IELTS Writing 2 Task explained
I said this many times and I will repeat it again - “to write good IELTS essay, you need to get into your examiner’s head”. You’ve go to understand what makes you gain or lose marks, because once you do - you can’t go wrong. What I am about to reveal here can be found in IELTS official site, but I am explaining it in simple English.
This is how they grade your essay: you receive points for Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Looks heavy? Never mind, here comes the simple English version:
“Task Response” means that your essay shows that you understood and covered the topic from all its sides, aspects, etc. Let’s take this topic for example - “Internet: connecting or isolating people?”. Those who chose to write about how Internet connects people - loose marks, those who chose to write about how Internet isolates people - loose marks, those who compare and contrast both sides of the Internet and give arguments for and against - gain marks.
“Coherence and Cohesion” means how well you connected the paragraphs and sentences inside each paragraph. You see, all of your paragraphs need to be logically connected. For example, if paragraph 1 explains the advantages of the Internet, and paragraph 2 explains its disadvantages, then paragraph 1 should have last sentence saying something like this: “In spite of Internet being such a help in communication, its drawbacks can not be overlooked”. This sentence creates the connection between 1st and 2nd paragraphs. If it wasn’t there, examiner could think that you jumped from advantages to disadvantages without a reason. The same rule applies to sentences inside the paragraph. Every sentence should lead to the next one.
“Lexical Resource” means vocabulary and different types of sentences, simple and complex. You should be able to use words and their synonyms.
“Grammatical Range and Accuracy” means spelling and grammar of sentences. You should be able to spell the words correctly, do not forget articles “a” and “the”, punctuations is also important, etc - you get the picture, don’t you?
One more important thing to know: the four criteria are equally weighted. It means that if you forgot about “Coherence and Cohesion” in your essay, you will loose 1/4 of your essay points.
It is quite possible that after reading this explanation you still couldn’t write good IELTS essay. This is where “Ace The IELTS” book comes in. It has a full chapter dedicated to IELTS essay, which explains from A to Z the whole process of essay writing and makes it so easy, a kid could do it.
There are topics of essays for you to practice on and our teacher is waiting to check your essays and make sure you are ready for the big IELTS. And, of course, I am here to answer your questions, solve your problems and support you every step of the way, write me to simone@IELTS-Blog.com
I’m going to take the IELTS test in the near future. Here I have a question about “TASK RESPONSE.” I wonder how I would define which kind of title is a comparison one or an argument. As the example written in this article, “Internet:connecting or isolating people?”, if the title changes into “Internet:isolating people” and ask me if I agree or not. Should I then write an argument instead of writing the comparison? Hope that u could understand what I’m talking about, cuz I got confused my self. Thank u very much!:)
Comment by Sheila — April 8, 2008 @ 9:37 am
You are confused because you think that there are 2 different types of topic, comparison and argument, when they are the same type. So here you should discuss 2 points of view - why some people think that Internet is isolating people and why others think it connects people. I hope that makes it clearer.
Comment by admin — April 8, 2008 @ 4:57 pm