Customer Reviews

GRE: Answers to the Real Essay Questions: Everything You Need to Write a Top-Notch GRE Essay (Peterson's GRE Answers to the Real Essay Questions)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

A practical read for the two writing sections. Well-written examples throughout the whole book with useful tactics included. A vast number of samples covering all realms tested. Not a page is wasted. An honest and well-thought publish. The author saves pages by shortening real issue and argument topics into key words-- presented in a way for easy study, quick reminder of your previous read, and to search for the original, complete question from the offical pool. Each essay/ arguement sample is grouped accroding to each tactic introduced. A great guide for those who feel lost in scaning the official pools and dreaded to have a start. Handy and light. Convenient to be carried around. The book would be a waste for you if you memorize the passages because it only serve as a guide to show you how good a piece of work, answering the GRE official questions, can be. The vast number of samples in the book is enough to give you a "feel" on what quality is, and what tone should be used. You might want to have some extra, classic readings on the different realms of interest, e.g. education, science... so that you will have your own opinions on the issues being raised, and will not copy the author's ones.

I would suggest the author to further categorize the topics into different realms, i.e. education, politics, science and art, etc.

This book provides a great overview for the essay portion of the GRE.

The beginning of the book explains what you should expect and what you should or should not do. It also goes into what the readers are looking for and how you should consider writing your essays.

The author provides a plethora of essays to go through. Of course, I think unless you have endless amounts of time, it would be tedious to go through all of them. However, I think a good idea would be scan through and if you see a topic that you're scratching your head about, it would be a good idea to read through the essay. If you want to know what the exact issue statement was for reference, you can always go to the GRE's official website and go to the issue topic list. Once you're there, you can always "ctrl+f" the bolded phrase they provide for you in the book.

Generally, I would recommend that one goes through the issue essays more than the argument essays. The latter seem much easier to write, whereas the former can be rather difficult. Why? The issue topics vary greatly and what is very easy to one person may be incredibly difficult for another. My only concern with some of the issue essays in this book is that some of them seem way too over prepared---almost to the point of "fluff." Otherwise, I found it to be a valuable tool.

The best way to learn to write is to immerse oneself in good writing. This book allows you to do that! It has great recommendations for how to improve your score on the essays. It makes the analysis essay a piece of cake and explains the logical flaws that the GRE test makers are fond of. I'll write more once I get my score :) I anticipate that I did quite well.

This book was an excellent source. I received a near perfect score on my essay thanks to its useful tips. Many people who score well on the analytical writing claim the same thing: they followed exact recommendations provided by expert sources (e.g. this book, Princeton Review, etc..). Bottom line, if you want to score well, follow what the experts advise, and certainly purchase this book.

This book quickly outlined the kind of things graders will be looking for in your essay and how to give it to them. 270 pages were just devoted to sample responses. I read a fair amount of both the issue and argument task ones and skimmed a few more. The first 30 pages or so is where the real meat is. I don't know what I would have gotten had I used other prep materials, but I got a 6.0 with this.

For those preparing themselves for the GRE, this book offers an indispensable study guide for the two essays on the exam. The topics, writing samples, essay construction guides, and helpful guidance are, by far, the most useful essay-writing help I have seen on bookshelves. The research is thorough, informative, easy to understand, well-written and organized.

If you're planning on taking the GRE and want to improve your score on the essay portions, this book is well worth the price. I'd buy it again, hands down.

I bought this item to prepare for my GRE general exam and found it pretty useful. Almost all the real GRE topics as published on the ETS Web site have been fully discussed and definitely all of them are at a very 6 level. I went through them for two different purposes; it does give you a great idea on how to structure a well developed writing task and it also gives you a lot of different general "templates" to open and develop a discussion. This is particularly useful when it comes to the arguments if you know how use some used bricks to build a new castle. However, there are some issues that may or may not be fixable: 1- For some reasons (copy right?) the book does not offer the full title of each task so anyway you have to have the whole list of articles handy to read the topic before getting down to the actual writing task 2- Found the structure of some articles more complex than a minimum needed to get a 6/6 score 3-The book does not feature a well organized table of content 4-The quality of papers seems to be extremely poor. I'd be more than happy to pay 5 bucks more and get a book with white, neat and soft pages. Finally, I would recommend this book to take a successful GRE exam, yet ensure you would allocate at least 3 weeks to ace all the topics if you need 5.5-6.

Gives a good review of the GRE essay and how to write them. Plenty of practice questions. What we need is a program that we can use to grade our essays so we don't have to guess!

Stewart's Book: "answers to the real essay questions" is a reliable book that will grant you the tools you need for writing a great essay on the GRE's. The best thing about the book is that it is filled with endless examples of well writer essays for both the issue paper and the argument. I highly suggest this book if you have little background in writing essays and are willing to go the extra mile. Note that this book only deals with the essay part of the test and not the other parts

This book falls short. However, the author's poor writing style had the unintended consequence of boosting my confidence in my essay writing abilities so it wasn't a total waste.
I found better advice on essay writing in Barron's 'How to Prepare for the GRE Test' and 'The Complete Idiot's Guide to Acing the GRE.'