Whether it is better to work as a team than as an individual to succeed

Hi! I'm practicing for the Toefl writing task 2. Please help me review my essay. Many thanks for your comments!

Topic:

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?

It is better to work as a team than as an individual to succeed.

Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.

My essay:

There are a variety of ways in which people can approach works. However, in my opinion, working in a group is more advantageous than working individually. I feel this way for two reasons, which I will explore in the following paragraphs.

Firstly, when it comes to addressing problems, teamwork enables us to produce effective and diverse solutions. Since each person views the problem from different angles, having a large number of people working together means having more creative ways to solve the issue, which brings benefits to the whole group. For instance, in my business class, when I and my classmates were assigned to work on a projects regarding how to cope with economic crisis, we gathered together and worked as a team to figure out the answers. We had five people in total, each member in the group came up with a method to overcome the obstacles. As a result, our group has eventually produced many creative ways to deal with the problem and achieved a high score. If I worked on this task by myself, I would not be able to finish the task such successfully.

Secondly, teamwork is also important when we encounter difficulties during working process. People in the group are willing to offer help whenever one member runs into troubles. Take my experience as an example, when our team was conducting some experiments in a physics class, I had a hard time understanding and operating a machine. Fortunately, one of my friends in the group gave me elaborate instructions and kindly showed me the way to properly use that equipment. Thanks to his assistance, I was able to complete the task quickly and effectively. That is how colaborating as a team can help us succeed.

In conclusion, I believe that we should always work in a group rather than on our own, for it not only helps increase effeciency and effectiveness of the task, but also benefits us in case we face unexpected problems while working.

You did very well with this discussion. Although you do not really need to restate the prompt in the first paragraph, doing so did help retain the clarity of your discussion. However, the examiner would have expected you to start the discussion at this point. At least a 2 opinion presentation. Just to help him keep track of the discussion requirements.

You should remember that your discussion and examples are being relayed from the past time line. So you should be using the past tense version of words. You cannot say; "our group has" which is a present time indicator. Rather you should have said "our group had", a past time indicator. You should have also avoided the word such in "such successfully". Simply saying "successfully" is sufficient for the presentation.

@Holt
I have a question. Does it matter if we include examples that are quite long? The examples above matched well with the ideas the OP was giving, but I find it quite like a story.

@Holt Thank you so much!