A quick thought today
I’m noticing that a lot of people are getting stuck in writing especially at Band 6.5. I’ve been teaching IELTS for over 20 years and I can tell you that this has always been the case for as long as I can remember. There are reasons for this:
- We all learn to speak and listen first
- Then we learn to read
- Then we learn to write
It takes longer – be prepared for this.
There’s hardly any room for errors at Band 7 and above – so
- IELTS writing needs to be very well written (almost around the level of a native speaker undergraduate)
- the style needs to be spot on (formal, academic, objective, informal in some cases (GT letters))
- your vocabulary needs to be very wide
- you also need a wide range of different sentence structures
- you need excellent grammar, flawless spelling and great punctuation
- you need robust cohesion between sentences and between paragraphs
- you need to provide a strong answer to the question with good evidence and support for your arguments and good examples to illustrate
- you need to be able to tackle any task – there is no choice
- you need to be able to plan, write and check - all in 60 minutes
The reason most students get stuck at 6.5 is because
- they are not able to do all of these things equally well
- they often focus on the question, the ideas etc. and NOT the language
- they write tons of tasks without getting any of them checked
- this means that they don’t know what is stopping them from getting band 7
- so they don’t know how to fix their writing
To fix this
- get someone to take a look at your writing
- don’t use the listening and reading scores as a guide for your writing band – they are not the same a band 7 in reading won’t guarantee the same band in writing
- work on things like grammar, vocabulary, spelling and punctuation as well as writing your tasks
- be realistic about how long it will take – don’t jump back into the exam after a couple of weeks it may take much longer