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Paddy17
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kivalo
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uHCWB
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Vmacc
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Looks good to me! Seems like you’re at a 4 or 5 level scoring-wise already. It’s a solid argument, well supported by evidence. There are a few minor grammatical and idiomatic issues, but I think they are few enough and minor enough that it shouldn’t affect your score much or at all. I’ll still mention a few minor stylistic things you could improve in case it’s helpful for the future.

I can’t tell if the pagination is just off because of the way copy-pasting it into the forum, but the first “paragraph” has some odd line breaks where they shouldn’t be there. I know this seems minor, but anything that makes your essay literally easy to read for your scorers will help. The sentence “Because of this, I will present in the following essay some arguments that….” is grammatically correct, but idiomatically, a little wordier than necessary. Again, especially for your intro paragraph, you want to get to your point as concisely as possible, considering how quickly the scorers read these essays and how many they have to read at once. I’d change that sentence to “In this essay, I will argue that watching too much television can have a negative effect on children.” You could even add “…a negative effect on children’s development both physically and socially,” to give more of an outline of what you’re going to say in the rest of the essay.

More minor grammatical points: “I had a schoolmate that…” should be “I had a schoolmate who…” That shouldn’t be used as a relative pronoun referring to people. “popular within the class” should be “popular with the class.” The tense in the last sentence in that paragraph is wrong. It should be “Overall, the lack of activity caused many people to laugh at him.”

Next paragraph: When you say “Exactly this was also true for my friend David and it was actually the reason, …” it is unclear what “reason” this refers to. I can tell from context that you mean “the reason that many people laughed at him.” But grammatically, it is incorrect/unclear. So you need to say “the (other) reason people laughed at him” Adding other would be better, because you gave one reason people laughed at him in the first paragraph. “We were also chatting and discussing next to playing together”… next to is slightly off idiomatically. Perhaps something like “we were also chatting while playing together” If you use the word discussing, you need to say what you were discussing with a direct object, so it’s better to leave it out if you don’t what to specify something specific you were discussing. “big consumption”… big feels like not quite the right adjective. perhaps “vast.”

Last paragraph: you don’t need to repeat the “to some extent” phrase for both clauses in the first sentence. Next sentence there’s a tense error and you use to instead of too. It should be “as soon as parents notice that their children spend too much time…”
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Paddy17
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Thanks to all for your responses!

Here how it went:
I took the TOEFL on the 1st of April 2017 and received my results 11 days later.
I scored at 114 (Reading: 28; Listening: 29; Speaking: 28; Writing: 29)
What was nice is that my word count was really high - on the open essay, i wrote around 630 words and still had enough time to proofread my essay twice.

For prep i watched a lot of youtube videos, did 2 full official practice tests, wrote a summary for myself and did one speaking and one writing task that was evaluated via Notefull.com.
All in all I have to say that a 100+ score is possible without much studying as long as you already have used English as a language for some time (e.g. i am working on an english speaking project for 3+ years now...). With good english knowledge, the required effort to master the TOEFL is only to get familiar with the type of questions and the expectations of the test maker how good answers should look like.

BR,
Patrick
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