 'it' has no clear referent; 'saves money' is unsupported. A stronger revision would make one arguable claim, qualify it, and specify evidence: 'Uniform policies may reduce clothing costs for families, but only when schools offer affordable options and allow exemptions; a useful district survey would report both average savings and the share of families who saw none.' The revision does not invent a statistic; it states what evidence would be needed.
Traps that cost marks
- Answering a different prompt or ignoring the specified form.
- A thesis so broad that it cannot be supported in the space.
- Dropping quotations without framing or analysis.
- Using transitions that misstate the relationship between ideas.
- Editing for commas before revising the argument.