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Our guide GRE AWA Guide - All you Need to Know to Score 6 on AWA provides the students with the all the necessary information, step-by-step, to score the highest score in the two essays, issue and argument, they have during the GRE. However, an important question arises more often than not: How many words should my essay contain in it ??

In the same guide, we provide a definitive answer backed up, also, by the most relevant websites and platforms for the GRE on the internet. A good essay evaluated 5.0 or 6.0 on the GRE evaluation scale must contain around 500 words. In this fine article How Long Should Your GRE Essay Be? [A Data Driven Answer] the author, quote:



sustains that the research shows this. So far, so good.

Now, my goal is not to criticize or dismantle what the expert or tutors say in that article. This is far away from my genuine intention. Crunchprep does an outstanding job of preparing students for the GRE. Hands down. Nonetheless, my goal is to understand if that is true, essentially. And if the data and researches show us this. In other words, is this the reality, OR is there something more to investigate? Do we have some meta-analysis that demonstrates to us for sure we need \approx 500 hundred words, or do we have some variation or shift from this accepted universal baseline?

Let's dive into it, folks.

I performed some extensive research on Goole, and I landed on a quite useful and exciting paper named Patterns of misspellings in L2 and L1 English: a view from the ETS Spelling Corpus.

In this conference paper by:

• Michael Flor - Educational Testing Service | ETS · Division of Research and Development Ph.D. Cognitive Psychology
• Melissa Beth Lopez - Montclair State University · Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
• Yoko Futagi - Educational Testing Service | ETS · Division of Research and Development

The mentioned research paper is the result of a study conducted on a large scale of misspelled words in essays written by native and non-native speakers of English to the writing prompts of TOEFL and GRE examinations. They used objective metrics to measure: the severity of the error, the length of the word misspelled or miswritten, and the language frequency of the intended word. Eventually, they analyzed 3000 essays for a total of 963K words.. I remind you that the essay in the TOEFL exam is the same as the Issue task AWA we do have on the GRE. Therefore, having in both exams the same essays -- only that on the GRE are two and on the TOEFL is one only -- the study is reliable and consistent in its finding.




As you can see from the above important table is the following result



From these official data, the fateful threshold of 500 words for an essay graded 5.0 or 6.0 is just not true or a myth.

Consider the following extreme scenario in which we do have two essays: one with around 500 words and full of misspellings and sentences that are not cogent (wrong written, misplaced modifiers, run-on sentences, and so on) and one with around 200 words or even less but well written even though it does not perfectly nail or satisfy fully the prompt given.

Certainly, neither of the two could have a sufficient score. However, of the two, the second one would certainly be in a better position because of the grammar, misspelled words, and cogency.












From the data and finding above, how do we reconcile what our central issue is -- how many words we should write in the GRE AWA portion of the test -- with the main object of the studies presented above -- the misspelling words in the essays analyzed ?

Do they seem like two different stories with no apparent relationship?

Well, not really. The connection seems not quite obvious, but we have:

1. Analysis of the average percentage of misspellings per essay showed that the rate of misspellings decreases as proficiency (essay score) increases;
2. The severity of misspellings depends on writing proficiency. Writers of lesser proficiency produce more of severe errors, and the average error severity decreases with better proficiency;
3. With increased proficiency, essays become longer (more words). Writers of increased proficiency introduce more long words, but they also introduce more short words, and the relative proportions of words of different lengths remain roughly similar for all proficiency levels.
4. So, while writers of greater proficiency introduce more long words (in absolute measures, such as average word length per essay), they are also less prone to misspell such words (as compared to writers of lesser proficiency).

We did not address for simplicity other important factors in the study, such as the length of and the words' variation used by NS and NNS in the GRE essays.

However, the above findings clearly suggest to us that there is a direct AND pivotal correlation between misspelling words and the proficiency of the essay. As a result of this interplay between the two, we do have a higher or lower score.

In other words:

• words' variation and their length;
• the misspelling of them;
• the structure of the sentences as a result of the first two elements;
• the cogency as a whole

Every single element listed above INCREASES the proficiency of your writing. The by-product or result of this proficiency is, automatically, the increase in the number of the essay's words.

A few misspelled words \(\Longrightarrow\) Highest proficiency \(\Longrightarrow\) More words written \(\Longrightarrow\) HIGHER GRE AWA SCORE

Therefore, next time you approach the GRE AWA think about your grammar, misspelling words, length of the words, variation, and better terminology. They certainly will bring you to have more words, a longer essay, and a higher score effortlessly!!!