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I took the GRE and my analytical writing score wasn't what I hoped for. During the exam, I thought my answer was good. Having read about argumentation and practiced writing, I wonder if there is a reputable service that will score essays and give feedback?

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  • Have you visited www.ets.org? I think they have excellent strategy on how to prepare.
    – Tirath
    Commented Sep 9, 2013 at 7:21

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You've got a few options:

  1. See if your school has a GRE preparation course (you may have to pay for this) or other writing tutorials.
  2. As Tirath said, look at ets.org for strategies.
  3. If you're still in undergraduate school and have at least another semester, enroll in a writing class. The practice you get from the class should improve your overall ability.
  4. Look online for test preparation courses. These can be expensive, but sometimes they have "guaranteed results," and you can probably figure out the best ones by looking at reviews.
  5. Advertise on Craigslist (or similar) for a tutor. If you are in a college town, you may find someone willing to tutor you relatively cheaply.
  6. Look online for GRE writing samples, and read as many as you can.
  7. Practice writing every day. The more you practice, the better you'll get (and read as much as you can, too).

Keep in mind that while you always should strive for high scores, your field of study will partially dictate how important the writing score is. If you're going for a history PhD, you'll need a high score, but for a science degree this tends to be less important (for admissions--being able to write is important for any PhD!).

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  • Check on the rules for the GRE. You may be able to only retake the writing portion, or they may "blend" the top scores from each section, so you could take it a 2nd time and only focus on the writing portion (check me on this).
    – sevensevens
    Commented Feb 6, 2015 at 15:42
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Ets offers a service to rate your essays. They charge approximately $10/essay and they rate the essays as in the actual examination. You could check the service by logging in your GRE account.

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How about joining a MooC by UC, Berkely on eDX : "College Writing 2.1x is an introduction to academic writing for English Language Learners, focusing on essay development, grammatical correctness, and self-editing."

Link - https://www.edx.org/course/berkeley/colwri2-1x/college-writing-2-1x-principles/1194 or http://online.berkeley.edu/news/introducing-latest-mooc-college-writing-21x-principles-written-english

Its a 5 week course and requires 5-6Hours/week effort. The course will be taught by Maggie Sokolik. And will be starting from November 8, 2013. So enrol now soon.

And one more, English Composition by Cousera :

English Composition Part 1 - https://www.coursera.org/course/composition#!

And then you can move on to part 2 ;-)

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What I wound up doing is hiring a tutor through WyzAnt. I found someone with experience in this area, and wrote a few essays based on sample prompts from GRE study books. I emailed them to him, he estimated a score for each of them and made comments. We went through a second round of the same. My score did improve the second time I took the GRE.

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