I am always surprised when I speak to students who tell me that they are very confident about their IELTS writing and yet it has the lowest score in their test – and this happens quite a lot.
I used to think that it meant they weren’t ready to tackle the writing as they needed to work on reading or speaking first but of late I have come to the conclusion that actually it’s really about the fact that because there are so many writing examples available – it’s going to be easy to do this.
How wrong they are!!
A student of mine once called IELTS Writing ‘The last frontier’ and she was right. In my very long experience with IELTS, writing is for the vast majority of people the one that takes the longest and is the hardest to move beyond band 6.5.
This stands to reason – you go to school age 5 being able to understand and speak but not read and write. It’s taken 5 years to acquire this skill and there are 2 more years to go before you will be a proficient speaker.
Now you learn to read and start to write.
To reach Band 9 in IELTS you need to be at the level of a native speaker 18-year old who is about to begin a university course. It took them (and you in your own language) around 13 years to reach that level of sophistication in writing so how can writing at band 7 or 8 be that easy? It isn’t and that’s the truth.
I see all the time posts from IELTS teachers and really good IELTS students saying how the exam is flawed because even high level students and teachers don’t always score Band 9 – this should give you some idea about how hard it is to get these levels.
Is it impossible?
No, but there is work to do.
This is how to do get band 7 or 8 in IELTS Writing
- Write in in your own voice – don’t try to copy other pieces of writing. Use them for vocabulary and ways of saying things but make these your own.
- Follow the band descriptors – you MUST adhere to these, if you don’t then it’s impossible to achieve a high score.
- Don’t make any grammar errors (Band 9 must be flawless for Band 7 and 8 there is a low tolerance).
- Don’t repeat words and phrases – to do this you MUST be thinking about language as you write and NOT the topic of the task.
- Plan well – this helps you focus on language rather than the topic as you write.
- Do it in the time – this means; plan, write and check both task 1 and 2 in 20 and 40 minutes respectively.
- Less is more – with writing doing too many tasks is counter-productive (unless someone is checking it) – work more on the mechanics (vocabulary, sentence structures, planning, spelling etc.) – if you write 10 tasks all at once I can guarantee they will ALL have the same mistakes and you’ll be re-enforcing your errors!
- Get someone who knows what they are doing to check it – if you pay for anything in IELTS pay for a writing check. It’s almost impossible to do this yourself.
- Get good feedback – a simple band score is not helpful - you need to know WHERE the errors are and exactly HOW to improve your writing.
- Now practise all of these things and there will be a point at which you know that you can get the score in the exam. How long this takes will depend on where you are now.
Check out this webinar for more about IELTS Writing and how I can help you to achieve your band: