IELTS-Blog

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

As I promised many of you, this is what you need to know about Academic IELTS test Writing Task 1.

The task here is to describe a graph in a report. The report is intended for university lecturer, so the language you use should be appropriate.

There are several different graphs you could see in Writing 1 Task:

No matter what graph, diagram or table you are describing, you shouldn’t break these rules:

When your Academic Writing 1 Task is graded by IELTS examiners, they look for this structure:
Introduction
Body
Conclusion

Introduction should describe the purpose of report and say what overall trends you see.
For example, if the graph is climbing up or dropping down, you should mention that.You need to remember that you are describing a graph to someone who doesn’t see it. Write what the graph is about, its dates and location.

Body should describe the most important trends, while all information is summarized to avoid unnecessary details. For example, if there is a graph that has 2 peaks, you should mention them; tell when those peaks appeared and what the peak values are.Notice how many distinctive features diagram has and divide information into paragraphs, one paragraph for one feature. You should link the paragraphs by sentences that logically connect them to one another.

Important! You need to write about all the periods of time and all the subjects of graph.If it shows several years (1992, 1993, 1994) – write about all of them, if it is about men and women – write about both. Remember, summarizing doesn’t mean throwing away information. The secret here is to select what’s important, organize it, compare and contrast.

Conclusion should sum up the global trends shown on the figure and compare them if possible.

And if you need some sample answers, here they are, enjoy.