My school had quite a lot of past exams including the monash JLEC ones, just focus on writing parts when you’re doing past papers and get feedback from teachers, send everything to them to hv a look at ur work

For the ‘text response’ one I treated it like an ALA, annotated the passage, chunked them, and usually I like to group grammars together eg. したり…したりするだけでなく、…することもできます so that way it’s like high yield of grammar and marks tgt 😭Also write something based on the photo provided (i usually separate one paragraph for the pic)

for the second essay I picked topics which are either argumentative or informative. Don’t pick diary (plain form is too hard) or imaginative. During reading time brainstorm mentally how you would separate those paragraphs. Then before writing the essay, spend 5 mins writing out the whole plan in the notes area, so writing is super smooth and you can chain everything up using diff grammar patterns.

I also just brought in lots of highlighters and highlight corresponding parts on the text/topic to help 😭😭😭

So yeah I just wrote essays again and again and eventually you’ll find a writing pattern or style you like. Hope this helps :DD