Organisation and Expression
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Organisation and Expression go hand-in-hand with Thought and Content. Even the best, most sophisticated ideas are worthless if they’re completely unintelligible.
Writing clearly not only contributes directly to your overall score — it will also strengthen your ideas and clarity of thought. The more sophisticated and complex your thinking is, the more nuanced and controlled your writing needs to be.
Essays that score highly for Organisation and Expression are coherent: they hold together as a unified piece of writing where every part connects logically to every other part. Your essay should feel like a journey with a clear path from beginning to end, not like disconnected paragraphs that happen to appear in the same document.
Your introduction promises a certain approach to the theme, and your body paragraphs must deliver on that promise. Your body paragraphs should then build on each other, not simply exist as separate observations. As such, your second body paragraph should show awareness of the first.
Use connecting words and phrases throughout to help your reader understand how your ideas relate to each other and create a sense of forward momentum.
Use transitional phrases to signal how you’re moving through your argument.
These transitions show you’re consciously constructing a balanced argument, not randomly jumping between ideas.
Every paragraph in a strong essay relates clearly to the theme identified in the introduction. If a paragraph could be removed without affecting your argument, it shouldn’t be there.
Ask yourself regularly:
- Am I still discussing the theme?
- Does this relate to the question I’m trying to answer?
If you find yourself discussing tangential issues that aren’t directly relevant to the theme, you’ve digressed. These digressions take the essay away from its central focus, waste precious time and suggest you’re struggling to develop on-topic ideas.
Get back on track by streamlining and returning to the central theme of your essay. It helps if you examine each side of the issue separately — trying to argue both pros and cons within a single paragraph creates confusion and muddles your argument.
Every step in a strong argument follows logically from what came before. Your analysis should be supported by your evidence, and your conclusion should follow from your analysis.
To keep track of the logic, test your reasoning as you write. If you find yourself making leaps – asserting something without showing how you got there – your reasoning has gaps that you need to fill in.
If you find yourself struggling to make logical connections clear, it’s possible that your examples only loosely relate to your point or could equally well support a different argument. In this case, go back a step and think of other examples that provide stronger support for your point.
When writing your conclusion, refer back to key examples or points from your body paragraphs and explain how they led you to your position. This will show that your conclusion is the natural outcome of your analysis. The key is that it should feel inevitable.
Avoid distorting the perspective you disagree with so that it’s easier to dismiss. Instead, present the strongest possible case for each side before reaching your conclusion.
Engaging seriously with alternative perspectives shows that your essay is complex and balanced. It reveals the depth of your thinking and engagement with the theme. Remember that this doesn’t mean you can’t ultimately favour one side. Instead, it will strengthen your reasoning when you do.
In your conclusion, explain which side you ultimately favour, as well as why you’re dismissing or deprioritising the other. Show why one perspective is stronger on balance, despite the valid points for the other.
If your body paragraphs raise important points, your conclusion needs to account for them. Otherwise, there was no point including those points in the first place.
When it comes to expression, GAMSAT assessors are looking for clear thinking clearly expressed, not for impressive vocabulary or convoluted prose.
The most effective essays use clear, direct language. They primarily use simple sentences, with just one subject and main verb. Avoid including extra clauses or additional information. Instead, start a new sentence.
It can be tempting to try to sound more intelligent by using complex vocabulary or elaborate sentence structures. However, this approach usually backfires. Complex language is harder to use correctly and often obscures your meaning rather than enhancing it.
Using clear, straightforward language doesn’t mean compromising on the complexity of your ideas. In fact, expressing your ideas as simply as possible will highlight the sophistication of your thoughts. It’s easy to dress a basic idea up in convoluted language; it’s much more impressive to convey a complex idea clearly and directly.
Once you’ve mastered using simple sentence structures and vocabulary to express complex points, then you can try varying your word choice and sentence structure. This variation should enhance the clarity of your essay, not compromise it. The goal is to avoid repetition whilst maintaining simple, direct expression.
If you find yourself using the same word repeatedly in the same paragraph, look for appropriate synonyms or related terms. Choose synonyms that accurately convey your meaning, rather than just swapping words for the sake of variety. For example, in discussing the negative effects of something, you might interchange ‘detrimental’, ‘counterproductive’, ‘harmful’ and ‘damaging’ based on what fits best in each specific context.
The exception to this are the key terms that you’ve highlighted and defined in your introduction. Use these consistently throughout your essay, so that it’s clear how your argument is developing.
To vary sentence structure in your essays:
- Link multiple sentences with connectives like ‘and’ or ‘but’.
- Use subordinate clauses like ‘As the above discussion shows’.
- Use pronouns like ‘it’ and ‘such’ to avoid repetition.
However, don’t sacrifice clarity for variety. If a straightforward sentence structure best expresses your idea, use it even if your previous sentence followed a similar pattern.
Reading widely is the best way to directly target Organisation and Expression by improving your writing skills.
Unlike targeting Thought and Content, you need to make sure you’re reading, rather than listening to sources. Section II essays that read more like spoken language will probably score poorly.
The best sources to read are printed books, magazines and news sources. These are more likely to have undergone a proper editing process and will give you the best exposure to good structures, accurately used vocabulary and well-crafted sentences.
Some sources, like blogs, can provide excellent insight into different perspectives and ideas, but they may be less rigorously written.
As you read, keep a list of new vocabulary you encounter. Be judicious in what you note down. Focus on words and phrases that might be genuinely useful in your own writing, and avoid ‘flashy’ vocabulary that will bog your writing down and do more harm than good.
Think about the structure of what you’re reading:
- How does the writer introduce their ideas?
- What order does the writer present their ideas in?
- Do these ideas build on one another?
Tone is how the writer appears to feel about what they’re writing. It might be positive, negative, neutral, or something else entirely, and it subtly contributes to how an argument is conveyed.
Think about the tone of what you’re reading:
- Which words are contributing to this tone?
- Is the tone influencing how you receive the writer’s argument?
Once you’ve identified these things, you can try incorporating them into your own writing.
Accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar is a key part of Organisation and Expression. Reading widely from reputable sources will increase your exposure to correct usage.
Prepare the foundations for your own writing early. Get into the habit of using correct spelling, punctuation and grammar in everyday contexts, including:
- Messaging friends and family.
- Posting on social media.
- Writing emails.
This way, it will be second nature by Test Day.
There are always ways to improve your writing and learn from the materials you’re reading. However, preparing for Section II means finding a writing style that works for you.
Working out how to harness your own style will mean that your writing comes more naturally on Test Day, so you can focus on thinking analytically and responding thoughtfully to the tasks.
Find your own style by:
- Experimenting with different structures, tones and approaches.
- Reading back through your work after a few days to see what worked well and what didn’t.
- Asking others to read through your work to see if your ideas came across as you intended.
As long as your writing is grammatically correct, clear and accurately expresses your ideas, your exact writing style is up to you.
Weak essays often read like a collection of separate thoughts on a general topic rather than a unified exploration of a specific theme. Each paragraph exists independently without connecting to the others. When paragraphs could be rearranged in any order without affecting the argument, the essay lacks coherent structure, which makes it much harder to draw a convincing conclusion.
Even essays that start with a clear theme may score poorly if they gradually drift into discussing related but distinct topics. In these cases, the conclusion often discusses something different from what the introduction promised.
Similarly, frequent detours into tangential topics destroy the sense of unified focus. The essay becomes a meandering discussion of vaguely related ideas, making it hard for readers to understand the central point you’re making.
Weak essays sometimes lack clarity on a small scale, too.
Under-cooked paragraphs might:
- Begin with an example or vague statements, rather than a clear topic sentence.
- Lack clear direction, adding very little to the overall argument.
At the other extreme, some paragraphs have too much going on and create confusion. They might:
- Argue multiple different points.
- Explore both pros and cons simultaneously.
Keep each paragraph sharply focused on a specific aspect of your argument.
The conclusion in a low-scoring essay might:
- Make logical leaps from what was discussed in the body paragraphs.
- Contradict points made earlier.
A lack of overall organisation and coherence weakens any essay, even those with brilliantly thought-through ideas in the body paragraphs.
Equally, poor essays might present examples that provide weak support for the points being made, or even contradict them. Even if the examples are well chosen, a lack of signposting and explanation can make it hard to see how they support the essay’s overall argument.
Walkthrough
Identifying ways to improve
Let’s identify ways to improve an essay’s Organisation and Expression score.