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INTRODUCTION
Bits & Pieces. First-year English majors at JPU, who attended the "Writing and Research Skills" course, know that these words refer to a chapter from Zinsser's "On Writing Well", which contains the author's tips and suggestions about essay writing.

The application of these Zinsserian tips can help university students compose their proficiency essays, which is one of the four tasks that students are supposed to complete at the end of the second semester; it's a complex exercise and gives an authentic picture of their fluency in drafting. It aims to examine the students' writing skills, how they can make a well-organized, logical draft without serious grammatical mistakes and with a large vocabulary specific to their topic. The testees have the possibility to select a theme from 125 options and their task is to compose a four- or five- paragraph essay of about 450 words focusing on their chosen assignment.

In my research paper my aim is to find out whether the examinees have followed Zinsser's pieces of advice and whether the application of the tips have influenced the evaluation.

METHOD
I selected five proficiency tests with different scores (from 5 to 9) and analyzed them on the basis of Zinsser's "Bits and Pieces". While reading I concentrated on five view-points from "Bits and Pieces": the use of verbs, adverbs, adjectives, concept nouns and little qualifiers. Then I compared the essays and examined the differences between them relating to Zinsser's tips and their effect on the markers' evaluation.

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

VERBS
The "Bits and Pieces" essay suggests the use of active verbs, because they are direct, short and vivid, while "a style that consists mainly of passive constructions, especially if the sentences are long, saps the reader's energy." (Zinsser 110)

The examinees of proficiency essays seem to take the advice of Zinsser, they rarely used passive verbs. The writer of the essay 59 ("How to find a boyfriend") didn't put any passive structures in the essay, and even in the essay 82 ("How to ruin a girlfriend") which contains the most passive verbs, can be found only 8 passives from 93 verbs.

All the five candidates used a lot of "be" forms in direct proportion to the number of verbs they used. The essay 82, who got the best points out of the five testees, applied the most verbs in the draft and 27 of them was one of the conjugations of "be".

The essay 59, that obtained the less scores from the five examined tests, selected only simple verbs and phrases to express his/her thoughts, like "find, have, ask, talk, go, change", and used them repeatedly, while the authors of the other essays chose more remarkable and meaningful verbs, which transmit more life and emotions. (For example: consider, bother, provide, distract, involve, reveal, determine, deserve, gaze, improve, murmure, appreciate.)

ADVERBS
According to Zinsser most adverbs are unnecessary, they often don't give any extra information to a verb, and cause clutter in the sentences. (111)

In the five proficiency tests we can observe that those testees who got less points sometimes used redundant adverbs such as "really", (" I don't really think", "I don't really care") while the 3 students who reached better evaluation applied more meaningful and less used adverbs like "desirously", "hopefully", "economically", "safely". The adequate selection and use of adverbs might have influenced the evaluation, since the ones who used them properly got higher scores for vocabulary. But there's many other components that had effects on the vocabulary scores, such as the use of adjectives.

ADJECTIVES
Zinsser provides similar tips about adjective use as about adverbs. It also refers to adjectives that many of them are redundant, because their concept is already in the noun. (112) There's another significant problem with the application of adjectives: "Most writers sow adjectives almost unconsciously into the soil of their prose to make it more lush and pretty....The adjective that exists solely as decoration is a self-indulgence for the reader." (112)

The five examinee rarely used unnecessary adjectives. In essay 59 the author chose the adjective "noisy" before "rock concert" - but it's obvious that a rock concert is noisy and doesn't give any new meaning to the word, such as the "rude remark" in essay 28 ("How to ruin a perfect Christmas"), because the word "remark" has already a negative connotation in itself. These two examinee used especially simple adjectives, as "different", "false", "careful" , and sometimes even trite and meaningless ones, for example: "important" or "real". a typical feature of the essay 28 is the repetition of the adjectives "perfect" (5 times) and "ideal" (3 times) in every case in connection with Christmas.

The other 3 testees applied more unique and significant adjectives, which makes the texts fascinating and easy-flowing. (For example: desperate, sufficient, independent and exotic) The writer of the essay 74 ("How to find a girlfriend") sometimes crams the draft with too many adjectives just to full up the lines and to decorate the words. One of his sentences contains 9 adjectives: "wonderful, understanding, caring, significant, hard, luxurious, splendid, exclusive, huge"; which means more than 25% of the sentence.

The author of the essay 82 used the more specific adjectives of his/her theme, and also the most unique and particular ones. ("unexperienced, confidental, jealous, problematic, ugly, unpredictable, masochist, wretched") This choice of adjectives makes the composition vivid and ironic at the same time.

LITTLE QUALIFIERS
As for little qualifiers, Zinsser suggests to neglect these meaningless and unsure small words, like "a bit", "a little", "sort of", "kind of", "rather", "quite", "very", "too", etc. "Every little qualifier whittles away some fraction of trust on the part of the reader." (113) With these small words the essay doesn't seem confident.

From this point of view all the students made an adequate essay, they carefully supervised their drafts and omitted these little qualifiers. I found them just in two writings. The author of essay 59 put "really" twice in the draft, which can be found in essay 74, too, as well as "very".
But we can observe many other phrases that express uncertainty in the 5 essays such as "possibly", "hopefully", "probably", "likely" and "potential".

CONCEPT NOUNS
Zinsser advises the use of verbs, that "tell what somebody did" instead of impersonal nouns that express a concept and makes sentences cold. These sentences usually don't contain working verbs - only "is" or "isn't".(118)

The 5 proficiency tests contain just few of these concept nouns, for example in the essay 74 ("How to find a girlfriend") the writer put a long sentence in the essay without any vivid verb in it: "Delicate questions about the candidates musical taste or favourite author are very adviseable and so is the invitation for a coffee to the buffet afterwards.", or I could cite the essay 82: "However, the use of this technique is not recommended, since the possible outcome is unpredictable, and at the same time can be dangerous, too."

But generally the examinees applied vivid verbs which push forward the sentence and it can be noticed mostly in the essay 59 and 28.

CONCLUSION
Having examined the 5 proficiency essays from five various point of views I realized that the 5 testees - consciously or unconsciously - tried to keep the Zinsserian pieces of advice. Just few of the students used redundant adjectives or adverbs, they tried to avoid little qualifiers and constant nouns, and paid attention to change passive structions into active ones in most cases. Probably the examinees found useful these 5 tips from the "Bits and Pieces" and Zinsser gave them help with his essay.

The evaluation of the two markers based on 5 requirements: focus, accuracy, vocabulary, paragraph organization and essay organization.

The use of verbs, adjectives and adverbs must have seriously influenced the evaluation of the essays. Those testees who put more particular and specific words and phrases in their tests, got higher scores for vocabulary and focus than that ones who applied only simple verbs or unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. The use of verbs effected mostly the evaluation, since the students who used a lot of verbs and paid attention to use active ones achieved the best results.
These point of views that I analyzed on the basis of "Bits and Pieces" didn't have much influence on the other 3 criteria of the proficiency essay, they didn't count in accuracy, paragraph- and essay organization scores, however, they might have effected the final evaluation.