Thursday 12 February 2015

Chris Green's IELTS essay writing advices

The richness of your ideas and the strength of your arguments (including the logic, not just the strength of your English) is VITAL for getting a good Task 2 score.

Hackneyed phrases:
- Last but not least
- First and foremost
- Every coin has two sides
- With the development of science and technology, ...
- Moreover


My general advice for avoiding hackneyed expressions and for writing better essays overall is to read as many materials that were written by native English speakers as you can.

if possible, use suitable synonyms and other words sometimes instead of repeating the same word all the time.

The biggest problem for people at the Band 5 to 6 level is that it is difficult to write a good essay of 300 or more words in about 40 minutes. Someone at the Band 8 level could do it but a Band 5.5 candidate would be writing in a hurry, not thinking very clearly about the real or full meaning of the question,...

 I think that sometimes (not always) the legibility of the essay alone might be indirectly worth 1/4 of a band point for that essay due to the effect of poor legibility, even though this is not written in the Band Descriptor.
 
Overall, I think candidates at the Band 4.5 to 7 level should teach themselves to write Task 2 essays that are between 260 and 290 words long. (Writing 260 to 275 words would be better.) You can teach yourself this by practicing writing essays using copies of the real exam writing paper and then you can get to know how many lines you need to write to reach the word count you want.

You should also try to teach yourself how to summarize better. I realized that the nature of these Task 2 questions is not simply to test your essay writing ability but to test your ability to write concisely, which really means expressing some things (or even most things) in a rather summarized form. This is assuming your essay has several ideas or points, not just one or two.








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Read other available IELTS Writings :

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Task 1, Letters: 

Letter 1 
Letter 2 
Letter 3 
Letter 4 
Letter 5 
Letter 6 
Letter 7 
Letter 8 
Letter 9 
Letter 10 

Task 1, Graph descriptions:

Graph 1 
Graph 2 
Graph 3 

Task 2, Essays:

Essay 1 
Essay 2 
Essay 3 
Essay 4 
Essay 5 
Essay 6 
Essay 7 
Essay 8 
Essay 9 
Essay 10 
Essay 11 
Essay 12 
Essay 13 
Essay 14 
Essay 15 
Essay 16 
Essay 17 
Essay 18 
Essay 19 
Essay 20 
Essay 21 

IELTS writing tips:

Chris Green's IELTS essay writing advices 
Essay: 3 WAYS TO WRITE THE INTRODUCTION 
Essays IELTS Topics 2014 
IELTS Essays writing tips 
Task Essays: tips 
IELTS writing tips 
IELTS Letter Writing – Useful Words & Expressions 
IELTS Writing: Articles  

IELTS Speaking:

IELTS Speaking - topics, part 2 

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