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Be patient about your writing practice
You may have heard the expression Rome wasn’t built in a day; it refers to the need for patience and having a systematic and steady approach to something. I meet many, many IELTS students who are in a hurry to take the exam and because of this they are not really looking at whether they are actually capable of getting the result that they want with the English level that they have.
All areas of the IELTS exam require some patience to perfect the skills you need to achieve the band that you want, but I wanted to look very specifically at writing as this part of the exam for most people does require longer to get to the required score.
There are reasons for this. Writing is not something we do (especially essay writing) every day and many of you will not have done this type of writing since you left formal education be that university or school. Secondly when we first develop language as children, writing is the very last skill that we learn to do and it will have taken you several years to be able to write the kind of tasks expected in IELTS even in your own language.
I would not have written this type of Task much before my mid-teens – 15 or 6 years of age, this represents around 10 years of schooling to get writing to that level. I am not suggesting that it will take 10 years to be able to write an IELTS task, you have already achieved those skills in your own language but transferring them into English is not going to happen overnight and you should be prepared for a lot of practice.
I feel very sad when a student is looking for band 7 in their writing and they take the test and get band 5.5. Clearly the writing skills in English of this student are a long way from band 7 and the only way to get to band 7 is to get some help. In my experience, and I have been working with IELTS students at band 7 and 8 for over 20 years, it is almost impossible to improve your writing without having a teacher check it. In fact, and I am sure you have heard me say this before, if you don’t get some expert feedback on your writing it can be very dangerous for your IELTS as you will be learning mistakes and I know how hard it is to ‘unlearn’ mistakes before you can make good progress, I have seen many students with this problem!
If your target for writing is band 7 and you are currently achieving band 5 or 6 then be realistic this will take some time – don’t book another test in a month unless you intend to work intensively with a teacher for that month and really focus on your writing skills. Also remember you can spend hours on searching topics, looking at model essays, learning new vocabulary but if you don’t use any of these in your practice and get them checked or you don’t eliminate any of your grammar errors it will make very little difference to your writing score and you may find yourself becoming an expert at band 5 or band 6. In fact if you keep getting band 6.5 every time you take the IELTS then you have become an expert at band 6 and it is likely that you will stay at that level unless you do something different to change this.
So be realistic and have patience. If you are struggling with IELTS writing then I can help. My IELTS Writing Bootcamp is designed to ‘attack’ your IELTS writing and get you on track – it works because you have to focus for 3 weeks just on writing. Absolutely brilliant if writing is the ONLY skill keeping you back for your IELTS final score. Check it out here:
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