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- Three Things That Will Help Improve Your IELTS Writing.
Three Things That Will Help Improve Your IELTS Writing.
For many IELTS students writing is the one skill that often seems to stick at the same band (most often 6.5) and not improve easily. There are many reasons for this including timing, organising your ideas and lack of practice. But there are three key things that must form part of your IELTS writing in order for it to improve and progress.
These are grammar, planning and getting it corrected (ideally by an IELTS teacher).
Grammar
Every day I see writing from students that has all the right things. It’s well-organised, has well-expressed ideas that are supported, appropriate examples and good vocabulary. However, again and again, there are serious breakdowns in grammar and this stops the writing from getting anywhere near band 7. Students often believe that grammar is not that important, that if they have the right vocabulary and good ideas, somehow the examiner will overlook any grammar errors. This is not the case and increasingly, I believe, examiners are taking note of all grammatical errors and rightly so. Poor grammar is a sign of a poor level of language. In speaking, you can ‘get away’ with grammar errors to an extent as the test is one of communication, but grammar is never overlooked in writing – the examiners are the grammar police – and they will penalise you. Learning and taking note of grammar is fundamental to language learning and a piece of writing riddled with fundamental grammatical errors cannot be saved by ideas, good vocabulary or perfect organisation.
So, if your writing has grammar errors, it is vital to eliminate them. In order to do this, you need to know which mistakes you are making. Ironically the best way to discover this is to get someone to check your writing – one of my other three key things to do. A teacher (not necessarily an IELTS teacher) will be able to point these out to you. Once you know what your mistakes are, then you can begin to correct them (this takes time, but unless you know your mistakes, you can’t do anything about them at all). Check the rules in your grammar book – if you don’t have one, then get one (from the library or buy one it will be more valuable to you than any IELTS book!). Learn how to use the grammar correctly and make a mental note of each potential error in your writing – you’ll need to check for them as you write. Understanding your grammar errors, how to correct them and how to keep them in mind as you write your tasks is the best thing you can do for your IELTS writing.
Planning
Many students fail to plan – this is a fundamental mistake. Without planning it is very difficult to control your time and also the quality of your writing. Only good native speaker writers can write quickly and accurately without any planning. Planning helps you to organise your thoughts on the topic into an order that will give you the framework of your task (in task 2). This means that when you actually begin to write, you will simply be converting your plan into full sentences and can focus completely on the language; making sure you are using good linking words, vocabulary and avoiding grammatical errors. It also makes certain that you can manage the time leaving yourself with a few minutes to check for any errors at the end.
Planning your tasks is never wasted time. Spending 10 minutes on planning can actually help you to write your task 2 in 10 to 15 minutes, meaning that you will have plenty of time to check. If you plan both tasks well you can finish them both in around 50-55 minutes knowing that they are well-written. We teach all our IELTS students how to do this and after practising this well, they rarely have timing problems in IELTS writing.
Getting Your Work Corrected
If this is the only support you pay for in your IELTS study it will be worth the money to find out what mistakes you are making in your writing. This is one part if the IELTS that you cannot do alone if you want a high score. In fact, there are dangers in trying to do this by yourself – if you don’t discover your mistakes, you’ll keep making them and soon they will become part of your writing and more difficult to eliminate. As I said earlier, you have to know what the mistakes are in order to avoid them and it is unlikely you will be able to discover this alone.
If you are in a position to join a writing course (like the IELTS Writing Bootcamp), then your teacher will help you to develop your writing to the right standard for the score that you want – but be prepared to change what you are doing now (and if it’s not working – it has to change) and to learn new things which may take time to practice. Don’t be impatient, teachers cannot work miracles, but they can help you to get to where you want to be.
If you are not able to take a course, then at least invest in a teacher to check your writing once and tell you where you are going wrong and give you some ideas about how to change this. It will be a good investment. It may not help you to keep developing your skills but at least you will have a good idea about your mistakes and you can make sure to avoid these.
If you find yourself with good scores in listening, reading and speaking but your writing is still falling below the score you want, then make sure you do these three things. Without them nothing much will change.
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