Written by Olga Donskaia

Jurga Kasteckienė is not only a VU lecturer and a teacher-trainer, but also a senior exam assessor who reads and evaluates hundreds of high school students’ essays written as part of the English language state examination. On October 17, the lecturer shared her invaluable insight with students from Vilniaus Pilaitė Gymnasium.

‘There are 19,000 students taking a state exam each year. Can you guess how many of the essays are really interesting to read out of those 19,000? Five hundred. Even though 19,000 write on the same topic, only five hundred are interesting. Why? Because they use creative arguments. Because they use support that is really interesting to read. Because they take different approaches to the topic,’ says Jurga Kasteckienė.

In her presentation titled “Mastering a Paragraph Is Mastering the Whole”, Jurga Kasteckienė showed how structuring an essay paragraph by paragraph allows for creative ideas and original arguments to shine through. The lecturer stressed the importance of clear paragraph structure (from a topic sentence to a conclusive statement) and demonstrated how key nouns, consistent pronouns, and transition signals help achieve cohesion in an essay.

Among other practical advice, the students learned how to avoid the most typical mistakes, how to write a perfect topic sentence, which is not too specific and not too abstract, and how to make sure that a conclusive statement logically agrees with the rest of the paragraph and effectively delivers the intended idea.

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