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Writing tips

How to prepare for the IELTS Writing test, tips and techniques that help to raise your score

How to get ideas for an IELTS essay

You guys often ask me this question in the emails: “How do I get ideas for an IELTS essay, when I don’t understand the topic?”. And you’re right, it is extremely hard to write about something you don’t understand.

So here’s what you can do to solve this problem:

  • Work on your vocabulary and learn new words, to make sure you will be able to understand the topic or at least take a very good guess.
  • Read as many IELTS essays as you can. You can find many sample essays here. Reading other people’s essays helps with the ideas, if you don’t have any of your own – “borrow” from others.
  • Read as much IELTS essay topics, as possible. You can find essay topics in every post in the Recent exams category. Why should you do it? Simply because sometimes the topics repeat in the future exams 🙂

    • Important! Don’t try to memorize essays. IELTS examiners are trained to look for memorized essays and they will disqualify your work on the spot.

    The IELTS Writing – half-band scores

    About a year ago there was a change in the IELTS grading system, when half-band scores were introduced for the Writing and Speaking modules. At first there was so much confusion, until they came up with an explanation of those half-bands, but even now many people write to me asking to explain what can make a difference between a full band and a half-band.

    According to the IELTS examiners, it is the quality of your writing that makes that half band of difference. Let me explain. I have written a post explaining how your Writing task gets graded, what things are important and what you can get marks for. So let’s take for example one of categories there, “Selecting what information to present”. If the examiner sees that you attempted to do that, but didn’t do it quite right (for example threw too much information away) – that could mean that you get half of band for attempting but not the full band because you didn’t do a very good job selecting information. Usually messing up in just one category is not enough to cost you half-band; it would take two or three mess-ups of that kind to get the half-band taken away.

    Another example – weak grammar and poor choice of words can make the difference between band 5.5 and 6. The work can be written in beautiful English but if it doesn’t follow the IELTS format, you’ll never get beyond Band 7.

    So I think the bottom line is – they introduced the half bands to make difference between students that know what IELTS writing rules are, try hard but do a poor job following the rules and students that do a good job in fulfilling all the requirements.