<p>@silverturtle - “artificiality is frequently salient.” owned it! 
By the way I am reading the entire sat help thread by you, thank you so much!
@nothingto - thanks for the link! I completely understand what you are saying: as an example, I shouldn’t learn new words for the sake of impressing my reader if I don’t know how to apply it to the context.
@protoslg - that is exactly what I want ‘a fancy word here and there’… I agree that too much is never too good 
(by the way nice word ‘pedantic’, I had actually never heard of it before.)
@collegeattempt - thanks for sharing, I totally understand what you are conveying, great examples by the way the ‘wrong’ one made me giggle a bit </p>
<p>I guess now I see my question was a bit ‘off’, what I really have to focus on is making my thoughts and ideas clearer not only in my head but on paper, I think this is what goes wrong with my essays. Sentence structure is also something I definitely need to look into a little more.</p>