This text comprises excerpts from a video lecture on IELTS essay writing. The lecturer critiques common, ineffective strategies taught online, emphasizing the importance of clear communication over memorized templates or complex vocabulary. The core message advocates for focusing on accurate, simple language to answer the question directly, rather than attempting to impress the examiner with elaborate structures or high-level vocabulary. Specific examples of flawed advice and successful approaches are provided and analyzed. The lecturer also demonstrates how to effectively structure and write IELTS essays.

IELTS Test Preparation Study Guide

Quiz

According to the source, how should you prioritize modules for study? You should prioritize modules where you have lower scores from previous tests. If you have a high enough score in any of the four modules, you can ignore them during prep.
What type of expert feedback is crucial for speaking and writing improvement? Feedback from an experienced examiner is essential for speaking and writing to pinpoint your specific weaknesses. This ensures that you improve on the areas where you need it most.
Why does the source emphasize slowing down the learning process? The source emphasizes slowing down to focus on improving specific weaknesses rather than doing many practice tests and hoping for a high score. This means you should focus on areas that need work instead of doing a lot of practice tests.
What is the key idea regarding vocabulary usage for the IELTS test, according to the source? The source advises using clear, easily understood vocabulary and only using words that you can spell correctly and confidently. You should not try to use high level words that you don’t know well.
What does the marking criteria say about using linking words in writing? The marking criteria state that effective cohesion should not draw attention to itself and should not be mechanical or faulty. Using linking words should not be forced or inappropriate.
What does the source say about grammatical range versus accuracy? Both grammatical range and accuracy are important, but the source states that more than 50% of your sentences must be error-free to get a band seven or above. You should focus on accuracy first.
According to the source, why should you avoid using “hooks” in your IELTS essay? Hooks are a waste of time because examiners are paid to read your essay and are not interested in the type of creative intro that a hook provides. They do not give you any additional points.
Why should you avoid memorized templates in your IELTS essay? Memorized templates are easy for examiners to spot and indicate a lack of ability to write fluently, so avoid them. They can also lead to errors because they are not specific to the questions.
What are the three things to think about when generating ideas for your essay? You need to make sure your ideas are relevant, that you can develop them, and that you can think of them quickly. The ideas need to be something you know you can expand on and that you can get to fast.
What is the “coffee shop method,” and what is its purpose? The coffee shop method involves imagining you are discussing the test question in a relaxed setting, like a coffee shop, to generate ideas naturally. It’s intended to reduce stress and allow your brain to think more normally about how to answer a question.

Answer Key

You should prioritize modules where you have lower scores from previous tests. If you have a high enough score in any of the four modules, you can ignore them during prep.
Feedback from an experienced examiner is essential for speaking and writing to pinpoint your specific weaknesses. This ensures that you improve on the areas where you need it most.
The source emphasizes slowing down to focus on improving specific weaknesses rather than doing many practice tests and hoping for a high score. This means you should focus on areas that need work instead of doing a lot of practice tests.
The source advises using clear, easily understood vocabulary and only using words that you can spell correctly and confidently. You should not try to use high level words that you don’t know well.
The marking criteria state that effective cohesion should not draw attention to itself and should not be mechanical or faulty. Using linking words should not be forced or inappropriate.
Both grammatical range and accuracy are important, but the source states that more than 50% of your sentences must be error-free to get a band seven or above. You should focus on accuracy first.
Hooks are a waste of time because examiners are paid to read your essay and are not interested in the type of creative intro that a hook provides. They do not give you any additional points.
Memorized templates are easy for examiners to spot and indicate a lack of ability to write fluently, so avoid them. They can also lead to errors because they are not specific to the questions.
You need to make sure your ideas are relevant, that you can develop them, and that you can think of them quickly. The ideas need to be something you know you can expand on and that you can get to fast.
The coffee shop method involves imagining you are discussing the test question in a relaxed setting, like a coffee shop, to generate ideas naturally. It’s intended to reduce stress and allow your brain to think more normally about how to answer a question.

Essay Questions

The source strongly critiques using memorized templates and “hooks” in IELTS writing. To what extent do you agree with this critique? How do these practices affect a candidate’s overall score according to the source?
The source argues that accuracy is more crucial than a wide range of vocabulary or complex grammatical structures. How does this advice align with the official IELTS marking criteria? Provide specific examples to justify your response.
How can the “coffee shop method” and “family fortunes method” aid in idea generation, and how do they address the inadequacies of traditional brainstorming techniques? Explain each method and provide examples from your own experience on how they may help or hinder your own writing.
According to the source, a common error among IELTS test takers is the use of personal examples in their essays. How does the source advocate transforming personal anecdotes to make them suitable for academic writing? Explain the process and provide examples of both types of sentences.
The source emphasizes the importance of understanding both what to do and what to avoid in order to improve your IELTS writing. How does the source show and support the common errors in writing and also help the test taker better understand how to improve their score?

Glossary

Band Score: A numerical score ranging from 0 to 9, indicating a candidate’s proficiency in English on the IELTS test.
Cohesion: How well the parts of a piece of writing fit together, creating a unified and logical whole using linking words appropriately.
Coherence: The overall clarity and understandability of a piece of writing. The ideas are well-organized and flow smoothly.
Collocation: A combination of words that are frequently used together, such as “viable solution.”
Error-Free Sentences: Sentences without grammatical, punctuation, or spelling mistakes.
Feedback: Constructive criticism and advice on how to improve your work.
Grammatical Range: The variety of grammatical structures used in a piece of writing.
Idiomatic Language: Natural language that native English speakers would use, including but not limited to idioms.
IELTS (International English Language Testing System): An international standardized test of English language proficiency for non-native English language speakers.
Hook: In writing, an opening line or strategy used to grab the reader’s attention; but that are ineffective for the IELTS essay.
Lexical Resource: The range and appropriate use of vocabulary in a piece of writing.
Marking Criteria: The standards used to evaluate and score the IELTS exam.
Module: One of the four sections of the IELTS test: Listening, Reading, Writing, and Speaking.
Template: A pre-set structure or formula used to organize writing, but can hinder individual expression and often indicates a failure to answer the specific test questions.
Task Achievement: How fully the test taker achieves the requirements of a particular task or test question.
Viable: Capable of succeeding, often used to describe a plan or solution.

IELTS Writing Mastery: Strategies and Pitfalls

Okay, here’s a detailed briefing document summarizing the key themes and ideas from the provided text:

Briefing Document: IELTS Test Preparation Strategies & Common Pitfalls

Introduction:

This document analyzes a collection of excerpts offering advice on preparing for the IELTS exam, specifically focusing on common mistakes and effective strategies for achieving higher scores, especially in the writing module. The core message revolves around moving away from rote memorization and focusing on clear communication and accuracy. It strongly criticizes popular online tips and tricks that often mislead students.

Key Themes & Ideas:

Personalized Study Approach:

Identify Weaknesses: The first step is to assess your existing proficiency in the four IELTS modules (reading, writing, speaking, listening). You should only focus on modules where you have not already reached your target band score.
Optimize: Within each module, pinpoint specific weaknesses and make those into strengths. It’s important to address all weaknesses to achieve a desired band level (“you will not get a band seven unless everything is at a bond seven level”).
Expert Feedback: Get feedback on speaking and writing from experienced examiners. This investment is worthwhile and will help avoid repeated failures. “your goal is not to save money your goal is to get the I score that you need as quickly as possible.”

Focus on Clear Communication Over Complex Vocabulary:

Accuracy over Range: While high-level vocabulary is good, accuracy is crucial. “attempts to use less common vocabulary but with some inaccuracy” is a common reason for a band 6 score. The goal is to communicate clearly, not to showcase a large vocabulary.
Simple and Understandable: Use vocabulary that is easy to understand for the reader. “it is not a vocabulary test it is a writing test it is testing your ability to clearly communicate with the reader.”
Spell Correctly: Use only words that you can spell to avoid indicating inaccuracy to the examiner.
Experience of Successful Students: Many successful students simplified vocabulary for a higher score.

Cohesion & Coherence (Linking Words):

Faulty or Mechanical Use: Overuse of linking words, or using them inaccurately (“faulty or mechanical”), leads to lower scores. A robotic application of high-level linking words will be obvious to examiners.
Natural Flow: Effective cohesion should not draw attention to itself. “uses cohesion in such a way that attracts no attention”. Focus on using common linking words appropriately.
Example of Good vs Bad Cohesion: The source compares a paragraph with many linking words causing repetition vs. a paragraph using “because” effectively to show a clear logical flow.

Grammar: Accuracy Over Range:

Both are important: the band descriptors make it clear that both grammatical range and accuracy are important.
Error-Free Sentences: Aim for frequent, error-free sentences, at least 50% of your sentences must be without errors to achieve a band 7 or above. “produces frequent error free sentences.”
Prioritize Accuracy: Increasing grammatical range at the expense of accuracy is counterproductive. “uses a range of grammatical structures correctly”.

Avoid Memorization & Templates:

Hooks are Unnecessary: Avoid introductory hooks because examiners are paid to read, so they will review the essay no matter what the opening is. “The Examiner is being paid to check your essay you don’t need to to hook them in at all”.
Clichés are Bad: Avoid cliches, like “hotly debated topic”, which display a lack of original thought. “a phrase or opinion that is overused and most importantly betrays a lack of original thought”.
Memorized Responses = Zero: Memorizing responses or templates can result in a band 0 as it is considered a failure to attempt the task or demonstrate actual writing ability. “memorizing these templates is the same as a student that falls asleep for the entirity of the ielt writing test”.
IDP Guidelines: IDP advises against using memorized phrases or examples and outline thesis statements. They don’t want to know what you will discuss, just to discuss it.
Overused Vocabulary: Memorized phrases or words are spotted by examiners and suggest an inability to think independently. Using words like “plethora” often demonstrates an attempt at memorization rather than authentic communication.

Examples and Supporting Arguments:

Relevance: All examples should be relevant to the main idea.
Sample Size Matters: A personal experience is fine as a starting point, but make an effort to broaden the scope and add more authority to your argument (“many people in Ireland live close to buildings that date back centuries”). Avoid very personal or vague examples.
Specificity: Be specific with your examples, linking them directly to the point being made. Avoid general statements (“the best driving experience ever”)

Word Count and Length:

250 Words Minimum: You must write at least 250 words for Task 2.
Not the More the Better: More is not always better. Writing too much over 300 words can lead to going off topic and not enough time for proofreading. (“once students start to write more than 300 words two things happen number one they generally go off topic and number two they don’t have enough time to check their work proofread their work”).

Brainstorming and Idea Generation:

Flaws of Brainstorming: Traditional brainstorming can lead to irrelevant ideas.
Relevance, Development, Quick Thinking: Good ideas must be relevant, developable, and easy to think of quickly.
The Coffee Shop Method: Imagine you’re discussing the question with a friend in a casual setting. This promotes relevant idea generation.
Family Fortunes Method: This is an alternative if the coffee shop method isn’t working, especially for over-thinkers.
Personal Experience: Start with a personal example and think about how to generalize that example to have more authority in your writing.

Common Myths about IELTS Vocabulary

Idioms are for Speaking: Idioms are not suitable for academic writing task 2 or formal letters, use them only in informal letters or speaking.
Idiomatic Language: This means using natural English, not necessarily idioms. Native English speakers don’t usually use idioms very often.
Real-World Use: You will not use memorized phrases or vocabulary in the real world. The test is testing your ability to communicate in a real-world context.
High-Level Words: Only a small percentage of words in high-scoring essays are C1 or C2 level, which means you should focus on using them correctly, rather than focusing on inserting them just for the sake of it.

Key Vocabulary to Improve IELTS Essays

This document provides a list of vocabulary words along with their definitions, synonyms, common collocations and sample sentences taken from real student essays. This vocabulary is not meant to be memorized, but to be used as a tool for improving the accuracy and sophistication of your writing. (the document goes on to provide a long list of vocabulary, which will not be summarized here)

Common Mistakes and How to Fix Them (Analysis of a Band 6 Essay)

Background Statements: Avoid them (like ‘Nows a days’) as they are memorized and not authentic. They also take up time that you should use for actually answering the questions. They also demonstrate a lack of ability to write independently to the examiner.
No Clear Position: In your introduction, you need to state your position, what you believe is the answer to the question. You need to do this from the beginning and through the essay.
Two Main Ideas in One Paragraph: Do not try to cram multiple ideas into a single main body paragraph. Instead, focus on fully developing each idea in its own paragraph.
Bad Explanations: Avoid bad or confusing explanations by simplifying and clarifying your thoughts. Always ask “so what?” and explain why your point is important.
Personal Examples: Generalize personal examples rather than providing specific personal stories (“My brother did this”).
Sitting on the Fence: Take a position on the topic, stop beating around the bush and tell the examiner your opinion. Don’t just recommend, and give you opinion.
Focus on Accuracy: Accuracy is far more important than range. Do not try to add sophisticated vocabulary or structures that lead to mistakes.
Topic Sentences: Make each paragraph about ONE main point. Make that point clear from the very beginning of your paragraphs with a clear topic sentence.
Avoid Redundant Ideas: In your conclusion, do not introduce new ideas. Focus on summarizing the main ideas of the essay.

Thinking Critically about IELTS Questions

Avoid Jumping to Conclusions: You need to consider all possible viewpoints and perspectives when planning your essay.
Why do they believe that: You need to be able to explain clearly why people hold opposing views on a topic.
It is very common for students to get ideas wrong. It is crucial that you develop ways to check that your ideas make sense, and that they answer the questions.
Putting Yourself in Other’s Shoes: Imagine the same problem from different viewpoints to add authority and different angles.

Analysis of High-Scoring Essays

Don’t Copy: Do not copy high-scoring essays word for word. These essays are not perfect, they just use techniques effectively to demonstrate their English skills.
Not Perfect: You can learn from real essays that have real mistakes that demonstrate areas for improvement. This helps improve your own knowledge and skill.
Analyze the Structure: Think about how the essay is structured, and why the writer chose to structure it in that way.
Linking Words: Analyze linking words and cohesive devices to determine why the writer used them.
Grammar Mistakes: Identify mistakes and then think about the grammatical rules and why those mistakes were made.
Grammatical Structures: Think about why specific grammatical structures and tenses were chosen.
Vocabulary: Analyze vocabulary, collocations and phrases to guess their meaning in the context.
Vocab Mistakes: Identify vocabulary mistakes and think about ways to make them better.

Conclusion:

The advice presented emphasizes moving beyond surface-level tips and tricks and focusing on a deeper understanding of the requirements of the IELTS exam. The core message is to prioritize clarity, accuracy, and authentic communication over complex language and memorized structures. Successful IELTS preparation involves personalized study, seeking expert feedback, and critical thinking.

This document provides a thorough overview of the source material. Please let me know if you have further questions.

Optimizing Your IELTS Strategy

1. How can I identify which areas of the IELTS test I need to focus on?

Begin by reviewing your past IELTS test scores across the four modules: writing, speaking, reading, and listening. If you have consistently scored half a band higher than your target band in a particular module, you likely don’t need to spend much time studying that module. For example, if you need a Band 7 overall and have consistently scored a Band 7 or higher in listening in past tests, then you can reduce your study time for listening and focus on other areas that require more work.

2. How do I optimize my study approach for the IELTS test?

After identifying the modules that require the most focus, pinpoint the specific weaknesses within those modules. To improve, turn each weakness into a strength. Remember that your overall band score will be limited by your weakest skills. It’s essential to get feedback from a real expert who has been an IELTS examiner for many years to accurately assess your weaknesses in speaking and writing. This is vital because you likely “don’t know what you don’t know” in areas of weakness.

3. Why is it important to get expert feedback on my IELTS performance?

Expert feedback from an experienced IELTS examiner is crucial for accurately identifying your weaknesses and monitoring your progress. While it might seem like an extra expense, investing in expert feedback is much more cost-effective than repeatedly failing the test and it is the best way to improve quickly. Expert feedback pinpoints areas for improvement more accurately than self-evaluation and general teachers.

4. Should I prioritize taking practice tests or focusing on improving my weaknesses?

It is more effective to focus on improving your key weaknesses before taking numerous practice tests. Avoid writing essays or doing practice tests until you have seen tangible improvement on your weaker areas. Once you have improved your specific weaknesses based on expert feedback, then you can integrate practice tests into your study routine.

5. How should I approach vocabulary in the IELTS writing test?

Focus on using vocabulary that you understand well and can use accurately rather than trying to incorporate less common or “high-level” words incorrectly. The IELTS writing test is not primarily a vocabulary test; it’s a test of your ability to clearly communicate your ideas effectively in writing. The official band descriptors emphasize a balance between range and accuracy. Using common words accurately and clearly is better than using complex words incorrectly. Additionally, avoid memorizing lists of C1/C2 words and only use vocabulary that you are confident in your ability to spell.

6. Is it beneficial to use lots of linking words and cohesive devices in IELTS writing?

Overusing linking words or using them in a mechanical or inappropriate way will not improve your IELTS score. Focus on using cohesion in a way that is natural and goes unnoticed by the reader. Cohesion should come from a natural communication of ideas and not from forced or excessive linking words. It is far better to focus on using only connecting words when necessary and focus on communicating ideas clearly.

7. Should I prioritize grammatical range or grammatical accuracy?

Both grammatical range (using a wide variety of structures) and accuracy (using structures correctly without errors) are essential for a high IELTS score. However, accuracy should be your main focus. According to the official band descriptors, you should produce error-free sentences frequently (more than 50% of the time) to reach a Band 7 or higher. Trying to increase your range without focusing on accuracy will usually hurt your score because you will be introducing more errors.

8. What common errors should I avoid in my IELTS writing introduction?

Avoid using “hooks” to try to engage the examiner, as they are being paid to read your essay regardless of how interesting it is. Also, do not include cliches like “this is a hotly debated topic nowadays” as these betray a lack of original thought and are often overused. In addition, you should avoid adding memorized impressive vocabulary words or phrases that you may not know how to use properly as this indicates you believe that the test is a memorization test. Finally, do not use memorized formulas or structures and avoid stating what you are going to say in your essay. Instead, it is better to clearly state your position on the issue in a straightforward manner.

Mastering the IELTS: A Step-by-Step Guide

Okay, here is the detailed timeline and cast of characters based on the provided text:

Timeline of Main Events & Concepts

Unspecified Time (Prior to the Video):
Many IELTS students struggle with the test, often failing multiple times.
Common online advice and teaching methods for the IELTS are often ineffective, leading to repeated failures and frustration for many test takers.
Common tips include: focusing on high level vocabulary and linking words, memorizing templates and phrases, and using statistics.
Brainstorming is commonly taught as a method for idea generation.
Many students come from educational backgrounds where they were taught not to take strong positions, and this impacts their performance on the IELTS test.
Start of Video/Presentation (Step-by-Step Guide):
Step 1: Analyze: Students should analyze their previous IELTS test results to identify weaker modules (writing, speaking, reading, listening) and focus on them.
Step 2: Prioritize: Focus on modules where a higher score is needed, avoiding unnecessary study of stronger modules. This will help cut down on study time by 75%.
Step 3: Optimize: Identify key weaknesses within the target modules and work to improve them. Expert feedback from an IELTS examiner is crucial for speaking and writing.
Step 4: Slow Down: Instead of taking many practice tests, students should slow down and focus on improving key weaknesses.
Step 5: (Unspecified): The video continues, but the steps are not sequentially numbered.
Vocabulary Students should focus on using simple easy to understand words accurately. Do not use big words incorrectly.
Cohesion: The focus should be on using linking words naturally and effectively, not mechanically.
Grammar: Students should prioritize accuracy over range, ensuring a high percentage of error-free sentences, and work on writing grammatically accurate sentences instead of trying to use complex grammar.
Memorized Templates: Avoid using memorized language and phrases, which examiners easily spot; this includes hooks, cliches, and memorized topic statements.
Statistics: Use personal examples instead of statistics to support your arguments, or real examples related to the topic. Avoid statistics if not applicable to the idea you are conveying.
Idioms: Avoid idioms in writing; they are for speaking and informal situations only.
Word Length: Write more than 250 words for Task 2, but more does not equal higher scores; going over 300 can lead to problems.
Generating Ideas: Brainstorming is a useless activity because it results in irrelevant ideas. Students should instead practice thinking like a normal person in a coffee shop, and not stress out as if it were a test.
Personal Examples: Students should take personal examples and expand the data sample size by thinking about how many others are experiencing the same.
Specific Details: Examples should be as specific and relevant as possible to the point you are making.
Vocabulary: Focus on high-level vocabulary, including the use of viable, schooling, renowned, prime, prone, intellect, incentives, irrespective, fundamental, disclose, detrimental, adolescence, accountable, addressed, affluent, allocate, capabilities, commonly, consumption, competence, corruption, downsides, drawbacks, deficiency, establishments, expenditure, exceed, harassment, hence, implications, innate, nutritional, thrive, unsafe, unwind, mediocre, notable, numerous, peers, phenomenon, proportion, revenue, resent, rigid, subsequent, ubiquitous, valid, vulnerable, wary, widespread. Students are shown how to incorporate these words effectively into their writing.
Band 6 Essay Example: The video analyzes a Band 6 essay, identifying common mistakes such as using a background statement, failing to state an opinion, failing to develop ideas fully, lack of clarity, inaccurate linking words, too many grammatical errors, and lack of task response.
Band 8 Transformation: The video demonstrates how to transform the Band 6 essay into a Band 8 essay by making the appropriate changes by providing a clear position, clear ideas that are fully developed with good examples, by focusing on accuracy and clarity in the grammar and by cutting out unnecessary filler sentences.
Analysis of High-Scoring Essays:
High level essays use a low percentage of C1/C2 level vocabulary. The majority of words are A1-B2, which demonstrates that the focus should be on clarity and not on the use of complex vocabulary.
Real Test Simulation:
A real test situation is simulated with the instructor writing a task 2 and a task 1 in a timed setting, demonstrating the process from planning to finalizing a test essay.
Analysis of Sample Essays:
The video explains how students should analyze example essays focusing on the following points: if the essay makes sense, if the essay follows a logical structure, if the linking words were used effectively, if there are grammatical mistakes and why they were made, and if the vocabulary was used appropriately and in a topic specific manner.
Students should also look for things that they do not know and then research these things so that they are learning about the language as they prepare for the exam.
Additional Tips and Guidance:
Students should not look for things that they can copy, and should never copy an entire essay.
Students should make a vocabulary book for new vocabulary that they learn.
Students should take time to read the news from multiple sources from all around the world to improve their general knowledge and their ability to generate ideas.
Students should avoid writing long, complex sentences and instead focus on accuracy and clarity.
Students should remember the test is about communication and not about demonstrating how much vocabulary they have memorized.
Students need to take a clear position and opinion on a topic.
Students should think like an examiner, and evaluate their own work using the official marking criteria.

Cast of Characters

The Video Presenter/Instructor: This individual is the main speaker throughout the video. They are an experienced IELTS teacher (likely with an online course). They offer practical advice and critique common IELTS preparation methods. They demonstrate the planning and writing process in real time. They claim to have many success stories from their VIP course.
IELTS Examiners (General): Referred to frequently as the individuals who assess IELTS writing. They are portrayed as being very familiar with the common errors and are not impressed by memorized phrases or overly complex vocabulary.
Navjot: A student who failed the IELTS writing test multiple times before using the instructor’s strategy and improving her score.
The Instructor’s Students (General): Referred to throughout the video. They serve as examples of common mistakes. They also provide examples of students who have seen success on the test using the strategies presented in the video.
The Instructor’s English Teacher: Mentioned as a teacher who was very violent and would constantly ask “so what” as a way of helping students develop their explanation skills.
The Instructor’s Brother: Used as an example of an engineer who built a high-speed rail network.
The Instructor’s Family: Used to show how the government pays for doctors and lawyers to be trained.
The Instructor’s Friend: Used as a way of demonstrating informal letter writing in Task 1.
The Beatles Producer (George Martin): Mentioned when talking about music.

Let me know if you would like any further clarification or have more questions.

IELTS Writing Task 2: Strategies for Success

The sources provide extensive information about the IELTS writing test, particularly Task 2, and offer advice on how to improve scores. Here’s a breakdown of key points:

General Advice and Key Principles

The Golden Rule for IELTS writing is to focus on clear communication with the reader [1-4]. The test is not about memorizing complex vocabulary or structures, but about effectively conveying your thoughts in English [3].
Writing is a reflection of thinking. If your thoughts are confused, your writing will also be confused [2, 4].
Simplicity is key. Use vocabulary that is easy to understand and that you can spell correctly [3]. Focus on answering the question directly with simple ideas [5, 6].
Accuracy is more important than range [3, 7, 8]. While a range of grammatical structures is important, it’s crucial that they are used accurately [7]. Over 50% of your sentences should be error-free to score above a band 6 [7].
Avoid memorization. Do not use memorized language, phrases, or examples [9, 10]. Examiners can easily spot these, and they do not demonstrate your ability to write fluently [9, 11, 12].
Reduce stress. Being stressed will negatively impact your ability to think clearly and write well [13, 14]. Normalizing the test situation can help you think more clearly [14].
Focus on answering the question. The number one thing the examiner is looking for is if you have clearly answered the question [4].
Do not overuse linking words. Use them in a way that attracts no attention from the reader [15, 16]. Avoid using them at the beginning of every sentence [15].
Do not repeat words unnecessarily. However, do not change words to things that you are not sure of [8, 13]. If you know a synonym is 100% correct, use it, otherwise repeat [13].

Common Mistakes to Avoid

Using High-Level Vocabulary Inaccurately. Do not attempt to use complex words (C1, C2) if you are not sure of their meaning, spelling, or collocation. It’s better to use simpler words accurately [2, 3]. Many students fail by trying to memorize and use high-level words inaccurately [3].
Overusing linking words. Avoid using too many linking words or using them inappropriately [15].
Prioritizing range over accuracy in grammar. Focusing solely on using a wide range of grammatical structures often leads to mistakes and a lower score. Use a range of structures safely and appropriately, prioritizing accuracy [7, 8, 17].
Repeating words unnecessarily. Avoid changing words to things you are not sure of [8, 13]. If you know a synonym is 100% correct, use it, otherwise repeat the word [13].
Including a “hook” in the introduction. Hooks are unnecessary and a waste of time, as examiners are paid to read your essay [9, 10].
Using templates or memorized language. Avoid using memorized phrases and essay templates [9]. Examiners recognize these immediately, and they do not demonstrate your English ability [9, 12].
Using statistics, surveys, and research. Don’t use statistics if you don’t know them well [18]. Instead, use real-world examples [18, 19].
Using idioms in Task 2. Idioms are informal and should not be used in Task 2 writing [19, 20]. They are more appropriate for the speaking test and informal letters [19].
Writing too much. While you must write more than 250 words, writing too much (over 300) can cause you to go off-topic, make mistakes and run out of time to proofread [20].
Including background statements. Avoid starting your essay with a background statement, as it’s often a memorized sentence that wastes time and doesn’t improve your score [21, 22].

Strategies for Improvement

Practice under timed conditions. Work to complete Task 2 essays within the 40-minute time limit [2].
Focus on real questions. Use official IELTS questions from Cambridge books or the IDP website [5, 23].
Simplify your approach. Think of the simplest, most obvious ideas [5, 6].
Use the “coffee shop method”: Imagine you’re discussing the question with a friend in a coffee shop to reduce stress [14].
Use “family fortunes”: Think about the most common answers to a question, as if you were on a game show [24].
Use real examples: Focus on real examples that you can personally relate to. Don’t use made up examples, use real ones [19, 24-26].
Check your writing for relevance, development and speed: Make sure your ideas are relevant, you can develop them, and that you can think of them quickly [27].

Specific Essay Components

Introduction:
Paraphrase the question [18, 25].
Clearly state your position [25].
Avoid hooks, cliches, and memorized phrases [9-11].
Do not tell the examiner what you are going to discuss in your essay [9]. Instead, immediately address the question [18].
Main Body Paragraphs:
Start with a clear topic sentence that matches your main idea [28].
Develop your ideas with explanations and examples [27].
Conclusion:
Summarize the main points and restate your opinion [5].
Use simple transitions like “in conclusion” [29].

Vocabulary

Focus on accurate and appropriate use of vocabulary, rather than just using high-level words. Aim for natural language [3, 26].
Learn collocations. Pay attention to how words are used together [30-33].
Use a variety of words. Use words from all levels: A1, A2, B1, B2, C1, and C2 [34].

Sample Essays

Use real band 7, 8, and 9 essays: Avoid fake sample essays [35, 36].
Do not passively read: Don’t just pick up and read the sample essays. Use them actively to improve your writing [36].
Do not copy: Do not copy chunks or full essays to use in your own writing [37].
Analyze idea generation: Identify the main ideas in the sample essays and compare them with your own [38, 39].
Analyze idea development: Compare your explanations and examples with those in the sample essays [39].
Analyze structure: Identify the structure of the essays, such as introduction, main body paragraphs, and conclusion [39, 40].
Identify linking words: Look at how the essays use linking words [40].
Analyze grammar: Pay attention to how grammar is used correctly and effectively [41].
Analyze vocabulary: Identify any vocabulary mistakes and look for ways to improve your own word choice [41].
Compare your essays: Compare your essays with the sample essays, but don’t think that if your essay is different that it is wrong [41].

This information should help you understand the key principles of IELTS writing and how to improve your score.

IELTS Task 2 Essay Structure

The sources provide a great deal of information about essay structure for the IELTS writing test, particularly Task 2. Here’s a breakdown of the recommended approach:

General Principles

Focus on answering the question: The primary purpose of an essay is to clearly tell the examiner what you think about the question [1]. All parts of your essay (introduction, main body, conclusion) should work towards this goal [1-3].
Simplicity: Focus on clear and simple structures that help the examiner understand your ideas easily. Avoid overly complicated structures that can lead to errors and confusion [3, 4].
Avoid rigid templates: Do not use memorized formulas or templates. They don’t allow you to think for yourself [5-7]. Instead, focus on clearly addressing the specific requirements of the question [7].

Essay Components

The sources emphasize a clear and logical flow within your essay, and each component has a specific purpose:

IntroductionParaphrase the question: Begin by restating the question in your own words [8-10]. This demonstrates your understanding of the question [8].
State your position: Clearly and directly state your opinion or position regarding the question [9, 11]. Do this immediately after paraphrasing the question [9].
Introduce main ideas: Briefly present the main points or reasons that support your position [9, 11]. This provides a roadmap for the rest of your essay [2, 3].
Avoid unnecessary elements: Do not include hooks, background statements, or phrases like “this essay will discuss” [6, 7, 10, 12].
Main Body ParagraphsTopic sentence: Each main body paragraph should begin with a clear topic sentence that directly relates to one of your main ideas from your introduction [13].
Explanation: Explain the main idea in more detail. Use logical reasoning to support your point [3, 13, 14].
Example: Support your main idea with a specific and relevant example from your personal experience or observations [8, 15].
ConclusionSummarize main points: Briefly restate the main ideas that you discussed in your main body paragraphs [3].
Reiterate your position: Restate your overall position on the question [3].
Keep it simple: Use a simple transition phrase like “in conclusion” [16]. Do not add new information [3].

Key Considerations for Different Question Types

The sources emphasize that you should tailor your response to the specific question type [7]. While the overall structure will remain the same, the specific elements within each component might differ based on what the question is asking you to do.
Opinion questions (Do you agree or disagree?):
State whether you agree, disagree, or partially agree in your introduction [11].
Provide reasons and examples to support your stance [3, 9].
Discussion questions (Discuss both views and give your opinion):
Acknowledge both sides of the issue in your introduction [9].
Clearly state your opinion or agreement with one side [9].
Dedicate a paragraph to each view before giving your own opinion [2, 9].
Problem/solution questions:
State the problem and the solution in your introduction [17, 18].
Dedicate a paragraph to the problem and one to the solution [17, 18].
Explain the problem and then explain your solution, always supporting each with examples [17, 18].

Additional Tips

Plan your essay: Before you start writing, take a few minutes to plan your essay [3]. Outline your main ideas and how they relate to the question. This will help you stay focused and on track [3, 19].
Coherence and cohesion: Make sure your ideas flow logically from one to another using simple, accurate linking words [3, 15, 20].
Prioritize clarity over complexity: Use simple language to clearly communicate your ideas. Avoid trying to impress the examiner with overly complicated language or structures [10, 21].

By following these guidelines, you can effectively structure your IELTS Task 2 essays, ensuring that you clearly answer the question and demonstrate your writing skills. The sources also emphasize that you should be flexible and adapt this advice to suit your own style and the specific questions you face on test day.

IELTS Writing Task 2: Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

The sources identify numerous common mistakes that students make on the IELTS writing test, particularly in Task 2. Understanding and avoiding these errors is crucial for achieving a higher score. Here’s a breakdown of these mistakes, drawing from the sources and our conversation history:

General Writing Issues

Prioritizing range over accuracy: Many students focus on using a wide range of vocabulary and grammar but make errors as a result [1, 2]. The test prioritizes accuracy over range; it’s better to use simpler language correctly than to attempt complex language inaccurately [1, 2]. Over 50% of sentences should be error-free to get a band 7 or above [2].
Overcomplicating vocabulary: Students often try to use high-level vocabulary (C1, C2) that they don’t fully understand, leading to incorrect usage, spelling, or collocations [1, 3]. It’s best to use words you are comfortable with and can use accurately [1].
Overusing linking words: Using too many linking words, especially at the beginning of sentences, is a common error [4]. Linking words should be used to enhance coherence, not distract from it [4]. Native English speakers would not overuse linking words [4].
Repeating words unnecessarily: While you don’t want to overuse linking words, you don’t want to change words to things that you are not sure of. If you know a synonym is 100% correct, use it, otherwise repeat the word [5].
Memorizing language: Using memorized phrases, templates, or examples is easily recognized by examiners and does not demonstrate genuine English ability [3, 6, 7]. The test is not a memorization exercise; it is designed to assess your ability to communicate effectively in English [3, 7].

Introduction Issues

Including a “hook”: Trying to “hook” the reader with an interesting introduction is unnecessary and a waste of time, as the examiner is paid to read your essay [6, 8].
Using clichés: Starting with overused phrases like “a hotly debated topic” shows a lack of original thought and is not natural [8].
Including background statements: Starting with a background statement is often a sign of using a template and does not improve your score [9, 10].
Poor thesis statement: Using a thesis statement that is memorized or does not accurately address the question, or includes information not directly related to the question is a common error [11].
Not paraphrasing the question: Failing to restate the question in your own words shows a lack of understanding [9, 12, 13].

Main Body Issues

Lack of clear topic sentences: Failing to start paragraphs with clear topic sentences that match your main ideas makes the essay difficult to follow [14].
Underdeveloped ideas: Not providing enough explanation and examples to support your main ideas will lower your score [15].
Including irrelevant ideas: Focusing on information that is not directly related to the question is a waste of time [16].

Conclusion Issues

Using informal language: Avoid using informal language in your conclusion. For example, do not begin a conclusion with “in a nutshell” [15].
Adding new information: Do not include new ideas or information in your conclusion [17].

Example and Support Issues

Using statistics incorrectly: Including statistics that are not accurate or do not make sense will lower your score. It’s better to use real, personal examples [18, 19].
Using made up examples: If your examples don’t make sense, examiners will know that you made it up [20]. Use examples from your own life [21].
Not developing examples: Not providing sufficient details and explanations for your examples will not demonstrate your ability to develop ideas [22].

Other Issues

Writing too much: While you must write over 250 words, writing too much (over 300) often leads to mistakes and going off-topic [23].
Misunderstanding the question: It is critical to understand the question fully before attempting to write your essay [24].
Failing to take a position: In opinion essays, you must clearly state your position. Avoid being “wishy-washy” or not taking a stance [25].
Ignoring the prompt: In discussion questions, it is important to fully address all parts of the prompt. For example, if you are asked to discuss both sides and give your opinion, be sure to do all of those things [16].
Using idioms: Avoid using idioms in Task 2 as it is a formal style of writing [19].
Spelling mistakes: Spelling errors indicate inaccurate use of vocabulary [1, 3].

How to Avoid These Mistakes

Focus on clear communication: Always prioritize clear communication with the examiner above all else [1].
Simplify language: Use vocabulary and grammar that you are confident in [1].
Use a clear structure: Structure your essay logically, with a clear introduction, main body, and conclusion [26].
Plan before writing: Take a few minutes to plan your essay, outlining your main ideas and supporting points before you start writing [26].
Practice consistently: Work through practice questions and learn from your mistakes. The sources emphasize learning what to avoid is just as important as learning what to do [27].
Get feedback: Seek feedback from experienced teachers or tutors who can identify your specific mistakes and give you advice on how to improve [15].

By being aware of these common errors and taking steps to avoid them, you can significantly improve your IELTS writing score.

IELTS Writing Band Scores: A Comprehensive Guide

The sources provide a detailed explanation of IELTS band scores, particularly for writing, and how they relate to the test criteria [1-3]. Here’s a breakdown of the key concepts:

Overall Scoring

Four Modules: The IELTS test has four modules: Listening, Reading, Writing, and Speaking [4]. Each module is scored on a scale from 1 to 9, with 9 being the highest.
Band Score Averages: Test takers receive an individual band score for each module and an overall average band score.
Consistent Scoring: To achieve a specific overall band score, you must generally score at or above that level in all modules. If one or more scores are lower, it will impact the overall band. For instance, if a candidate needs a band 7, they must score at least a 7 in all modules [4].
Expert Feedback: You need feedback from an expert, preferably someone who has been an examiner, to identify your weaknesses to achieve a higher score [4].

Writing Band Descriptors

The official band descriptors are what examiners use to mark your essay, so it’s critical to understand what they are looking for [2]. The following is a discussion of the key elements:

Task Response:
Band 6: Main ideas are relevant but may be insufficiently developed or lack clarity. Some supporting arguments and evidence may be less relevant or inadequate [5].
Band 7: The main parts of the prompt are appropriately addressed [6].
Band 8: The prompt is appropriately and sufficiently addressed. Ideas are relevant, well-extended, and supported [5, 6].
Band 9: Fully satisfies all the requirements of the task. Presents a fully developed response [7].
Coherence and Cohesion: This relates to how well your essay flows and how well your ideas are connected.
Band 6: Uses cohesive devices effectively but cohesion within and between sentences may be faulty or mechanical [8, 9].
Band 9: Uses cohesion in such a way that attracts no attention; it is seamless and natural [8, 9]. Overuse of linking words can lower your score.
Lexical Resource (Vocabulary)Band 4: Uses only basic vocabulary which may be used repetitively or inappropriately for the task [10].
Band 6: Attempts to use less common vocabulary, but with some inaccuracy [11]. This is a very common score for vocabulary.
Band 9: Uses a wide range of vocabulary with very natural and sophisticated control of lexical features [7].
Grammatical Range and AccuracyBand 6: Uses a mix of simple and complex structures but with some errors [12].
Band 8 and 9: Uses a wide range of structures with very few errors, but you can still get a high score even with some mistakes [13, 14]. Accuracy is more important than range.

Key Factors Affecting Band Scores

Accuracy: Accuracy is prioritized over range for both grammar and vocabulary. Making errors, particularly spelling and grammar, will lower your score.
Relevance: Ideas must be relevant to the question, and you must address all parts of the prompt [6].
Development: Ideas must be fully explained and supported with examples [14].
Clarity: Your writing should be clear and easy for the examiner to understand [11]. Simpler, clearer essays generally achieve higher scores.
Avoiding memorization: Do not use memorized phrases, templates, or examples. The test is designed to assess your ability to communicate effectively in English [15, 16].
Appropriate Language: Use language that is appropriate for the task. Avoid overly formal or informal language.
Thinking Clearly: The examiner is testing your ability to think clearly about a topic and then write about that clearly in English [2, 17].

Common Issues Leading to Lower Scores

Background Statements: Starting with background statements, which are memorized, is a waste of time. The examiners have seen these statements hundreds of times [3].
Overuse of Linking Words: Overusing or inappropriately using linking words can make your writing seem unnatural and lower your score.
Too Many Ideas: Trying to include too many ideas in a single paragraph prevents you from fully developing the most important ones [5].
Spelling errors: Spelling errors count against you [18].
Not answering the question: It is critical to answer the question directly [6]. Many students write good essays but don’t answer the question.
Not Taking a position: In opinion essays, not clearly stating and maintaining your position will lower your score.

How to Improve Your Band Score

Understand the criteria: Familiarize yourself with the official band descriptors and what the examiners are looking for [2].
Focus on your weaknesses: Use real sample essays to identify where you can improve by looking at the types of mistakes that are commonly made [2].
Practice consistently: Practice writing essays regularly, focusing on developing clear and concise ideas, and getting expert feedback [19].
Simplify language: Choose to use language you know you can use correctly, and do not try to impress the examiner with long, complicated words [20].
Seek feedback: Ask an expert, preferably someone who has been an examiner, to provide feedback [4].

By understanding these elements of the band scores and common mistakes, you can better prepare for the IELTS writing test and work towards achieving the score you need.

Strategies for IELTS Writing Success

To improve your IELTS writing, particularly for Task 2, the sources emphasize a range of strategies focused on both content and technique. Here’s a breakdown of how you can enhance your writing skills and achieve a higher band score:

Understanding the Fundamentals

Prioritize Clear Communication: The most important aspect of your writing is clear and effective communication. The IELTS is not a test of your memorization skills or your ability to use complex vocabulary; it’s about your capacity to convey your thoughts in English [1-3].
Focus on Accuracy: Accuracy in grammar and vocabulary is more crucial than using a wide range of complex language [4-6]. Prioritize using language that you are comfortable with and can use correctly [2].
Answer the Question Directly: Always ensure that your essay directly addresses the question and fulfills all aspects of the prompt. Examiners are looking to see if you answered the question, above all else [7].

Strategies for Content Development

Plan Before Writing: Before you start writing, take time to plan your essay. This includes outlining your main ideas, supporting points, and examples [8, 9]. A clear plan will help ensure your writing is focused and coherent [8].
Develop Your Ideas Fully: Each main idea should be fully explained and supported with relevant examples. Avoid including too many ideas in one paragraph, as this will prevent you from fully developing the most important ones [10].
Use Relevant Examples: Use real, personal examples rather than made-up or memorized ones [9, 11]. Examples should support your main ideas and help clarify your points [11].
Take a Clear Position: In opinion essays, clearly state your position and maintain it throughout your essay. Avoid being vague or indecisive [12, 13].
Use Topic Sentences: Start each paragraph with a clear topic sentence that expresses the main idea of the paragraph [14, 15]. This helps to improve the coherence and flow of your essay [14].

Techniques for Language Use

Simplify Your Vocabulary: Use vocabulary that you are comfortable with and know how to use correctly [2]. Avoid trying to impress the examiner with complex words you don’t understand [2, 16].
Do Not Memorize: Avoid memorizing phrases, templates, or vocabulary lists. This will be easily recognized by examiners, and it will not improve your score [12, 16, 17].
Use Linking Words Appropriately: Use linking words sparingly and accurately. Overusing or misusing linking words will lower your score [18, 19]. If you are unsure of which to use, use simple ones [19, 20].
Focus on Grammar Accuracy: Make sure more than 50% of your sentences are error-free to get a band 7 or above [5].
Avoid Repetition: While you don’t want to overuse linking words, you don’t want to change words to things that you are not sure of. If you know a synonym is 100% correct, use it, otherwise repeat the word [3].

Specific Techniques

Use the “Why” Method: If you’re struggling to generate ideas for any given question, consider the “Why” method, asking yourself ‘why’ about both sides of the issue and then using the answer as your main idea [21].
Read the News: Reading news articles regularly can help you to expand your knowledge of common topics and learn new vocabulary [22].
Identify and Correct Your Mistakes: Analyze your essays for errors in grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and coherence. Then, you can start correcting those errors to improve your overall score [23, 24].
Use Sample Essays: Analyze high-scoring sample essays to learn about effective structures, idea generation, and language use [25, 26]. However, do not copy them blindly.
Use a Checklist: Have a checklist that you go through when you are finished with your essay to make sure that you are using effective techniques [27].
Practice Under Timed Conditions: Practice writing essays under timed conditions to build your speed and accuracy [4].

Important Considerations

Avoid Overcomplicating: IELTS writing is not about using complex or fancy language. It is about communicating effectively with the examiner [13, 28].
Be Specific: Use specific examples, and do not include generalized information. Your examples should be clear and easy to understand [11].
Seek Expert Feedback: Get feedback from experienced teachers or tutors who can identify your mistakes and provide advice on how to improve [1, 29].
Real Essays Have Mistakes: The sources use examples of real essays to help you to see that mistakes are normal. Examiners do not expect perfection [2].

By focusing on clear communication, accuracy, and a logical approach, you can significantly improve your IELTS writing score. Remember to practice consistently and seek feedback from experts to help you achieve your goals [1, 8].

12 Years of IELTS Writing Task 2 Knowledge in 6 Hours

The Original Text

you just find The Ultimate Guide to I reading Tas two this is the longest most detailed guide to I reading Tas two you’ll find anywhere in the world it’s going to show you step by step how to answer any Tas two question gives you more than 100 real band 78 and9 samples and give you the same strategies thousands of my students have used to get a band eight and nine we’re also going to give you the same grammar and vocabulary tools that I’ve only ever shared with my VIP members and then at the end of the video I’m going to share you something that has never been seen before I’m going to take all the lessons in this video and write a band n essay live so you can see how I personally would put all of these lessons into practice I’ve put everything I’ve learned about task two writing into this one video but the most important part comes first this first video will show you the fastest way to improve so that you get the highest return on the time you invest into learning with us today and this video also contains the one Golden Rule for I writing I’m going to show you the simple step-by-step strategy that my most successful students use to improve your scores and dramatically cut your preparation time so let’s start off by telling you how I improve the average score of a whole school from 5.5 to 7.5 by getting them to work less not more so more than 10 years ago I worked for one of the best a schools in the world I can’t tell you specifically what the name is of the school but it contained the letter b and c in the name this school despite being the best school in the country at the time had a huge problem most of the I students there were professionals they were people like doctors Engineers nurses teachers software developers and they hoped of moving to countries like Canada the US the UK to get a better life the key problem was that they were all failing because of one thing their writing score in fact the average writing score for the whole school for these very very intelligent people was just 5.5 compared to 7.5 for listening and seven for reading and speaking this was not only harming the reputation of this very prestigious expensive school but it was ruining many many lives because they couldn’t move to the country of their dreams and many of them had to give up on jobs they had already accepted and I knew there had to be a better way because these were all very very intelligent successful people who spoke English very very well they all had a high level of English but what was their key problem so here are all the things you need to learn to get a high is score can you guess what they taught on this course yes they taught absolutely everything problem number one was we were trying to cram in too much information in a very short period of time this is called overwhelm and can completely destroy an ult students chances of getting a high score but even worse than that we as teachers were wasting the students time you see the vast majority of students don’t need help with vocabulary with grammar speaking writing listening reading but we were overwhelming their brains with new information about all of these different topics that they didn’t need help with and this left us with just a few days at the end of the course to really focus in on the things that they did need help with and at that point the students were exhausted and many had just given up and stopped coming to class so we needed to completely rip up this course and start from scratch so what we did was we gave students two simple tests and these two simple tests guaranteed that the students would only spend time on the things that they needed to improve and this skyrocketed results results went from an average of 5.5 to 7.5 pretty much overnight and the students were studying less not more and don’t worry I will show you exactly how we did this step by step towards the end of the video I’ll show you how you can implement this at home today and study less while increasing your scores so so far in this video I’ve told do you need to work on your writing thanks Chris for telling me something I already know but how does this knowledge actually improve your writing score and get you to study less so let me show you how to improve your score using this water bottle and a drill each of these bottles represents the four marking criteria for I tring task two to get the score that you want you must get at least that band score for all of the marketing criteria and this is a big problem for you because Childs don’t tell you which areas you need to work on students will say things like I need to work on my vocabulary or I need to work on my grammar but in my experience all of these guesses are completely wrong and to make matters worse most local is Teachers or people saying that they’re an is expert online don’t really know what they’re doing either so what happens when you have a problem you know nothing about this is what happens you see most students don’t have a problem with everything they have a problem with one specific area this not only lowers their grammar score but actually makes their writing less coherent which lowers their coherence and cohesion score as well so you probably have one key weakness that you’re unaware of and this is going to stop you moving to the country of your dreams and according to our data the average student fails three times or more than three times and wastes more than ,000 repe repeting the test over and over again watch the rest of this video we’re going to show you how to do that much much faster and much much cheaper so step number one of our system is to clarify your goal this first step is super important your only goal is to get the I score that you need as quickly as possible Nothing Else Matters why is this important well students focus on many many other goals your goal is not to keep your family happy or your friends Happy by just doing the test over and over and over again because your mother or your father tells you to your goal is not to keep your local teacher Happy by sitting in their classroom listening to stuff that is wrong your goal is not to save money by doing everything as cheaply as possible and your goal is not to reduce the amount of hard work you have to do you will have to do a certain amount of hard work and finally your goal is not to show off to the examiner how many big words you memorized or how many essays you’ve memorized it’s not a memorization test only thing that you are trying to do is get the score that you need as quickly as possible forget everything else now that we’ve clarified our goal we can move on to step two elimination we want to eliminate the modules that we don’t need to work on so there are four modules writing speaking reading and listening and if you have got half a band more in any of these modules in past tests then you don’t need to study that module let’s say for example you need a band seven and you’ve got these scores in past tests that means that you don’t need to study this this or this congratulations you just cut down your preparation Time by 75% step three is optimize now that we know which module or modules to focus on we need to identify the key weaknesses within that module and turn each key weakness into a strength optimize remember you will not get a band seven unless everything is at a bond seven level you will not get a bond n unless everything is at a bond n level for speaking and writing you need a real expert who has been an examiner for many many years to listen to your speaking or look at your writing and give you feedback on that and before you say I can’t afford that your goal is not to save money your goal is to get the I score that you need as quickly as possible which is more money failing the test over and over and over again or spending $ 20 to $50 getting an actual expert to give you feedback and tell you what your weaknesses are so that you can improve them so if you’re in the business of keeping everyone happy and saving a huge amount of money then go and do that stop watching this video but if you want to improve your ey out score as quickly as possible keep watching now you have got real accurate feed back you know what your key weaknesses are the next step number four is slow down you need to step back slow down and focus on improving each of those key weaknesses your goal is not to do lots and lots of practice tests and hope that you will get lucky on test day you will not so don’t write any essays don’t do any practice tests until you have actually improved each of those key weaknesses and then get more feedback have you you actually improved if you are weak in that area you probably can’t give yourself feedback you don’t know what you don’t know so you need to go back to that teacher and say have I actually improved am I at that score yet and once you are once you’ve turned each of those weaknesses into strengths you can move on to step five which is accelerate only now can you start practicing essays again but don’t worry if you’re not up to much speed you’re not getting your task two essays done in 40 minutes you’re still in the learning process so if it’s taking you one hour to do a task two essay try and do it in 1 hour and then the next one in 55 minutes and then the next one in 50 minutes and then the next one in 45 minutes you’re accelerating every time until you can comfortably get the score that you need in under 40 minutes do not book The Test until you get to that stage you are not ready until in practice you are consistently getting above the score that you need within the time limits set by the test now that you understand the Golden Rule you must remove all the things that you’ve been taught that lower your score one of the most frustrating things about I preparation is that there’s so much confusing information out there your writing is a reflection of your thinking if your thinking is confused your writing will be confused luckily the next video takes you through all the most common tips and shows you which ones will lower your score and which ones will improve your score let’s start off with one of the most popular tips and tricks use lots of high level vocabulary and that will improve your score is this tip correct so the most popular I video over the last year with 6.5 million views so a lot of people are following this tip this video tells you exactly that use lots of high level words and you will improve your score here’s exactly what they say about that in the video If you use most of the words which are C1 C2 definitely you will get higher bands all words in the English language are divided into A1 A2 which is the simplest words B1 B2 kind of intermediate words and C1 C2 Advanced words so what this very very popular video is telling you the more C1 C2 Advanced words you use the higher your score is that actually correct so if we look at the marking criteria for vocabulary for a band nine it says uses a wide range of vocabulary with very natural and sophisticated control of lexical features that does not say for a band n use as many C1 and C2 words as possible what it talks about there in the keyword is natural another way of saying this is if you were a native English speaker what type of vocabulary would you use to discuss the topics and the questions that are asked on test day and if we look down at band Six in the markting criteria what it says is attempts to use less common vocabulary but with some inaccuracy so this is probably the most common band that examiners give for vocabulary because what that is saying is students attempt to use highlevel c1c2 words but they do so inaccurately what the markting criteria says is there is a balance between range using high level vocabulary and accuracy so what it is saying is yes if you can use words accurately use them but if you use them inaccurately you’re going to get a low score you’re probably only going to get a six Let’s Help look at what IDP say about this writing is a means of communicating your thoughts to the reader that is extremely important because what they are saying is it is not a vocabulary test it is a writing test it is testing your ability to clearly communicate with the reader therefore make use of vocabulary that is easy to understand easy to understand do easy to understand and lots of big words go together no also only use words you can spell in other words only use words that you know how to spell because if you memorize lots of big words you probably won’t be able to spell them correctly and if you spell them incorrectly that is an indication to The Examiner and we go back to Band six that you are using these words inaccurately if we go and analyze the thousands of b s eight and N success stories that we have on our VIP course not a single one of these students ever said that they got a high score because they used lots of high level words most of them when we interview them what they say is they simplified their vocabulary and their vocabulary score improved and many many of them hundreds of them talk about how they were taught this tip this trick of memorizing lots of C1 see two words and that’s the reason why they failed 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 times now am I being too harsh on these YouTubers well not really if we look at two other of the most popular videos related to vocabulary tips and tricks one of them is use these five words to score high and the other one is I writing vocabulary 25 band n words and you’ll hear a lot of teachers giving you this type of information use these words these are high level words well what I did was I took the words from those popular videos and I wrote a paragraph using those popular words that these videos suggest that if you use them you’ll get a high score so what I’ve done here is wrote a paragraph about how to solve the problem of global warming using electric cars there are a plethora of reasons why the Breakthrough of electric cars helps prevent the imminent global warming Dilemma to elucidate their immense acceleration breakthrough is mesmerizing which exacerbates the deterioration of fossil fuel powered internal combustion engines compare that with a student who just focuses on what IDP suggests that they should do which is clearly communicate with the examiner electric cars help reduce the impact of global warming because they produce less Co two there aren’t any fancy words in this second paragraph but they are all correct and they every word in that paragraph helps the reader that is what they are testing do you know how to communicate with the reader they are not testing did you go on to YouTube and watch a video called five amazing words to include in your essay to guarantee a nine it is not a memorization test it is a written communication Test in English so is this popular tip correct no it is totally wrong so the next I writing tip and trick that you’ll see is use lots of linking words and you will get a high score and the more complex linking words you use the more advanced linking words you use the higher your score is this actually true well what I did was I went and looked at Google so I Googled ielt linking words and I looked at the most popular article and this is what that article said they need more connecting words from ielt higher band descriptors very very clear they they’re talking about students so they’re saying students need more linking words more connecting words to get one of the higher bands pretty clear what this teacher is suggesting I also looked at the most popular video on YouTube teaching you about linking words and this is what they said to get a high score in ielt writing you must use some more formal linking words so what this teacher is suggesting is you use more formal linking words now this teacher who has more than a million subscribers is making a very common error that a lot of teachers make and a lot of students make because their teachers pass it on to them which is confusing the word formal with Advanced what this teacher is teaching you is use lots of formal linking words which they mean Advanced because they go on to explain that in the video so again the most popular blog and the most popular video are teaching you this tip which is use lots of highlevel linking words so if we look at the official marketing criteria what it says for band nine for coherence and cohesion is very very interesting uses cohesion in such a way that attracts no attention in other words if a native English speaker was reading your writing was reading your essay would they notice that there are too many linking words in there and would they notice that the linking words just look weird that they are overly formal they’re overly complex and the British Council go into more detail on their website on this and what they say is don’t overuse linking words pretty clear what the British Council think about that which is the direct opposite to what the most popular teachers are teaching you It also says or use them inappropriately so inappropriate is different from inaccurate inaccurate refers to the spelling is wrong or the meaning is wrong inappropriate means that you’re using too many of them you don’t need to use a linking word in that scenario so the British Council who developed the test Mark the test they are being very very explicit on what you should and shouldn’t do also don’t always use linking words at the beginning of sentences again from the British Council don’t always use linking words at the beginning of sentences the reason why they’re telling you that is because they know that many many teachers around the world teach you that you should start every sentence or include a linking word in every sentence the British counil says it’s wrong on the IDP website when they give advice on linking words they only show the simplest linking words why would IDP suggest that you only use the simplest linking words maybe that’s what they want you to do to get a higher score and if we go back to the marketing criteria what does it say for a band six for cerence and cohesion uses cohesive devices effectively but cohesion within Andor between sentences may be faulty or mechanical faulty means you’re using them inappropriately or inaccurately mechanical means that you’re adding them in like a robot so if you programmed a robot and told the robot use lots of linking words and make those words really high level that is what a robot would do and that is what a lot of band Six essays look like it’s like that programmed robot that has been told add in lots of linking words that’s what those essays look like quickly to talk about our VIP students not a single VIP student has ever said I improved my score by including lots of linking words so the evidence is quite clear but let’s have a look at an essay compare this paragraph with a student who knows what they’re doing to begin with electric cars help reduce the impact of global warming as a result they produce less CO2 consequently less carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere therefore higher levels of greenhouse gases are not present in the atmosphere consequently global warming is reduced this student is more focused on including lots of linking words than they are answering the question in fact the linking words are actually leading to a lot of repetition they basically just saying the same thing again and again compare that with this student electric cars help reduce the impact of global warming because they produce less CO2 the only linking word in that paragraph is because because is one of the most common words in the whole English language just because a word is common doesn’t mean that it is a bad word it’s probably common because it is extremely useful for clear communication this student uses cohesion in a way that you don’t even notice you probably didn’t even notice it didn’t draw any attention to the fact that they used a linking word this student on the other hand if you look at there you’re like wow that’s a lot of linking words what does it say for band nine uses cohesion in such a way that attracts no attention which one attracts no attention so is this right tip and trick that so many teachers are teaching you online are they correct no they are totally wrong that brings us on to one of the most common things that we get asked uh the writing tip and trick which is is range is grammatical range using lots of structures is it more important than accuracy using words sentences grammar structures accurately which one is more important range or accuracy if you go on to YouTube and you type in ielt task 2 tips the number one video the one right at the top gives you advice on this very very clear advice what they say in there is variety is more important than accuracy very very clear is this actually correct well the band descriptors make it very clear that both are important it’s not either or for band nine for grammatical range and accuracy it says uses a wide range of structures with full flexibility and accuracy so it’s saying a band n student has both range and accuracy a band seven and this is the most important part for grammatical range and accuracy produces frequent error free sentences what is an error free sentence an error free sentence is a sentence without any grammatical errors in it no punctuation errors or article errors or tense errors nothing it is grammatically perfect it is an error-free sentence what does frequently produces error-free sentences what does that mean well what that means is it’s frequent more than 50% in other words more than 50% of your sentences must have zero grammatical errors in them if you hope to get a seven or above and this is very important because if you are a teacher who is actually working with students on a day-to-day basis what you will always notice is when you try to get students to increase their range of grammar when you advise them to use more grammatical structures generally accuracy goes done so what you are telling a student if you are telling them increase the range decrease the accuracy and if more than 50% % of your sentences of errors in them it is impossible to get more than a six for grammar IDP are also very clear about this on their website what they say about this is uses a range of grammatical structures correctly so they don’t just say uses a range of structures they don’t say that the key word there is correctly but I think the most important evidence comes from our examiners who have worked for I advantage over the last 10 years and our success stories what do they say we have had probably close to 50 Ex examiners working at I’s Advantage not a single one of them has ever said that they ever gave one student in their entire career a low score for grammar because of range only reason why any examiner I’ve ever worked with at I advantage and at the British counil the only reason they’ve ever given a student a lower score for grammar is because of accuracy it is never a problem with range it is always accuracy and you get to know that if you’re working on a day-to-day basis with real students and correcting their essays and correcting the grammar mistakes in those essays and Counting the number of mistakes in each sentence so should you just use really simple sentences and play it safe no that’s not what we’re saying in fact that very popular video does have very good advice on how to improve your range but just telling students blindly range is more important than accuracy is not actually correct so let’s have a look at a few example paragraphs so electric cars help reduce the impact of global warming this is because they produce less CO2 this paragraph is made up of two simple sentences compare that with the second paragraph electric cars help reduce the impact of global warming because they produce less CO2 so this is for the purposes of IELTS marking criteria this is a complex sentence these are two simple sentences this is a complex sentence for the purposes of IELTS a complex sentence is a sentence with more than one clause or more than one idea what we teach our students is yes use a range of different structures but only use them safely and appropriately if you know how to use that structure and it’s appropriate to do so and it’s accurate then use it and as you can see here it is actually quite easy to produce error-free sentences and use a range of vocabulary at the same time now if you wanted to push that even further you could use this if electric cars hope to reduce the impact of global warming they will have to produce less CO2 now this student is using a complex sentence but they’re also using conditionals and they’re also using future structures but you don’t have to use this for the purposes of the is marking criteria if the examiner was looking at the purple sentence and the red sentence they would be happy with both of them there are no mistakes in either of them so is this tip and trick correct well it’s not as simple as the other ones all right if your teacher just tells you use as many different tenses and structures as possible and that will improve your score that is completely wrong because as we’ve seen it is not just about range it is about accuracy and the more complex you make your language the more mistakes that you’re going to make so that is completely wrong also if someone just tells you range doesn’t matter and make every single sentence simple and play it as safe as possible and you will get a high score that is also quite wrong it is about balance use appropriate structures appropriate tenses appropriate complexity to write your essay but really focus on reducing the number of mistakes that you are making the advice that we give our VIP students is range will take care of itself if you focus on answering the question you will naturally use a range of simple and complex sentences and a range of different appropriate structures CU it is impossible to write an effect Ive essay that answers the question without naturally using a range of structures so just focus on answering the question and range will take care of itself but really focus in on how many mistakes am I making and if you have systematic errors if you’re making mistakes with articles or punctuation for example in every sentence you need to address that it doesn’t matter how complex your grammar is until you address that fact you will never get more than a six the next I writing tip and trick is don’t repeat words if you repeat a word you will get a lower score is this true so again I put this into YouTube search and I looked at the most popular video discussing this topic and what that video said was stop repeating vocabulary in I speaking and writing very clear what they think about this so what does the official marking criteria say well it doesn’t actually talk about repetition and repeating words until you get down to band four so for vocabulary at band four it says uses only basic vocabulary which may be used repetitively or which may be inappropriate for the task now does that mean if you repeat a word you will get a band four no if that was the case every single one of my students and every single student in the world would get a band four because there are always going to be Words which we will show you in a minute that there will always be words that you have to repeat what ban four for lexical resource is saying here is you just keep repeating the same basic basic words you have basically no range at all and you just keep saying the same basic things over and over and over again that’s not what you want to do but is the advice that these teachers are teaching you which is if you repeat a word you will automatically get a low score is that actually true let’s look at some facts and some data so what we did was take 100 of our VIP students essays these are students that got either about seven eight or nine in the real test and we put these 100 essays into some software what this software does is it shows you how many words are repeated the frequency of those words and the results are that the top 20 words the most common words the words that are repeated the most make up 33.5% around a third of all the words in those 100 essays in other words those basic words are repeated all the time now is this just our students because we teach them this on our course well what you can do is take any book in the world any English book that is Well written put it into the same software and you’ll see the same pattern the most common words make up around a third of the English language why is this well this is how languages work most of the words that you say in English and your native language are not big complicated unusual words you were repeating the same words over and over and over again now do we teach our students to just don’t don’t care about variety don’t care about range when it comes to vocabulary don’t worry about repeating words no what we teach them is this when you see a word and you think that you need to repeat that word you have three choices number one repeat the word number two change it to something that you’re not really sure about or number three change it to something you’re 100% sure about now if your teacher has taught you this tip which is don’t repeat any words you’re always going to go with option two you’re going to continually change words to things that you’re not really sure about what does the marking criteria say about that well it talks about inaccuracy talks about spelling mistakes meaning mistakes collocation mistakes if you’re making lots of mistakes you get a lower vocabulary score what we teach our students is choose option one or option three if you can change it to something that you know is 100% correct you know the spelling collocations meaning especially change it but if you don’t repeat the word that is going to produce an essay that has a wide enough range to get a high score but most importantly it will be accurate but even more importantly the shouldn’t is not going to be stressed out because if you teach a student that you can never repeat a word the I writing exam is going to be one of the most stressful experiences that they ever encounter they’re going to see lots and lots and lots of these words that are constantly repeated and they know that you’ve told them if you repeat a word you’ll fail your test you’ll get a score so they’re forced to change into stuff that they know is wrong if you are stressed out and if you’re wasting time do you think that you’re going to get a high score again there’s a huge difference between making videos on YouTube and working on a day-to-day basis with real students and seeing what tips and tricks what actually works on the ground on test day this tip is completely wrong the next tip and trick is that you need to include a hook in your introduction when I searched Google and YouTube for this I found a teacher that has taken this to a whole new level what they have done is they have given their students templates that include hooks in the introductions and thesis statements and outline statements and background statements and what they are teaching their students is memorize these templates insert some of your ideas in there and you’re going to wow the examiner and get a high score and this is becoming more and more and more common among students real examiners are starting to see the same templates which include hooks in them every single time and one of the things that examiners find quite funny is what is a hook well a hook is designed to hook the reader in to get their attention the only thing hooking The Examiner to the only reason why they’re looking at your essay is because they’re being paid to do so they would rather do anything in this world but look at your essay no matter how amazing your hook is they’re only doing it because they’re doing their job it would be like teaching someone that you need to have an interesting introduction to ordering a burger in McDonald’s the person doesn’t care how you greet them in McDonald’s you’re just another customer so what does the markting criteria say about this well some very interesting stuff ban zero how can you get a ban zero well number one you could not attend you could stay at home in your bed if you did that you would get a ban zero or you can get a ban zero if you go to the test center and you fall asleep and you don’t write anything you will get a ban zero does not attempt the task in any way or if you write a totally memorized response what they are telling you is memorizing these templates is the same as a student that falls asleep for the entirity of the ielt writing test IDP on their website says don’t use any memorized language phrases or examples throughout your essay they are easy for examiners to spot and don’t demonstrate your ability to write fluently pretty clear from IDP IDP also says don’t tell The Examiner what you are going to say in your essay in other words don’t include outline thesis statements like this essay will discuss blah blah blah blah blah so what I’ve done is I’ve taken the most popular template online and I’ve answered a question with it it has been universally accepted that the problem so an article mistake straight away the problem of climate change is escalating at an alarming rate the problem is bringing a state of depression among the masses and in the economy too they have another article mistake so this teacher who wrote this doesn’t know how to use articles or use grammarly there are a plethora so another grammatical mistake I didn’t make this up this is exactly what you will find on the internet this is the most popular template there are plethora of reasons of the same and it’s possible solutions can be suggested to which are discussed below outlining what you’re going to say exactly what the examiners and IDP say that you should not do also just ask yourself does this make sense climate change is causing a state of depression among the masses literally most people have a clinical mental disorder because of climate change are you going to write about that in your essay and also the Eon omy is affected so are you going to talk about clinical depression and the effect on the economy because you put it in your introduction you better discuss that in the rest of your essay now compare that with a student that is using no memorization what they are doing instead is just clearly answering the question climate change is one of the gravest dangers Humanity faces instead of memorizing a hook what they’re doing is they are paraphrasing the question this is demonstrating to The Examiner that you’ve understood the question you know what you’re doing you know how to paraphrase your vocabulary is good and your grammar is good those are five very good things this is caused by an increase in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere you’ve just answered question one straight away in your introduction and the most viable solution is the introduction of electric cars you’ve answered question two so you’re not telling the examiner what you are going to discuss you’re telling them straight away this is the answer to these questions and then in your main body you can go into detail and also if you think about it what you are saying to The Examiner if you write this is you are dumb you are saying to The Examiner I think that you are so stupid that I’m going to use the most popular template online that tens of thousands maybe even a 100 thousand students have used before and I don’t think that you’re going to notice because you’re dumb do you think that’s creating a great impression for you know what you’re trying to do here so do you think this is right or wrong this tip is absolutely wrong the next I writing tip and trick is use statistics and surveys and research in your examples and that is going to improve the strength of your examples in your essay so I went on to YouTube and I found the most pop video on how to use examples and the video includes statistics now this video was made a very long time ago and let me make a confession I used to do exactly the same thing with my students we all did it was actually standard practice 5 to S years ago to tell students that if you include statistics it’s absolutely fine and it’s just an easy way to create examples cuz a lot of students were having problems at thinking of examples so what I and a lot of other teachers taught them was look at your main idea and create a survey or a study 47% of people did this for example add that in and you’ll get a high score the problem is students used this incorrectly so what we were teaching our students was match your main idea to your example and make sure that your example makes sense if your example doesn’t make any sense it is not a good example and you’re wasting your time but High a lot of teachers and students interpreted that advice was just include lots of data and surveys and don’t worry about whether they make sense so IDP noticed this noticed that a lot of students were using this technique put out on their website recently I think last year and they said don’t present Recent research or statistics related to the topic so what IDP are saying is stop using this we stopped advising students to do this by two or three years ago because again we’re working day-to-day with students and we just noticed that students would mess this up um you would get students writing statistics such as 98% of people in the UK died from smoking doesn’t make any sense so let’s look at the example from the most popular YouTube video on how to do this an increasing number of people are eating unhealthy food regardless of the health warnings for example about 70% of people working in the UK resort to buying ready-made meals for convenience rather than doing home cooking so this is actually fine it makes sense it sounds correct but now since IDP have said this we can’t do this so what we do instead is take out the research take out the example of the statistics and just replace 70% with something more vague like many many people working in the UK resort to buying ready-made meals for convenience rather than doing home cooking so we’re keeping IDP happy we’re not using statistics and this makes sense and it is a real example do many people in the UK buy ready-made meals absolutely that’s a fact and this example is good because it’s connected to the main idea and it makes sense so instead of thinking about should I use statistics just what is an example of the thing that I’m talking about what is an example of the main idea of this topic and if you do that you’ll be fine so is this common tip and trick correct no don’t use statistics so the next I writing tip and trick is idioms if you use lots of idioms in your I writing will this improve your I score so if you go and type in idioms I writing into YouTube you’ll find lots of videos the most popular one is one called 40 awesome idioms for ielt writing with a title like that this teacher is definitely suggesting that idioms are awesome and you should use them in your ielt writing is this actually true well what does the markting criteria say well the writing criteria says nothing about idioms it is silent on idioms but the speak markting criteria talks about them what does the speaking marking criteria say well the speaking markting criteria talks about idiomatic language and this reveals to you a lot about the tips and tricks that you will see on YouTube especially the reason why teachers are teaching you use lots of idioms to improve your score is number one they have confused the speaking test with the writing test and number two they don’t know what idiomatic language means idiomatic language does not mean idioms idiomatic language means natural language that native English speakers would use that includes idioms but that is just a small part of idiomatic language if you know native English speakers listen to them for 5 minutes count how many idioms they use probably zero IDP has a video on their website called where can I use idioms in my ielt test and they only mention speaking and task one General training informal letters why because speaking and task one General training informal letters are informal idioms are informal that means that you should not use them in writing task 2 or task one academic or general training task one formal letters IDP on their website also says on their guide to ielt writing don’t use idioms pretty clear I’ve also never met a real ex examiner or a real successful student who used this tactic who tried to include lots of idioms and eventually got a high score using that tactic just doesn’t work so is it correct no it’s not correct the next tips and tricks are about word length so for TAS two you will often hear teachers teaching their students that you must write more than 250 words this is absolutely correct I’m not going to go into detail on this cuz it’s very very simple you must if you want a high score you must write more than 250 words but what is more worrying is there’s lots of tips and tricks out there that teach you that the more you write the higher your score this is absolutely false for two reasons number one if you think about it if this were true all you would have to do is just write lots of words and you would get a high score score that’s not actually testing your ability to clearly communicate in English secondly from a tactical point of view from working with real students what you will notice if you are a real teacher working with real students is once students start to write more than 300 words two things happen number one they generally go off topic and number two they don’t have enough time to check their work proofread their work and move on and do task one and get everything done on time so more than 250 absolutely this tip is correct but once you start going over 300 if you write 301 305 don’t worry too much about it but if you’re writing is starting to get to 350 400 450 you probably have a major problem the next lesson is the most important in this whole video it’s going to give you laser focus and help you understand task two right in a much shorter period of time you’ll learn the four key rules that guarantee you’ll improve your score no matter what question you get navjot failed her ISS writing test three times in a row she lost all hope and was about to give up on her dream of moving to Canada but after I shared this simple strategy with her that allows anyone to answer any I’s question she was able to jump from a b 6.5 to 7.5 in just a few days so one day I get this email from her Chris I need your help if I don’t get seven in writing soon I’ll lose my Express entry Visa for Canada help so I replied send me a few of your essays and she was right it was very obvious from looking at her writing that she was completely confused you see your writing is a reflection of your thinking if on test day your thinking is confused your writing is going to be confused but I knew that if she learned this simple stratey she was definitely going to get a b seven on her next test but when I told her this she got even more worried Chris there are so many different question types how is one strategy going to answer all of them don’t worry and what if I get a topic I know nothing about how is this strategy going to help with that don’t worry and I can’t even finish an essay in 40 minutes so how is learning a new strategy going to help don’t worry this strategy will guarantee that you get a high score and finish everything on time no matter what topic you get to remove all this confusion I tried to make everything as simple as possible and I did that by asking her one simple question why do we write anything think about the different things that you’ve written in the past few days this could be a text message a note to your family or an email to a colleague at work you wrote all of those things to take information from your brain and transfer that information into their brain in other words the main purpose of writing is to help the reader understand what you are thinking let’s apply that to an essay why do we write an essay to get a high score to show The Examiner how many big words we know and how many fancy structures we’ve memorized no we simply write an essay to tell the reader The Examiner what we think about the questions otherwise known as answer the question the number one thing the examiner will be thinking about when they look at your essay is did you clearly answer the question but there are so many different question types how will I know which structure to use let’s apply what we’ve learned about writing to structuring an essay why do we write an introduction we write an introduction to introduce to the reader what we think about the question so let’s apply that to some real questions some people believe that University students should volunteer to benefit the community do you agree or disagree many think that those in third level education should do unpaid work to improve their local community so all I’ve done there is just taking the question statement and paraphrased it put it in my own words but now let’s do what the examiners are looking for which is clearly answering the question do you agree or disagree we are immediately saying very very clearly what we think about the question so the examiner can just look at this very easily and know exactly what we think about the question but then why because then we’re going to write the first reason why we disagree because students need time to focus on their studies a simple idea that directly answers the question and then let’s give them another idea and some also have to get paid jobs to survive so if we Analyze This a bit further we have answered the question here and we’ve given our first main idea and then we’ve given our second idea so all we’re doing here is taking our ideas out of our head I disagree for this reason and this reason and putting it on paper but you now you might be thinking well what about if we get a different type of question won’t the structure be different so it is widely believed that transportation is the main source of pollution while some believe governments should address this others believe this is the responsibility of individuals discuss both views and give your opinion so this is a completely different question because it’s asking you to do three things it’s asking you why do some people believe this why do some people believe this other View and what do you think individually so let’s start off by just paraphrasing again many think that transport causes the most pollution so I’ve just taken the question statement paraphrased it so governments can ban internal combustion engines to solve this problem so again what am I thinking communication taking ideas out of my head while some people believe government should address this so I’m thinking why would someone believe this why would someone think this well governments have the power to ban to make a legal internal combustion engines and that could go some way to solving this issue so that’s one of the reasons why someone might advocate for that position so I’m going to state that but then why would other people think well it’s nothing to do with governments this is the responsibility of individuals why would someone think that but I think a better option is for people to choose Greener Transportation voluntarily this Choice gives people more freedom so why would people think that it’s the responsibility of the individual well you know governments can be a little bit overbearing some people really believe in the rights and the freedoms of the individual to make their own choice voluntarily so that’s why they would believe that side and I agree with them so what do I think I think a better option is people to voluntarily choose their own method of transportation because this gives them more freedom but I also understand that governments can ban petrol and diesel engines and they may have a role in it too and that’s why some people believe this so these are two very very different questions and I have used slightly different structures but you don’t really need to be thinking about structures all you need to be thinking about is how do I clearly tell the examiner what I think about the question there is no one structure that’s going to magically get you about nine but how you guarantee you don’t get a high score is you don’t tell The Examiner clearly what you think about the question so all you have to do really is think about this you look at the question and you start to think about the answer to the question in your brain all the introduction is doing is introducing your main ideas your answers to the question to the examiner’s brain you do not need structures for doing that you just need to think clearly okay but won’t that take a lot of time that’s where the essay acceleration system comes in let’s look at our introductions what do they all have in common they are all introducing to the reader what we are going to write about all we have to do then is take the main points from the introduction and put them into our main body paragraphs you see by understanding the main purpose of an introduction you’ve not only created a brilliant introduction but you’ve also created a plan for your entire essay when people run out of time on test day it’s not because they are slow writers or slow thinkers it’s because they are confused about what to write and then they get lost and have to start all over again this sa acceleration system means that your thinking is crystal clear and you have a road map for the rest of your essay great but won’t I need a different main body structure for all the different types of essays let’s make it simple again if the purpose of an introduction is to introduce to the reader how you’re going to answer the question what is the purpose of the main body answer the question yes and the simplest way to do that is to use this structure main point explain example and then we simply do the same thing with our next main body paragraph by this point I could see that she was really starting to understand how powerful this simple strategy really was but she needed to avoid a huge mistake that most students make many students write a great introduction in mainbody paragraphs and then throw away a high score by failing to write a good conclusion to write a great conclusion you need my law professor’s secret hack when I was 18 many many years ago I started studying law at Queens University and at the start of the first semester we were given a huge reading list and it seemed impossible that anyone would be able to read this number of books in such a short period of time but I stayed up night after night and arrived at my first tutorial having read them all you read all the books nobody reads them all and this is when he shared his secret hack with me take any academic textbook and open any chapter read the introduction and then read the conclusion what do you see remember what I said at the start about introductions introductions tell the reader what you’re going to write about and conclusions tell the reader what you just wrote about in other words you should be able to just read the introduction and conclusion and fully understand all of the main points of the whole chapter and to make it even easier for you all you have to do is just look at your introduction note the key points and then repeat them in the conclusion it really is that simple take the main points paraphrase them put them into conclusion and that’s you done so at this point I thought that she would be very very happy she now I understood how to structure any I question but I could see that she was more stressed than ever it doesn’t matter if I know how to structure these essays if I get a topic I don’t understand I’ll panic and just run out of time don’t worry I’m going to give you a system that will ensure you can answer any question no matter what topic you get but first we need to understand why you have this problem you see if you had a health problem you wouldn’t just go to the doctor and expect them to give you medicine without them trying to find out why you have the health problem by understanding the root cause of the problem the doctor will be able to treat you more effectively so what is the root cause of this fear of unknown topics so first I asked her this question when you get an unfamiliar topic is it ever in the real test no have you ever seen a topic in any of the Cambridge books you didn’t understand no then where are you seeing these terrible unknown topics my old teachers gave me some and here I think we find the first root cause of the problem if you look at real questions from real ielt Cambridge books the questions and the topics are designed in a way so that anyone in the world can answer them but when websites run by people who don’t really know what they’re doing create these questions they often make them way more complicated than they actually need to be but I’m a mathematician what do I know about advertising or newspapers and here we find the second root cause of the problem and the more intelligent someone is the more they have this problem you see people like mathematicians doctors lawyers Engineers they’ve all been trained that the solution to complex problems is to have lots of expert knowledge and let me tell you a little secret the opposite is true for is if you get a question don’t try and think of the most complex idea try and think of the simplest most obvious most straightforward idea instead of thinking which idea will impress The Examiner think about if I asked a 100 people this question question what would be the most common answer but what about brainstorming how do you feel when you’re brainstorming stress confused worried and does brainstorming result in good ideas no so why would you do something that makes you feel terrible that doesn’t get you the result you’re looking for all of my teachers told me to do it and most of the big ILS experts on YouTube teach brainstorming and this was her final challenge what she going to follow my advice that was different from all the other advice that she was getting or was she just going to be a sheep and follow the herd it didn’t work the other three times you tried it what makes you think it will work now and here’s what she did on test day got the question she read it and asked herself one question what are the two simplest ideas she then wrote them down and planned out her answer after she planned out her answer using the structure we gave her she had a complete road map showing her exactly what’s right this investment of time into her plan meant that her thinking was crystal clear and she finished everything on time and because she followed the universal structure she completely shocked the examiners you see every examiner sees the same confusing difficult to understand essays all day long when you choose simple ideas answer the question and write your answer in a clear organized way using language you know instead of fancy words you memorize the night before your test the examiner has no choice but to give you a high score an navjot is now a mathematics professor in Canada after getting an amazing 7.5 in her I writing if you want a more detailed look at what we discussed here today my free course ielt essay Builder will show you everything you need to know for free all you have to do is just click the link in the description if you want to join the same course as nav Joo our VIP course is available for 10% off you need a special link to get the discount it’s also in the description now let’s get into the detail of writing your essay the introduction is the most important part of your entire essay if you write a good introduction it not only improves your overall score but it will also make writing the rest of your essay so much easier let’s show you step by step how to write a great introduction and then after that we will work on idea generation Okay so let’s start off with the question it’s really really important that we fully understand the question before we can write our introduction and this is one of the key mistakes that we see students making all the time and it’s related to the things you want to avoid in your introduction so let’s have a look at it and fully understand it many argue that schools are no longer necessary because children can learn so much from the internet and be educated at home do you agree or disagree so pause the video if you like and just have a read of that again to make sure that you fully understand this so what I’m going to do now is I’m going to set you a little test what I’m going to show you is two introductions introduction a and introduction B both of these introductions were produced by the same student one of them when they first started working with us and on their previous attempt they got a band six and one of them after they had finished working with us and we removed removed all of these common mistakes and we showed them how to write an effective introduction and they actually moved from a band six to a band eight so I’m not going to tell you which one it is I want you in the comments to tell me do you think the band 8 student is or the band 8 introduction is a or b okay so let’s start off with a teaching children at home is a hotly debated topic nowadays a plethora of people believe that children can study better online this essay will discuss why it is better to teach Adolescence in educational institution before coming to a reasoned conclusion so I would like you to just read that have a think about it and do you think this is a band Six essay or a bond 8 essay so remember one of them the student was getting a bond six and the other the student was getting a band eight so let’s have a look at the second introduction introduction B many people believe that homeschooling is preferable to traditional education because learning can be done online I do not agree with this because students require face-to-face guidance and many way web-based schools are not reliable so do you think a is better or do you think B is better in the comments just let me know put a or b um and maybe if you want to say why you think this is so so what I’m going to do now is I’m going to take introduction a and I’m going to break it down into its constituent Parts all right so we’re going to look at each part of this essay introduction and tell you exactly what the student is doing to give you an insight into how the examiner is thinking about this all right so let’s start so this bit here is what an examiner would consider a hook a hook is something that you’ll often see in essays where the person writing the essay is trying to make the reader interested in what they’re trying to say they’re trying to hook the reader in and get them to read the rest of the essay uh this is a terrible idea uh for I writing task 2 for a couple of reasons number one The Examiner is being paid to check your essay you don’t need to to hook them in at all the money that they’re getting paid is hooking them in so you don’t need to do that number two there is no or there are no extra marks for it being interesting or it being exciting or anything like that you’re not being judged on how interesting or exciting your essay is so if you are trying to do something that doesn’t get you any marks you’ve just wasted your time completely so you’re doing something that is not necessary and you are wasting your time completely so the first thing that we do not want to see is a hook they are a complete and utter waste of time okay so the next thing that you do not want to put in your introduction is something like this hotly debated topic nowadays now you’ll see this in the vast majority of essays and you’ll often also see teachers teaching this um and this is a cliche so let’s have a look at what a cliche is cliche a phrase or opinion that is overused and most importantly betrays a lack of original thought so it is an overused phrase and the reason why people use these phrases is they don’t have original thoughts they don’t want to think for themselves so a examiner is looking at this and number one they’re looking at it and going another hotly debated topic all right I’ve seen this hundreds of times this week um and the the examin ERS are human beings and if you they say the same thing over and over and over again they you’re not putting them in a great mood to be honest and most importantly you’re just basically copying something that You’ seen elsewhere there is no originality in here um and you want to at all times avoid things that the examiner is looking at that and thinking this person is just memorize something because the IELTS test is not a memorization test it is not a repeat a memorization test it is a test where they’re testing your ability to clearly communicate in English when have you ever heard someone a native English speaker say oh this is a hotly debated topic never in your entire life have you heard someone say that naturally so it is completely unnatural to put this into your essay shows that you’re not really thinking and shows that you believe that the test is just a memorization test so don’t include cliches Okay the third thing a plethora of people and educational institution spelled incorrectly and the spelling is not the actual problem here this problem here is memorizing impressive vocabulary or high level vocabulary or band n vocabulary the examiners see this over and over and over and over again especially words like plethora why does plethora come up because someone on YouTube made a video called use these five words and you will get a high score so what happens is millions of people have seen that video they’ll include it and some of those words in their introduction I’ve even seen introductions with all five words put in there and what again that indicates to The Examiner is that you believe this is a memorization test and also that you are not focusing on actually answering the question and you were also not focusing on using the English language effectively to convey meaning why do people write anything in any language it is to clearly convey meaning to tell people what you think but instead of doing that you were just trying to shove in big words people would never use a plethora of people that is just an inappropriate way to use it so often when people memorize these big words they will use them inappropriately and incorrectly the collocations will be wrong it’s not suitable to use that in a sentence the grammar could be wrong or like here the spelling is wrong there you do not get any extra marks for using big words incorrectly or inappropriately educational institution it would be better just to put school all right so you might be repeating the word school but which is better to repeat a simple word that actually is effective and accurate and appropriate or try and put in a big word that is actually inaccurate because you spelled it wrong the collocation is is wrong or the grammar is wrong or here you would just never use that word why not just say many people or a lot of people again much simpler but actually correct so the fourth thing that you do not want to include is a background statement um so I’ve highlighted both of these teaching children at home is a hotly debated topic nowadays and a plethora of people believe that children can study better online this person has watched a few too many YouTube channels and some of them say you need to include a hook some of them say that you need to include a background statement and some of them say just paraphrase the question and what this causes is huge confusion in the student mind so they’re like well this YouTube channel says hook this says background statement and they get totally confused about the difference between a hook a background statement and simply paraphrasing the question and some teachers also get confused about not all most teachers are great but there are some teachers especially online and on YouTube that get confused because how they produce their lessons is they actually go and look at other YouTube channels and if you are looking at other YouTube channels that don’t know what they’re doing you’re not going to know what you’re doing either so this is going to cause a huge amount of confusion and this is what has happened to this student so forget about hooks forget about background statements and just simply paraphrase the question instead your first sentence just look at the question statement paraphrase that stated in your own words and that’s you done for your first sentence you’re not going to be confused and most importantly The Examiner is not going to be confused because they’re like well is this a paraphrase what are they doing here I don’t really understand the examiner has a headache already before they’ve even got to the end of the introduction so forget about background statements okay so the next thing we’re going to talk about is this this essay will discuss why it is better to teach Adolescence in educational institution before coming to A Reason conclusion so this is a very poor thesis statement for two different reasons and there’s two different things that you do not want to include in your introduction and the key here is adolescence so did the question talk about adolescence so adolescence are a specific subset of children adolescence are teenagers there are people who are in high school the question was not about high school it was not about teenagers it was not about adolesence it was actually about children in general and school in general uh so by misunderstanding the question and putting things in there that are not actually accurate and not related to the question you’re indicating to The Examiner that you haven’t understood the question and also what the student was doing was trying to again add in big words so they didn’t think that children or school children or boys and girls or whatever was fancy enough or impressive enough because their former teacher had told them that you need to use big impressive band nine words so they’ve tried to put that in there and this is not accurate it’s not what the question is about so not only have you messed up your introduction and you’ve messed up your whole essay because your focus is now going to be on adolescence so be very very careful about understanding the question and just putting things in the introduction that relate to you answering the question because at the end of the day the most important thing is that you actually answer the question this second reason why this thesis statement is not appropriate is because it has a lot of memorized language in it you will see a huge number of introductions that say this essay will and then they talk about the topic before coming to A Reason conclusion so it is very very obviously memorized by the student and again this comes from the internet especially YouTube where you will get certain videos that have millions and millions of views on them obviously students are watching them they trust the person talking to them they think that they’re an expert so they copy what they say and then after a few months examiners start to see the same thing over and over and over and over over and over again and that is not a good thing for your band level um your band score is going to suffer because again you are basically telling the examiner I do not know how to think for myself and I do not know how to write in English without memorizing things it is not a memorization test it is an English writing test you will not be able to go into the real world and use these fixed phrases they are testing your ability to communicate effectively in the real world not memorize stuff that is totally useless in the real world and the last thing that you want to avoid thing that you never want to do is to use a memorized formula to treat writing in the same way that someone would treat a mathematical equation um it is very very tempting and it is very attractive to think that all you have to do is just memorize a formula and then use it I know that you’re very stressed out and I know that you want to get high score but this is the last thing that you want to do to memorize a formula and then place it on any different type of question that’s bad for a few reasons so this is what a lot of these memorized formulas look like X so take the topic is a hotly hotly debated topic nowadays wow you’re really impressing people with those cliches like insert General background statements so so take the background um of the topic and then put that in even though you’ve already really talked about it in the hook there this essay will discuss Y and Zed well the examiner really isn’t interested in you telling them what the essay is going to discuss you better discuss that that is what they’ve just asked you to do um so it’s you know it’s like walking into a store and saying I am going to open the door now I am going to walk to the country like you’re supposed to um why are you telling people about that and then before coming to A Reason conclusion just another memorized fixed phrase um other major problem with this is that people tell you that you can take this formula take this format and apply it to any question type doesn’t matter if it is advantages and disadvantages problem solution a double question a discussion question an opinion question you can just memorize this and do that um you can’t uh each of those questions is asking you to do a very different thing therefore you need to have a different approach for each different introduction and each different question um I know that’s going to require a little bit of extra work um but if you want to go to our website is advantage.com we cover a lot of that on there for free so go and check that out if at the end of this video of course if you want to so let’s look at the seven things not to put in your introduction do not put a hook do not put cliches do do not put memorized high level vocabulary don’t put a background statement especially if you don’t understand the difference between a hook a background statement and paraphrasing this essay will discuss and then put something in there that is not related to the question or this essay will discuss plus all those memorized phrases and finally don’t make every introduction exactly the same or apply the same format or the same strategy to every single introduction right the good news is that once we took all of those things out from our students introduction they were able to massively improve their essay and I say essay not introduction because let’s look at what a good introduction can do for your entire essay so let’s have a break it down again so many people believe that homeschooling is preferable to traditional education because learning can be done online so what they’ve done is they’ve just taken the question and they have paraphrased it so they’ve taken the words and they have stated it in their own words so that it means the same but with different words so this introduces the topic it tells the examiner this person understands the question and they know how to paraphrase so their vocabulary is good their grammar is good so you are making the examiner very very happy because they know you know what you’re doing and just from the very first sentence they know that this essay is going to be easy to read now let’s have a look at the rest of it I do not agree with this so the reason why this is a good way to start your second sentence is it clearly demonstrates that you have a position that you have an opinion on this question in other words you have just answered the question all right so it’s going to be different from question type to question type but this question type basically said do you agree or disagree I do not agree okay so they’re saying I disagree so they could say I disagree or do not agree but they’ve clearly stated what they think immediately so again the examiner has already understood what you think about the question let’s continue because okay here’s the reasons students require face-to-face guidance clear main idea and many web-based schools are not reliable clear second idea so instead of this essay will’ll discuss why homeschooling is preferable to not schools the plus reason that doesn’t you’re just wasting your time um State your position and your two main ideas now how is this going to help the student write the rest of their essay because what is going to be their first main body paragraph they’re going to talk about students require face-to-face guidance they’re going to explain why that is they’re going to put examples in there and then they’re second main body paragraph many webbased schols are not reliable they’re going to put that in their second main body paragraph they’re going to explain why that is they’re going to use examples um and the examiner will know exactly what is going on what this also does is it provides like a mini plan for the rest of the essay The Examiner will also be looking at your main body paragraphs they’ll be looking at your conclusion and seeing if all this matches up is it cohesive is it coherent so this introdu tion does many many things but the two things that it does really really well is it makes it easy for the student and most importantly it makes it easy for the examiner to understand that they are actually a Band-Aid student and they are going to get a good score because they are helping the reader with their job if you do that you’re going to do very very well if you just memorize a bunch of stuff copy other people use formulas you’re going to fail over and over and over again no matter who tells you that they have some secret method or magic formula they don’t exist okay so what if I know nothing we get this question at least a few times a day people emailing us saying what if I open the test paper on test day and I look at the task two question and I know nothing I just don’t know how to start I don’t don’t understand the topic I don’t know how to think of ideas so if you look at most I websites the majority of them have fake questions and this is where this fear comes from because if if someone is producing I questions and they don’t know what they’re doing normally what they do is they think that oh ielt is really difficult therefore I must create really difficult complex questions if you look at real IELTS questions so one’s produced by Cambridge if you go on to the IDP website the British Council website the official IELTS website you’ll see the task two questions are not really that complex they are on very common topics and the questions are designed in a way that anybody with half an education will be able to think of some ideas for them the other thing is so many students after they do the test what they’ll do is they’ll go online they’ll go on some blog or they’ll be chatting to someone and they’ll tell people this is the question that I got 99% of those questions are misreported this isn’t the student’s fault but it’s it’s very very difficult for someone to do a whole question finish the test and then remember that question and then be able to tell everyone accurately what it’s like so if you’re looking at fake and misreported questions no wonder that you’re worried that you’re not going to be able to answer the question because you’re looking at questions that are far more difficult than what you’ll really get get on the test so only look at official questions then you also need to think about the common topics so the common Tas two topics now can we accurately predict exactly what is going to come up no but are there some topics that come up again and again and again yes I’ve analyzed thousands of past questions and there there are some topics like education technology Health environment government these everyday topics that do come up quite regularly and so how can you use this information what you can do is use the common topics as part of your I preparation process log into every day into a popular English news website so BBC News New York Times the guardian something like that and at the top of the website you’ll see education news the environment news technology news all these common topics if you read one story about education one story about technology one story about the environment are you going to find it difficult to think of ideas if you did that every day during your a preparation and it only takes 5 minutes you can spend longer on that if you want to work on other things but it really doesn’t take that much time so if you’re looking at real questions and you’re also reading the news each day and reading about these common topics you should have no problem thinking of ideas and understanding the question on test day so that’s the first thing next what is a good idea so it doesn’t matter how amazing um an idea generation technique is if it is resulting in bad ideas so we have to think about what a good idea is so that when you’re generating your ideas you’ll be able to pick the ones that are best and be able to use those in your essay I hope you’re enjoying this video on I writing if you want to improve your I writing even more and put all of the things that you’re learning from our YouTube channel into practice I’ve developed a free course called ielt essay Builder what ielt essay Builder does is it gives you a free course that structures everything from your introduction to your mainbody paragraphs to your conclusions it shows you a step by step sentence by sentence how to write everything that you’re learning here and it’s 100% free and it’s helped thousands of students get about seven eight and even nine to sign up for that for free all you have to do is just click the Link in the description enter your email address on that page and we’ll send you that free I essay builder for free thanks very much now back to the video so what is a good idea so the first one and the most important one it has to be relevant all right it has to be relevant to the question if it is not relevant to the question it is not going to answer the question the number one thing that you must do is answer the question so if you have irrelevant ideas you’re not going to answer the question you’re likely to get a band five for task achievement the rest of your essay is not going to be very good either because you’re just you’re starting off on the wrong track so imagine you are on a journey the end of your journey is when you finish your essay if you use irrelevant ideas you’re going off on a tangent you’re going to write about something that is completely unrelated to the topic so make sure your ideas are relevant second thing is can you develop those ideas so you might think of the most amazing idea ever but if you can’t explain that idea if you can’t support that idea with a relevant example it’s useless because in the test in the writing task two you’re not just going to write a bunch of ideas you’re not going to have a main body paragraph with six or seven different ideas you’re going to have one idea and you’re going to fully develop that idea with explanations and examples so unless you know about that idea and you can develop it you can explain it then don’t use use it the third thing is can you think of that idea quickly so if I give you 6 hours to think of an idea you know anybody can do that but can you think of ideas quickly so what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to think of relevant ideas that you can develop and that you can think of quickly so those are the three things that you should be thinking about if you can’t think of relevant ideas if the idea is not relevant it’s not a good idea if you can’t develop it it’s not a good idea if you can’t think of it quickly it’s not a good idea all three of those things must be present in any technique that you use to help you generate ideas and that brings us on to brainstorming so as I said at the the start of this lesson if you go into any IELTS classroom today so all around the world there will be a 100 different classes all teaching I at the same time if you ask the teacher how do I generate ideas they will say brainstorming now does this work no it does not work in fact it is the most useless thing that you could ever do on the test it does not help at all why is that brainstorming results in irrelevant ideas how you brainstorm is you just think of as many different ideas as possible so if you’re just thinking of as many ideas as possible what you’re going to do you’re going to think of irrelevant ideas you’re also because you’re thinking just about as many ideas as possible you’re going to think a lot of those ideas are going to be ideas that you know a little bit about but you can’t fully develop them you can’t explain them you don’t have examples for them so what this does is it results in a huge number of irrelevant or useless ideas and it takes you a very very very long time to do that so you’re left with a bunch of useless information you’ve just wasted a few minutes and then you have to sort through all this useless information a better way would be to quickly think of relevant ideas that you can develop and be able to do that pretty much instantly and not in instantly is probably the wrong word actually you don’t want to do things instantly because that means you’re not thinking about them but you should be doing them pretty quickly when I work with my students on my VIP course we aim to get them to the point where they can think at you know look at any question and think of relevant ideas that they can develop in a few seconds and that might sound a little bit ambitious but it’s totally possible by using some other idea generation techniques and forgetting about brainstorming so if there’s one thing that I would suggest to you to take away from this lesson is stop brainstorming I know that your teacher has probably told you that that’s a really good idea but your teacher hasn’t taken the time like I have to really work with students and consider what actually works and what doesn’t if you want to stick with brainstorming stick with brainstorming if you want a better way to do it keep watching this lesson so number one is called the coffee shop method and I developed this myself when I was working with students in the classroom and one thing that I I picked up on one pattern that emerged was when I first walked into an eys class I would start the class maybe the first five minutes just chatting with the students asking them how they were talking about different things in the news or talking about current events and these were intelligent students that had no problem talking about these current events things in the news things that they were doing no problem at all as soon as the class started and as soon as I put a task two question in front of them the same students that had no problem whatsoever thinking of ideas was like their brain completely shut down so I started to spot this over and over and over again and when you spot a pattern like like that obviously there’s something wrong and you want to fix it so what I did was I I spoke to the students and and asked them why do you have no problem thinking of ideas before class but is when class starts you can’t do it and it was because they were in something that I call test mode and so this affects your writing it also affects your speaking more than anything that people for example on the speaking test when you are talking to someone outside of class their fluency is great their grammar is great great their pronunciation is great but then when they step into into the the real test everything falls apart for some reason again this is what I call test mode so what we want to do is we want to normalize the situation so even though it is a very stressful test and you’re going to have you know there’s a lot at stake I understand I speak to students every day about how important this this is we want to normalize it as much as possible and reduce stress as much as possible so that we can think normally so the coffee shop method what it does is I say to my students imagine instead of doing the I test imagine you’re sitting with a friend in a coffee shop just in your in your in your imagination and you’re discussing the question like two normal people would in a coffee shop so it’s probably better just to ex show you a real example of how this would be this video is sponsored by us I advantage and the ielt VIP course the I VI P course is the most successful I course in the world that is a fact because we have more b seven eight and nine success stories than any other I course in the entire world we do that by simplifying the whole I process supporting you with some of the best ises teachers in the world and being with you every step of the way until you get the score that you need to thank you for making it this far in the video I want to give you 10% off our VIP course all you have to do is just look down in the description you will see our special link that you need to get 10% off just click that and you can sign up if you have any questions about the VIP course always feel free to get in touch with us Chris advantage.com is my email address we answer 100% of the questions that we get hope that you would become a VIP if not enjoy the rest of this free video so here’s a question today more and more tourists are visiting places where conditions are difficult such as the Sahara Desert what are the advantages and disadvantages for the tourists so this is a real question from Cambridge 12 and this is a very typical question um it’s not difficult to understand but when students see this they over complicate everything they make it more complex than it really needs to be so instead of just looking at this question like an Al Tas two question imagine you’re sitting with your friend in a coffee shop and you’re saying like a lot of people are going to more extreme places on holiday these days and what are the good and bad things about that for the tourists so instead of using words like you know advantages and disadvantages just simplify it what are the good things about that what are the bad things about that and by doing that you will be able to easily generate ideas that are relevant that you can develop and you can think of them quickly so no brainstorming just thinking about that for a few seconds and it will generate really good ideas pretty much immediately another way to think about this is something that I call the Family fortunes method this is something that I developed with my VIP students because as I said before um one technique will work for some students but it won’t work with other students because it’s their brains don’t work like that everybody is different everybody’s brains are wired differently so there were some students who I was showing the coffee shop method to and they were still having problem problems so I said okay let’s think about this differently and let’s think about why you find this method difficult so they were still over complicating everything this is particularly with people who are very intelligent so I think about a third of my VIP course there are doctors and and engineers and lawyers and people like that like very very very intelligent highly qualified people those types of people tend to over complicate everything and they find it very difficult just to keep things simple so this is for someone if you’re a doctor or you know an engineer a lawyer someone who has a lot of Education this technique is probably for you so what is family fortunes family fortunes is a game show and basically what it is they ask the contestants questions and the questions are always we asked a 100 members of the public this question what was the top answer what was the most common answer and this is a great great way to think of writing task 2 ideas in this video I’m going to reveal to you the best and easiest way to write highlevel examples good examples not only improve your I score but they also make it easier to think of ideas and then develop those ideas into paragraphs but most students really worry about examples and ask questions like can I include data and surveys how do I give personal examples and how do I give examples from my own experience to help you I’ve taken seven real recent eys questions and I’m going to take you around where I live and give you seven real bad examples and seven real good examples to show you the difference between what is a good example and what is a bad example so let’s see how many you get correct and then I’ll show you the easiest way at the end of the video so the first question is in many places people are becoming interested in finding out about the history of the building they live in what are the reasons for this so I’m going to give you now two examples and I want you to think about those examples and think about which one is correct and which one is incorrect example one I live in a house very close to a 12th century Castle so I want to find out if any old things are buried there example two many people in Ireland live close to buildings that date back centuries and wish to establish if there are any valuables buried on their property second question in the future all cars will be driverless the only people traveling inside will be passengers do you think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages example one I own a Tesla and it is the best Driving Experience I’ve ever had example two Teslas allow their drivers to engage autopilot with which can accelerate break and steer autonomously freeing up the driver question three many drink products contain high sugar levels which causes many health problems a sugar tax should be applied to these products to encourage people to consume less sugar do you agree example one people who drink Coca-Cola are 96% more likely to be overweight example two in the UK regular Coke is more expensive than Coke zero because the government hopes this will help reduce obesity question four some people say that now is the best time in history to be alive what is your opinion on this example one the pandemic W witnessed a 52% increase in working from home example two during the pandemic millions of people started working from home which gave them more freedom and flexibility question five plastic packaging is bad for the environment what can be done by the government and individuals to solve this problem example one in the UK the government has to install bins for people to put dog waste into example two in the UK the government has installed recycling bins so that people can separate their rubbish question six young people who commit crimes should be treated the same as adults by the authorities do you agree or disagree example one when I was growing up all teenagers would drink alcohol in the park Mark every weekend example two in the UK it is illegal to buy alcohol if under 18 but many British teenagers frequently break this law in their advertising businesses nowadays usually emphasize that their products are new in some way why is this example one is VIP recently released VIP 2.0 to give their customers more control and flexibility over their learning at a much lower cost example two software company such as Microsoft update their products regularly and want to advertise these improvements so they can sell more products I couldn’t be bothered printing that art again okay so example one here is wrong the reason why it’s wrong is it is too personal personal examples are okay but most students mess them up in this way by talking just about them only or their cousin or their sister or their brother or something like that it’s really about sample size um if I want to go and find out if things are buried there that doesn’t mean that people in general want to do that as well it’s just what I want if you compare that with the second example which is correct many people in Ireland so I live in Ireland so instead of saying I want to do this I’m talking about people in my country or people in my area or city many people in Ireland live close to buildings that date back centuries all that is true and anyone can check that out and wish to establish if there are any valuables buried on their property so I’m stating something that has a bigger data set and is true and just gives far more authority to my answer and and this is an easy way an easy technique that any student can use so think about your own personal experience maybe you or a member of your family or a friend and then think how could I increase the sample size a bit so you instead of saying me you could say people in your city or your country or if you are a doctor instead of saying me many doctors or if you are a software engineer and many software Engineers or if you work for Google you know engineers at Google instead of me personally now for this next one the first example is wrong but not for the same reason as the previous one it is a personal example but it’s not because it’s too personal it’s because it’s too vague it’s the best driving experience ever um you want to be specific as our as specific as possible because you want to relate this to the specific point that you are making all right compare that with example two which is correct Teslas allow their drivers to engage autopilot that is what the thing the system in Tesla’s is actually called which can accelerate break and steer autonomously that’s specifically what it does why am I mentioning this these things because that is a hug huge Advantage the question is asking me about do you think the advantages outweigh the disadvantages it is a huge benefit not to have to worry about acceleration or breaking or steering a massive massive benefit and that is far more specific and descriptive and linked to the main point than just saying it’s awesome it’s amazing don’t sign like an American all right Americans if you ask them anything about anything it’s awesome oh amazing wonderful be specific but here for this question the first one is wrong why is it wrong well often students will add in just random statistics and surveys and studies and you know Cambridge University did this study Cambridge University are not studying Coca-Cola um they’re studying you know nuclear fusion and things like that or maybe they are I don’t know but you shouldn’t just add in random statistics Statics because like this one it not only is wrong it is dead wrong uh people who drink Coca-Cola are 96 more likely to be overweight it just doesn’t make any sense it doesn’t sound plausible so when the examiner sees this one they know that you’ve just used this technique that they don’t really like and two it doesn’t make any sense but what we can do is change it to something from our own experience in the UK I buy Coke Zero I like Coke Zero and the benefit of that also is it’s cheaper because there’s a like a 20% uh tax on sugary drinks so that is something that I know from my own experience which is much much much better than just throwing in these random statistics also the second reason why it is more correct is the question is asking about a sugar tax again your examples should be linked directly to your main points very similar to this one example one is wrong the person doesn’t know that there was a 52% increase in working from home there was a massive increase but we don’t know the exact percentage but what we can do instead is put language in such as millions of people I know that because there’s like 80 million people in the UK I’m sure there’s different numbers in your country but you can figure that out in your head you know you could guess roughly how many people it was it hundreds of thousands was it Millions if you’re in India it could be you know tens of millions hundreds of millions think of a a more General number and put that in because it is true and you know that it’s true it’s from your own experience during the pandemic millions of people started working from home which gave them more freedom and flexibility that is very different from this percentage it’s also very different from you know during the pandemic I worked from home and I loved it cuz I could go and work in the park but again this is not personal but it is from your own experience because if you were like me you were watching the news every day during the pandemic and you were aware that people were locked at home and had to work from home so in the UK the government has installed bins for people to put dog waste into wrong why is it wrong because the question doesn’t ask about dog the question is about plastic packaging all right it’s very very common you might think this is funny you might think oh I would never do that it’s very very common to see this in essays where students will write about the topic generally and just throw everything they know about the topic so recycling uh putting stuff in bins oh I have a dog I put stuff in the bin I’ll I’ll write that you might think that that’s crazy and I put it in there just for a joke but you see this all the time if you’re an examiner in the UK the government has installed recycling bins so that people can separate their rubbish I know this because I put out my rubbish each week we have a blue bin for Plastics and a black bin for everything else um in your country you might have a different system but that’s your own experience but what I did not write down was I put my plastic bottles in the blue bin it’s too personal in the UK I live in the UK so I’m going to put that in there when I was growing up all teenagers would drink alcohol in the park every weekend this is wrong for a couple of reasons number one it’s too personal and number two it is not actually factually correct not all teenagers a lot of them 80 90% % of them but not all make sure that you writing things that sound correct not every single teenager was getting drunk every weekend in the UK it is illegal to buy alcohol if under 18 this is correct but many British teenagers frequently break this law and many is very different from all so we’re stating something from our own experience every child every person in the UK knows that you are not allowed to buy alcohol if you’re under 18 that is from our own experience and many teenagers break this law every single person in the UK knows a friend who got too drunk one weekend when they were teenagers so this is correct now you might live in a country where uh alcohol is illegal completely um or it’s just not in your culture for teenagers uh to go and drink alcohol alcohol might be legal but just people don’t do that really you don’t have to use this specific example there are thousands of correct examples that you could use from your own experience don’t look at this and think oh I I’m wrong because I don’t know anything about alcohol okay so this one isn’t wrong per se but this one is just much better why the VIP course only you know a few thousand people in the world are actually aware of that um so if you’re writing something that is from your own experience but like literally you know 99.999% of the world have no idea what it is that could cause problems The Examiner could read that and think is this person just made up you know ABC company and it doesn’t really make any sense if you wrote that in the real exam this one you probably would be okay but what you want to do is add in in things that most people in the world will be aware of that will make your writing a lot more authoritative easy to understand um The Examiner will understand it more but it’s just easier for you to think if you’re thinking in those terms it’s easier you for you to think of Microsoft that you know everybody in the world basically knows about everybody has used those products well maybe not everybody but you know most people it is just far easier for you to think of and for the examiner to understand and that’s exactly what you want to do with every single part of the is test especially the writing test what’s easy for you and what’s easy for the examiner to understand so here’s the easiest system for generating very good examples and we’re going to use this question to help us with the demonstration some old people struggle with the use of advanced technology how can the elderly benefit from using Advanced Technologies so the first thing we’re going to do is think of a real example from our life experience so this is not just things that have happened to us this is things that we’ve experienced throughout our whole life things we know and for this question I’m going to use my mom’s iPhone my mom is in her 70s and she recently got this iPhone and it has helped her and not changed her life completely but definitely uh benefited her so my example is my mom’s iPhone then we’re going to ask ourselves if this idea is linked to the question this is the most important thing is your example actually linked to the question your main idea so my main idea is going to be that it helps my mom communicate so she is elderly this is advanced technology and it is benefiting her so the answer to my question is yes but if it was no if I looked at this idea and thought no actually this isn’t relevant to the question it’s not relevant to my main idea then we would just start again we would go back up here think of a real example think of another one now often when you do this not every time but sometimes they can be too personal so we’re just going to ask ourselves this question is it too personal if the answer is no then we’re done and we can use this example but because this is my mom’s phone it is very personal it’s just one person so we need to make it more G General so how can we do that instead of my mom my mom is an elderly person in the UK so we could say in the UK millions of elderly people use iPhones to FaceTime their loved ones so as you can see by following this system it is actually very very easy to generate a real example that is relevant to the specific question and really helps you develop your main body paragraphs but not only that you could actually use this during your idea generation phase so you could read this question and think who do I know that uses advanced technology and is elderly my mom what does she use it for FaceTime why does she use FaceTime to communicate with people how does that benefit her she won’t get lonely and if there’s an emergency she can contact them easily so what I’ve done there is just created a main idea an explanation and an example very very easily by following this system so we’ve gone from the question down to the example in the UK millions of elderly people use iPhones to FaceTime their loved ones done today we’re going to be looking at the 69 most common commonly used words by real band 7 8 and N students so that you can improve not just your vocabulary but massively boost your ielt writing score and in this video I’m going to show you what those words are how you can use them in your essays and how they will help you massively improve your essays at the end as a special bonus I’ll also give you access to all 100 of those sample essays as a little gift from me to you so the first word is viable this means able to work or succeed synonyms of this word are feasible workable or the most common one would be possible this is an adjective and common collocations are viable option or viable alternative for example the project is not a viable option without more funding let’s look at how our band 78 and9 students use this in their real essays a viable solution is to heavily punish law Breakers so in your essay days you will often be asked to write about Solutions or Alternatives so adding the collocation viable solution viable option viable alternative will hopefully boost your score the next word is schooling this means the education you get at school synonyms of this word would be education learning or training and this is a nine common collocations of this word are primary schooling and secondary schooling for example example good primary schooling is important for a child’s future and if we look at a sentence from the 100 essays in Vietnam the average class size is 20 students which makes it difficult for educators to provide proper schooling for each student education is one of the if not the most common topic for task two essays so very very useful word useful synonym to use in there instead of education training things like that the next word is n this means famous or respected synonyms of this word are wellknown famous and celebrated this is an adjective and common collocations are renowned expert or renowned for although you could add in athlete musician company many many different things that are well known and respected they are famous for something this is very useful for use in examples so often in examples you’re going to pick someone very well known or famous that demonstrates the point that you’re making here’s an example sentence he is a renowned expert in the field of biology and let’s look at how our students use this in their essay for instance after opening a branch of Apple company in Dubai many local graduates were thrilled by the good news of being accepted to work under this renowned company so instead of saying famous company they’ve added renowned the next word is Prime and know it’s not a drink made by Logan Paul this means the best or most important synonyms are best top Main and this word is an adjective the most common collocation is prime example but you could also Swap this out for Prime Advantage Prime disadvantage Prime solution Prime reason often in your essays you’ll be talking about these things so if you want to describe these things as the best or most important you can add prime before those words an example sentence is this is a prime example of excellent customer service and in our essays one student wrote the prime disadvantage is that these companies use the natural resources of developing nations recklessly which affects the environment so a very very good topic sentence there talking about advantages and disadvantages but the great thing about this word like many of the words on this list is it can be used interchange changeably throughout your essays the next word is prone which means likely to do or experience something synonyms are likely inclined and susceptible this is an adjective and a common collocation is prone to errors but it’s such as prone to errors the collocation will normally be prone to but you can swap out errors for other things that people are likely to experience so an example sentence children are prone to making mistakes when they are learning and in our essays we have thus people that have a diet based on plants and seeds are more prone to have a healthier life because they are allow their bodies to focus their energy in its normal processes and before you start writing this student made grammatical errors yes these are real essays these are real human beings that make mistakes we’re giving you real sentences not polished fake ones I hope you’re enjoying this video on ielt writing if you want to improve your ielt writing even more I’ve developed a free course called ielt essay Builder what ielt essay Builder does is it gives you a free course that structures everything from your introduction to your main body paragraphs to your conclusions it shows you a step by step sentence by sentence how to write everything that you’re learning here to sign up for that for free all you have to do is just click the link in the description thanks very much and let’s get back to the video the next word is officials and this means people in Authority or people in the government normally synonyms of this are authorities leaders or administrators and this is a nine common cations are government officials or public officials these are people working in the government in our essay they wrote in conclusion I do not support the argument of newspapers publishing the information of government officials so Tas two essays will often talk about the government and government policy so it’s a very useful word to have the next word is output and this means the amount produced of something synonyms of this word are production or yield and this is a noun common collocations are industrial output or total output sometimes you will be asked to write about companies companies dominate our lives similarly to the last one where we’re talking about governments governments and companies dominate our lives and have a huge impact on our lives therefore you will often be asked to write about the those things or write about examples of those things in your task two essays an example sentence the Factor’s output has increased this year and from our essays the main benefits of wearing a uniform are that it brings uniformity to the workplace and helps to increase the output of companies and you could also change that to a company’s output or a Factory’s output the next word is intellect which means the ability to think and understand and notice I didn’t say memorize memorize isn’t really thinking so don’t think that you can memorize all of these words and magically improve your intellect more on that at the end of the video synonym of this is intelligence and this is a noun common collocations are are his intellect or her intellect or maybe a child’s intellect an example sentence is her sharp intellect makes her a great scientist and from her essays educational programs on television can help a child’s intellect often you will get questions about education especially about children and how to improve their education improve their intelligence improve their intellect the next word is incentives which means things that encourage you to do something for example if you want a free course go down into the description of this video and add in your email address and we’ll send you a free course I’ve just given you an incentive synonyms of this word are motivation reward and encouragement this is a narn uncommon collocations are provide incentives or offer incentives so this will often come up when we’re talking about education or how companies are run often we will provide incentives or offer incentives to students workers citizens to try and get them to do something another way to think about this word is the approach of a carrot and a stick so if you want a donkey to do something you can beat it with a stick or you can provide an incentive a carrot to make it go forward an example sentence are the company offers Financial incentives to its best workers and in our essays many younger people find voting a waste of time and therefore if they are given incentives they are more likely to take the time to vote our next word is irrespective this means without considering something synonyms are regardless and despite and this is an adverb the most common collocation is irrespective of and then after of will be the thing that you are ignoring or you’re dis disregarding for example irrespective of the outcome we must try our best and in our essays I believe that adult life brings more joy because of Life fulfillment irrespective of more responsibilities so this is very useful when you are balancing two views or considering two views often you will get questions that ask you to discuss both views so this is very useful in your conclusion when you’re giving your opinion so you’re saying I believe this thing irrespective of the other side the next word is fundamental no it’s actually fundamental and this means important synonyms of this word are important essential or primary and this is an adjective common collocations are fundamental principle and fundamental change for example learning to read is a fundamental skill for children and from our essays it is the fundamental right of every human being to have their privacy so this is a great way in your essays to convey to The Examiner that this thing that you’re talking about is very very important you’re ranking this as the most important thing at the very very top so we could talk about the fundamental change that needs to happen the fundamental reason the fundamental right the fundamental whatever you are talking about to thank you for making it this far in the video I want to give you 10 10% off our VIP course I VIP course is the most successful I course in the world that is a fact because we have more band seven8 and N success stories than any other I course in the entire world we do that by simplifying the whole is process supporting you with some of the best teachers in the world and being with you every step of the way until you get the score that you need all you have to do is just look down in the description just click that and you can sign up if you have any any questions about the VIP course always feel free to get in touch with us we answer 100% of the questions that we get hope that you become a VIP if not enjoy the rest of this free video the next word is disclose which means to make something known synonyms are reveal show and tell this is a verb and the most common collocation is to disclose information for example the company must disclose any risk to its investors and from our essays on the on the other hand publishing details of Private Affairs discloses the corruption of politicians and make them accountable so again you’ll often be writing about the government what is the government full of in most countries corrupt politicians so it’s very easy to talk about disclosing them the next word is detrimental and it means to cause harm or damage synonyms are harmful damaging or just bad this is an adjective and the most common collocation is detrimental effect for example smoking has a detrimental effect on health I looked through the essays and the students did use this a lot but not many of them used it the most common way which is a detrimental effect on health for example or a detrimental effect on the environment Health the environment or just talking about bad effects on many different things you’ll often write about those in your essays so think about having that in your essay when you’re talking about negative or bad things the next word is adolescence and these are young people normally between the ages of 13 and 19 but it differs from person to person and a synonym of this word is teenager this is a noun and you have to be very very careful with this word most students use this because often you will be asked to write about children so what they do is they take the were children and just use that as a synonym by inserting adolesence now my two little boys one is three and the other is nine they are children but they are not adolescent so you must only use this word if you are writing about teenagers going through that stage of life which is puberty for example adolesence often experience many changes in their lives and there aren’t that many common collocations so I haven’t added any and from our essays although adolescence are free of responsibilities adults enjoy their life more because they are free to make their own choices so I think this is a really really good word to think about because you’re not just going to memorize these words and insert them randomly into your essays but what you’re also not going to do is take words that are similar so they’re synonyms and just replace those words like children adolescence think about the specific meaning of each of these words and think about can you actually use them accurately and appropriately in your essays we’re not telling you just to memorize these words and vomit them onto the page the next word is accountable and this means responsible for your actions synonyms are responsible answerable and liable this is an adjective and the most common collocations are accountable to something so to people or to a government or a body unaccountable for something if you’re accountable for something it’s normally your actions for example managers should be held accountable for their decisions from our essay this essay strongly disagrees with this view because politicians build Public Image through such news and they could be held accountable for any wrongdoings I think the student meant to write should be held accountable again you’ll often be asked to write about people in Authority people like government officials politicians teachers or just everybody in general we are all accountable for things that we do and we’re normally accountable to people above us or people around us the next word is addressed and this means to fix an issue or fix a problem synonyms are tackled deal with handled fixed and this is a verb the most common collocations are address a problem or the problem or address an issue or the issue for example the teacher addressed the issue of bullying in the classroom in that example we didn’t fix the issue it’s not the teacher completely resolving the issue of bullying this means to bring it up to address it to talk about it in the classroom so just be careful with that slight difference in meaning in our essay the student said however this can easily be addressed by making people aware and also by making new laws so they’ve used it to say addressed fixed so you might use this for example in problem solution essays addressing problems in your Solutions part of your essay but it can also be used very flexibly and interchangeably with many different ways of writing essays the next word is affluent which means having a lot of money synonyms are wealthy Rich prosperous and this is an adjective the most common collocations are an affluent society or an affluent country but you can also apply this to people in our essays our student wrote In addition not only does a country become more powerful economically but also many residents have an opportunity to become affluent so it is a common essay topic to write about money and people becoming more successful you’ll have a lot of people furiously typing success and money are not the same thing it’s not politics class or just trying to help you get a higher score so you can become more affluent and more successful in your new country that’s why you’re doing the I test right the next word is allocate which means to distribute resources or duties common synonyms are assign distribute and a lot this is a verb and the most common collocation is to allocate resources for example the manager will allocate resources for the new project and in our essays investment banks in Sweden showed a significant increase after they decided to allocate at least 40% of their leading positions to women the next one is a very useful word which is awareness which means knowledge about something synonyms are knowledge or understanding this is a n and common collocations are to raise awareness but for ielt essays we often talk about awareness campaigns which are campaigns by the government to to make people aware of a certain topic for example we need to raise awareness about the dangers of smoking and in our essays however encouraging youth participation in politics and awareness campaigns can be possible solutions to tackle these problems so these are very very useful when talking about solutions to problems often the best solution will be some kind of awareness campaign think about campaigns within your own country for smoking or or drunk driving or wear seat belts the next word is bullying which means repeated aggressive behavior intended to hurt someone synonyms are harassment intimidation and abuse this is a nine but it can also be used as a verb to bully someone common collocations are school bullying and very frequently these days cyber bullying which means to bully someone online normally through social media for example school bullying can seriously affect a child’s self-esteem and from our essays the main reason behind this is the increase of cyber bullying and hate crimes the next word is burden which means a heavy load or heavy responsibility synonyms are load or responsibility and this is a noun the most common collocations are heavy burden and financial burden for example the financial burden of college can be overwhelming for some students and from our essays this is because they cannot cope with the financial burden of buying new clothes from stores such as is Prada or Gucci money makes the world go around and a lot of task two essays will involve you talking about money Financial burdens but doesn’t have to be about money you could also talk about the burden of being a father or a mother for example or the burden of being a husband or wife but burden is often referred to negatively so don’t tell my wife that I said that the next word is capabilities which means the ab ability to do something synonyms are abilities skills or talents this is a nine and common collocations are their capabilities or its capabilities so you’re talking about the ability of a person to do something or a thing to do something for example the company’s technological capabilities are impressive and from our essays in conclusion many athletes nowadays use illegal substances to win the competition and exceed their physical capabilities so common topics are technology and health you could easily use capabilities to talk about company’s abilities or software’s abilities or AI abilities but you could also use the word capabilities to talk about someone’s physical health and their capabilities or you could use it for education to talk about the capabilities of students or maybe even teachers we have abilities to next is a very common word commonly which means frequently or usually synonyms are often usually and regularly this is an adverb common collocations are commonly used for example this word is commonly used in academic writing and from our essays for instance it can be commonly seen in many schools that teachers introduce TVs in their lectures to help students understand complicated and difficult subjects so if you’re talking about time and how often something happens use that word next is consumption the act of using something synonyms are use and usage and this is a noun common collocations are energy consumption human consumption when we eat things or when we use things and consumption of for example reducing energy consumption can help protect the environment the environment and global warming and new technologies for producing energy you will often use this word and these collocations and from our essays one student wrote this is because animals are reproduced kept in small and uncomfortable places and then killed and sold to supermarkets and butchers for human consumption so if anyone or anything is using something within your essays you could look through it and think how could I use the word consumption the next word is competence and this is the ability to do something well not the ability just to do something but to do something well synonyms are ability skill and proficiency this is a nine and common collocations are professional competence and competence in something for example her professional competence was evident in her excellent work and one student wrote by allocating a certain percent of high level positions to women companies would reach a higher competence level so often you’ll be writing about maybe disadvantaged groups of people for example in this one women and you’re writing about their confidence in things next is a word many of you already know I’m sure which is corruption this means dishonest or legal Behavior by those in power so think about a politician maybe from your local area or your country that dishonestly uses money synonyms of this word are dishonesty fraud and bright Library this is unknown and the most common collocation is political corruption for example the investigation revealed widespread political corruption and our student wrote for example when details of the lavish spending of the mayor of London while on a vacation were revealed in the sun it promoted questions from many sections of the society eventually exposing his corruption with the public money yes I know that student made a few small grammatical errors don’t go crazy it’s not the student’s fault maybe that student had a little bit of corruption in their school when they were growing up and they didn’t get the attention that you got from your very honest teachers and politicians the next one is a two for one these are both high level words that mean the same thing downsides and drawbacks these both mean the negative aspects of something synonyms are disadvantages negatives these are both nouns and it won’t be a surprise that students use these as synonyms when they are talking about advantages disadvantages essays the most common cocation for downsides are potential downsides so you’re talking about something that might be a dside and the most common collocation for drawbacks are major drawbacks for example the potential downsides of the new policy include increased costs and from our essay one of the major drawbacks of this method is its high cost another little trick there if you get an advantages or disadvantages essay very often an easy disadvantage is to talk about high cost not always but does help to have that in your toolkit and the next word is similar but different and that is deficiency now this isn’t really a disadvantage this is a lack of something so there is a little bit of it already but there is a lack of it synonyms are a lack a shortage or an insufficiency this is a Nar and a common collocation is a vitamin deficiency or deficiency in so you might not have a vitamin deficiency but you might have a deficiency in something else so you have a deficiency in whatever you have a deficiency of for example a vitamin deficiency can cause health problems un fromer essays the main disadvantage of the vegetarian diet is that without meat people may have a protein deficiency obviously this can be used for many different topics but health is one of the main ones the next one is Embrace which means to accept something with enthusiasm synonyms are accept welcome and adopt this is a verb and the most common collocation for our purposes is to embrace change life is basically the story of change when you’re writing you’re going to be writing about life so it’s very easy to use this collocation for example we need to embrace change to stay competitive and from our essays there are two main benefits of traveling such as people can gain knowledge and embrace other cultures so not just embracing change but embracing new things which is another way of saying change the next one will definitely enhance your writing score which is enhance this means to improve something synonyms are improve boost increase this is a verb and common collocations are to enhance performance but you can substitute out performance for something else or enhanced with a d on the End by enhanced by for example the new software will enhance our performance and one of our students wrote for instance many psychologists suggest to students who are struggling with social anxiety to take drama lessons as it helps to enhance confidence so enhance performance enhance confidence next is a very very popular one emissions which means gases or substances stied into the air most commonly for our purposes carbon dioxide emissions synonym of this is output and this is a n common collocations are carbon emissions or carbon dioxide emissions and reduce emissions for example reducing carbon emissions is vital to combat climate change and from our essays the main advantage of having a vegetarian diet is that carbon emissions can be reduced for bonus points take that sentence how would you improve the vocabulary of that sentence using the words we’ve already talked about in this video put it in the comments the next one is establishments and this is a business or an organization synonyms are institutions organizations and firms this is a n and the most common collocation especially for our purposes writing task two essays educational establishments so it should come as no surprise that when you are asked about education you are going to be writing about schools you’re going to be writing about universities so you can use educational establishments instead of school as a synonym for example universities are important educational establishments I looked at our students essays and they’re using them either incorrectly or using in a completely different context and I don’t want to confuse anyone so I’m not going to show you those the next word is expenditure which means money spent on something synonyms are spending costs or outlay this is a noun and is often Associated for TAS to writing with government expenditure or public expenditure public expenditure is just another way of saying government expenditure because governments use our public money for example government expenditure on Healthcare is increasing but you don’t have to just use it for government or public expenditure you could talk about company expenditure but I wouldn’t use it for individuals spending money on things it’s a little bit inappropriate in that context so what our student did was they said however the increase in expenditure of organizations and monotony among employees are the main drawbacks of compulsory uniforms so they’re talking about corporations companies spending money on uniforms how exciting now you’ll certainly exceed your required Bond score with this next one exceed this means to go beyond a limit or a standard or a number synonyms are surpass go beyond or outo it is a verb and the common collocations are exceed expectations or exceed a number for example the team managed to exceed expectations this quarter and in our essays in conclusion many athletes nowadays use illegal substances to win the competition and exceed their physical capabilities the next one I’ll just go quickly through it because it’s very similar to another word that we used harassment which is a synonym of a word we already mentioned which is bullying this means aggressive pressure or intimidation synonyms are bullying intimidation or abuse it is in NN and common collocations are workplace harassment and sexual harassment so bullying is normally associated with school whereas harassment is normally more associated with the workplace and Society in general although bullying can occur anywhere for example the company has policies to prevent workplace harassment and in our essays for instance in 2016 many supporters of Donald Trump lost their trust in him after newspapers uncovered the story of the sexual harassment allegations against him just be very careful with this word because often I hear I students talking about harassment in terms of things that are difficult um so I have act real emails from students talking about the ISS test harassing them or us harassing them because we’ve given them low scores because they’re not very good at writing that’s not harassment that’s just your life is difficult because you’re not very good at something normally because you’re lazy and the next one is more a linking word which doesn’t come under your vocabulary score it comes under your cohesion and coherence score but I’ll mention it because it is a useful word to know and it could help you improve your coherence and cohesion score and that word is hence and it basically means for this reason or therefore synonyms are therefore thus and so we would use so more in informal speaking than academic writing this is an adverb and a common cocation is hence the need or hence the need for for example the project is behind schedule hence the need for extra workers and you can also use it at the beginning of a sentence instead of therefore just like our student did hence the more sports facilities will be available to the public the more people could do Sports and thus stay healthy so they’ve used two different synonyms of there four hence and thus within the same sentence but remember the most important thing for linking words is not that you show a wide variety of them it’s that they are accurate and appropriate so if you’re unsure about linking words don’t memorize 50 of them and just shove them into your essay and hope for the best it’s better to repeat a simple word that is correct then change it to something that is wrong and the next word is informative and this means to provide useful information synonyms are educational enlightening and instructive this is an adjective and is normally used within educational contexts to describe programs or courses or TV shows or documentaries things like that so an example sentence would be the lecture was very informative and helped me understand the topic better from our essays kids who watch informative and educational shows learn to solve problems and develop strong mental math skills the next word is infrastructure this means the basic systems and structures needed for a society or organization a synonym of this word is a system and this is a n common collocations are transport infrastructure and infrastructure projects an example sentence is good transport infrastructure is essential for economic growth and from our essays in conclusion the advantages of the prioritizing economic growth above all other concerns are improved quality of life of people and good infrastructure the next word is insights this means the understanding or knowledge about something synonyms are understandings perceptions and intuition this is a n and common collocations are valuable insights and provide insights into for example the survey provided valuable insights into customer preferences and from our essays lessons at school can provide children with valuable insights in to being good members of society the next word is insufficient which means not enough often related to money or resources synonyms are inadequate lacking and deficient this is an adjective and the most common collocation is insufficient funds or insufficient resources for example the project was cancelled due to insufficient funds and from our essays the main downsides are higher costs of living for most and insufficient support for the poorest the next word is innate and this means existing from birth or is natural for example the ability to breathe is innate synonyms are inborn inherent and natural this is an adjective and the most common collocation is innate ability for example she has an innate ability to learn languages quickly and from our essays a person can only reach the highest level in the profession if they combine their innate ability with hard work often you will get questions that will ask things like does hard work lead to success or is it only people who are born with certain talents that are successful so you can use this word innate the next word is inappropriate no it is actually inappropriate and this means not suitable or proper it’s just a very very formal way of saying something is bad or not right synonyms are unsuitable improper and unfit this is an adjective and the most common collocation is inappropriate behavior this is often used to describe someone doing something their behavior is bad inappropriate for example his inappropriate behavior at the meeting was not acceptable and from our essays on the other hand employees who always wear uniforms might end up wearing inappropriate clothes for their work the next high level word is Merit and this means the quality of being good or worthy synonyms include worth value and Excellence this is a nine and common collocations are academic Merit or on Merit a good way to remember this word is not what the word means it’s what it doesn’t mean the opposite of that word I’m sure you know someone who got a job or a position in a company because they are the idiot nephew or the daughter of the owner of the company that is not based on Merit that is based on who they are an example sentence is scholarships are often given based on academic Merit so you deserve to get a scholarship because of high smart you are and in our essays this essay completely disagrees with the statement because selecting employees should be based on Merit their worth their value how good they are at the job so it can be used in the academic context but it can also be used in a more formal professional context as well the next word is one of my favorite words in the whole world it is mediocre and this means not very good pretty average synonyms include average ordinary and so so if you want to talk about it informally this is an adjective and there aren’t many common collocations for this but a good way to remember it is it’s one of the most horrible things that you could ever say to anyone I’m a very popular person on YouTube so I get horrible things said to me every day in the comments if somebody says that I’m terrible or useless or the worst teacher that has ever existed on the internet I don’t really worry if somebody says that but if somebody calls me mediocre that’s horrible to say that to someone you’re the same as everyone else an example sentence is his performance was mediocre not meaning expectations and from our essays for example the world is filled with many Star athletes who started off as mediocre in the beginning but they Challenge and push themselves to their limit which ultimately help them to attain the greatest version of themselves so if you want to really really annoy me and upset me just write this video as mediocre in the comments the next one is the opposite of mediocre it is notable and this means worthy of attention or important important synonyms are remarkable significant or noteworthy this is an adjective and common collocations are a notable achievement if you’re talking about some achievement that somebody has made or some kind of scientific discovery or technological advancement a notable exception so if you’re talking about I believe this this this this and then you want to talk about a counter argument or another side to the point that you’re making you could say a notable exception is and a notable example so you’re going to be giving at least two examples in your essays so you could write a notable example here’s an example sentence her notable achievements in science earned her several Awards and in her essay in conclusion although well-known individuals earn big amounts of money from sponsors notable people’s lives will be in danger because evil-minded people will harm them the next one is a very useful word numerous which means many in number synonyms include many sever veral various and this is an adjective common collocations are numerous times for example she has traveled to Paris numerous times and in our essay the majority of the chief positions in business organizations are occupied by males despite the fact that more than half of the workforce in numerous developed Nations is made up of women so when you are using this you might use it in your explanations or your examples when you’re explaining something you can say that this has happened numerous times or there are numerous examples of this happening you don’t have to do that for every essay just have it in your toolkit the next word is peers peers are people of the same age so for example my son’s peers are 9-year-olds or people that normally do the same job and are at the same level they have the same status synonyms include equals colleagues and contemporaries this is a nine and common collocations are peer pressure and their peers so we will often use this word when we are comparing people within the same group together for example adolescents often face peer pressure from their peers to conform to group norms and in her essay for instance several Studies have shown that kids are more likely to outperform their peers on tests when they watch educational shows very very useful for comparing for explaining for giving examples the next word is extremely useful because can be used to describe pretty much anything and can be used as a synonym for so many different things and it is one of the most mispronounced words in the English language let’s see how I do with it phenomenon this means something that happens or exists especially something unusual or interesting synonyms include event occurrence and happening this is a nine and common collocations are natural phenomenon you could use natural pH phenomenon to describe global warming for example or a social phenomenon so something that people have started to do or you go to a new country and you’re like oh that’s an interesting social phenomenon a thing that is happening that I’ve never noticed before for example I recently traveled to a country where every restaurant you go to uh parents would give their children iPads and phones and allow them to play music and games at full black fast it’s like that’s an interesting phenomenon it also allows you to be diplomatic and polite so an example sentence the northern lights are a natural phenomenon that attracts many visitors it is a thing in the sky that is natural a natural phenomenon in our essays this phenomenon may result in younger people being apathetic towards politics and election results that do not reflect public opinion so you could use this in your introduction you could use this in topic sentences you could use this in explanations and you could use this in your conclusion if you are really stuck for a synonym maybe you have repeated the word a few times and you’re like how do I change this you could say this phenomenon but make sure it is a phenomenon the next word is proportion which means a part of a whole or a percentage so if you’re talking about a percentage of something you could use proportion synonyms are part portion or fraction and this is a Nar and common cations are large proportion or small proportion for example a large proportion of the population supports the new law and from our essays some believe that a certain proportion of these vacancies should be allocated to females this is also very useful for task one academic if you’re doing the academic module the next word is revenue and this means income from business or government activities in the form of tax that’s how governments make money synonyms are Income earnings and profit Prof although be very careful because revenue and profits are two very very different things if youve ever run a business you should know that word type is a none and common collocations are annual revenue revenue from so revenue from taxes revenue from I VIP courses if we’re lucky and tax revenue example sentence the company’s annual revenue has grown steadily and from our essay this is because with economic progress States generate lots of Revenue which can be used to provide high quality services such as free education so often you will get questions asking about government services education is often a government service depending on which country you live in health is sometimes a government service not if you live in America but a lot of questions can be boiled down to should the government provide this service or is the government providing a good enough service and you can talk about Revenue coming in from different things and my revenue is being spent the next word is resent and this means to feel angry or bitter about something synonyms are begrudge disliked or be annoyed by this is a verb and common collocations are resent the implication or resent the fact for example he began to resent the implication that he was not working hard enough and from our essay parents should encourage their children to stay at home more rather than force them so that their children will not resent them so it’s a very easy way to talk about things that people dislike for example I really resent the fact that I picked so many of these words and I didn’t think it was going to take this long to make this video the next word is sector which means parts or divisions of a larger group or area synonyms are divisions segments or areas this is a Nar and common collocations are the public sector the public sector means you work in the government the private sector those people who actually do all the work means that you work not for the government for real businesses and then we have the voluntary sector people who volunteer their time they don’t work for the government they don’t work for real businesses they work for Charities for example the public sector employs many people in health care and education and from her essays others think that they have to only study something useful for their future for example those related to science and technology sectors the next word is Workforce and this means all the people who work in a company or country synonyms are staff employees and labor force this is a none and a common cocation is a skilled Workforce for example a skilled Workforce is key to ACC Company Success and from our essay one benefit of multinational companies is that they employ a large Workforce the next word is gifted and this means having a special talent or ability synonyms are talented skilled and exceptional this is an adjective and the common cocation is a gifted child or gifted children you will often use this when talking about education not every essay about education but if you are talking about exceptional gifted children you can use this word for example the school has programs for gifted children in the Arts and Sciences and from our essay children who are gifted with a particular inborn Talent often achieve their goal early in their lives you could also use one of the other highlevel words we mentioned in this video innate to talk about people who are born with a particular gift the next word is nutritional which means relating to the nutrients in food synonyms are dietary nutritious and nourishing this is an adjective and common cations are nutritional value and nutritional deficiencies for example it is important to consider the nutritional value of your diet and from our essays one disadvantage is that vegetarian diets may cause nutritional deficiencies one of the most common task two topics is health and it is very easy to connect Health with our nutrition our eating habits so very important word to know the next word is Thrive which means to grow or develop well synonyms include flourish prosper and succeed this is a verb and a common collocation for this word is to thrive in for example children thrive in a loving and supporting environment and from our essays for this reason I believe that some inborn qualities play a crucial part for people to thrive in some areas like music or Sports so if you think about the area or the context that that person or that thing is thriving in is succeeding in is prospering in then you can use thrive in that area and it’s not just people companies can Thrive animals can Thrive lots of different things can Thrive and the next word you might not think is a high level word and it is unsafe you might think that this is a low-level word because you know it you know how to use it and it is quite a short common word but if you go to Cambridge dictionary. org online pop in on safe you’ll see that this is a C1 word that’s a very very useful point to make because many of you think that highlevel words are these big unknowable unusable words that you’ve never heard before that’s often not the case often you know way more C1 and C2 words than you realize this word means not safe or dangerous synonyms include dangerous risky or hazardous this is an adjective and a very common collocation are unsafe conditions for example the building was evacuated due to unsafe conditions and from our essay the second reason behind the negativity of being a star is that it creates an unsafe environment that may endanger the star’s mental health so unsafe conditions unsafe environment when you’re talking about dangerous things often that will come up in TAS two and a very very appropriate word for our last word unwind cuz I’m definitely going to have to unwind after reading out so many of these words and this means to relax after work or some kind of tension synonyms include relax rest or d-stress this is a verb and common collocations are unwind after for example it is important to unwind after a long day at work like reading lots and lots and lots and lots of words and definitions from our essays this essay believes that television can do both as it helps people to unwind but it also presents complicated information in an easily digestible form so now that you know what those words are I want you now to think about why are you watching this video you’re not watching this video to boost your vocabulary you’re watching this video to get the I score that you need and let me tell you the worst thing that you could do right now if you want to improve your I’s writing score the worst thing you can do is take those words and try and insert as many of those words as possible into your essay and I want to prove that to you using data and a really cool software tool that you can use to analyze your own essays and I’m going to take the essays from here ielt 18 and I’m going to show you just how many band 789 c1c2 words they actually use in their essays that have been produced by Cambridge examiners so if we have a look here what I’ve done is I’ve used this amazing Tool uh called text inspector text inspector does a lot of different things but one of the things that it does is you can add in a bunch of text so I’ve taken the 100 essays from our band 7 8 and N students and what it will do is it will analyze all of the words and categorize the words into A1 A2 B1 B2 C1 C2 and this was the tool I also used to actually get the words so for example here’s a list of all the C1 words here’s all a list of all the C2 words but the really really interesting thing about this data is that out of all the words used only 3.2% of the words are C2 and only 6.04% of the words are C1 what does that tell you more than 90% of the words used in those band 7 8 and N essays are A1 A2 B1 B2 now many of you might be thinking chis you’re famous for telling people to simplify their language and not include too many highlevel words maybe your students this is what their essays look like but real band 7 8 and N essays don’t actually look like that so what I’ve done is I’ve taken three essays from this book Cambridge 18 these are essays that have been produced by very high level examiners and put into their book so let’s see what their essays look like 1.31% of their words were C2 3.67% of their words were C1 around 95% of their words are A1 A2 B1 B2 and the majority of their words are A1 and A2 more than half and this isn’t just I’s essays you can take any great writing like I’ve taken George Orwell essays who is is probably the greatest writer of the 20th century and the graph looks like this I’ve taken academic Journal articles from my University days I’ve taken the financial times the Wall Street Journal probably the best writing of any newspapers it looks like this so when you go on to your social media accounts you go on to Instagram you go on the Tik Tok and some guy is giving you a list of C1 and C2 words and telling you that your essays are not good enough if your essays aren’t packed full of these words just ask yourself a question who do you think knows more the person that runs the most successful online is course in the world Cambridge examiners George Orwell the people who write articles for the financial times in the Wall Street Journal or some clown on Tik Tok or Instagram so you’re probably thinking now well what do I do now you’ve given me this list of highle words how am I actually going to use them in my essay to improve my score am I saying not to use C1 and C2 words no what I’m saying is you should be using all levels of words accurately and appropriately getting a band 8 or n in I writing is much simpler than you think over the course of my career I have corrected more than 10,000 ielt essays I’ve seen every single mistake that an i student can make from structuring their arguments to making silly vocabulary errors and one thing that I can tell you is all of these can be easily fixed every student that I have worked with that has got a band eight or nine has followed one simple strategy understand what the common mistakes are and learn how to fix those common mistakes so today what I’m going to do is I’m going to take a band Six real student essay that is full of the most common mistakes that we see and I I’m going to show you sentence by sentence how to transform that essay it’s from a band six to a band eight so you’ll be able to see how simple it is to transform your writing and get the score that you need so if your aim is to get a band 7 eight or n in I writing and relocate to the country of your dreams you’re in the right place so sit back relax and let’s learn how to improve our IL writing so let’s start off by looking at this student’s essay and figure out why this is a band six and then I’ll show you how to transform it to a band8 now do not skip ahead if you skip ahead you’re not going to understand why most students get these things wrong and in my experience after you know correcting thousands of essays the students that learn what to avoid do much much better than the students that just learn a bunch of good things to do in their essay I know that doesn’t make sense but a lot of things don’t make sense about iels do not skip ahead watch this part of the video and understand the bad things to avoid everything that we’re going to discuss will be related to these These are the official band descriptors when your examiner is marking your essay they are looking at these bands and this is what they are basing their score on and only this so it’s really important that you understand why these things lead to a low score I’ll also share the new guidance that was released recently it’s a little bit more more detail and it’s released from ielt so it’s something that you should definitely pay attention to so let’s start off by understanding the question very very important some people believe that professionals such as doctors and Engineers should be required to work in the country where they did their training others believe they should be free to work in other countries discuss both views and give your opinion so the student starts off with naday spelled incorrectly The crucial debate about professional people work in other countries is Raging so in the very first sentence the student has made a crucial error they’ve made a mistake which is including a background statement now many of you have been taught because many teachers teach their students to start their essay with a background statement why is this wrong and why will this lower your score well a background statement is an example of a memorized sentence or memorized template normally they will look something like this nowadays is the crucial debate about X so insert the topic is Raging so what happens when students memorize these things is they will often make mistakes so for example this student and this is a very very very common mistake they have misspelled the word nowadays as Nows aays if I had a penny for every time I’ve read the word naday I wouldn’t be teaching you ielt I’d be on a beach somewhere en enjoying myself the other reason why this is a mistake is more strategic so you only have about 40 minutes to write your whole essay you should not include anything that doesn’t improve your score background statements do not improve your score at all so including them is wasting time so anything that wastes time and leads to vocabulary errors grammar errors and doesn’t improve your score at all is a complete and utter waste of time you’ve also created a very bad first impression because as I said the examiner has seen this a thousand times in their brain when they read that they are automatically thinking this person is just relying on memorization and templates they’ve probably went to a very bad school had a bad teacher this essay is going to be bad do you want the very first impression to be that probably not it also simp just doesn’t make any sense whatsoever read it Nows aays The crucial debate about professional people working in other countries is Raging is it is it actually raging is this a debate that a lot of people are having no there are far more important debates and problems in the world than professional people deciding whether to stay or leave their country so you have just written something that is complete and utter nonsense I’d also like to draw your attention to the official marking criteria and what it says for a band zero where there is proof that a candidate’s answer has been totally memorized your first sentence is providing proof to The Examiner that you do not know how to write if you knew how to write an essay you wouldn’t use memorized sentences like this so what some examiners will do is they will discount that entire sentence because it is meaningless it doesn’t mean anything it doesn’t contribute rute anything to the essay let’s have a look at the next sentence whilst many people believe they should remain in their home country others say they should have freedom to work anywhere in the world this essay will endeavor to analyze both side before coming to A Reason conclusion and let’s look at the official marking criteria to show you why this whole introduction is just a complete waste of time if we look at band nine for task response a clear and fully developed Ved position Bond eight a clear and well-developed position Bond seven a clear and developed position is presented and if we look at the guidance for the markting criteria says the task response assesses how clearly the candidate opens the discourse establishes their position and formulates conclusions so what your position is is what you think about the question what do you believe is the answer to the question so what is the question asking you to to do what’s asking you to do three things discuss this view discuss that view and give your opinion three different things this introduction doesn’t do any of those three things whilst many people believe they should remain in their home country that’s just repeating the question it’s not saying why it’s not giving any position others say that they should have freedom to work anywhere in the modern world again no position they’re just repeating the question this essay will endeavor to analyze both side before coming to A Reason conclusion this is a memorized sentence again so not very good but also there is no position no opinion give your opinion there’s nothing here now why do students do this well maybe it’s not your fault I’ve taught in many many countries all over the world especially Asia and in many countries I’ll not name individual countries don’t worry I’ll not pick on anybody but in your education system you are off and taught from a very small child not to take a strong position or not to have a strong opinion on anything this is completely the opposite to the Western education system and how I else want you to write essays they want you to have a strong position and tell them what you think so if you want to move to a Western Country and get a high score on the I test you have to abandon this idea of not taking any position and just being very wishy-washy about everything also the other reason is many of you go to I schools and I teachers that just teach you this templated memorization technique the examiners are not dumb most of the senior examiners have marked well over 10,000 essays and at least 70 80% of them look like this that is why it is extremely rare to get band eight and get band nine but it is extremely common to get band 5 5.5 6 and 6.5 these are the most common scores but don’t worry we’ll show you how to transform this introduction in a very very simple way and show you how to tell the examiner exactly what you think about this question in a very simple effective way now there are also multiple little spelling errors little spelling mistakes that is also a problem and is dragging your score down to about six I hope you’re enjoying this video on I writing if you want to improve your I writing even more and put all of the things that you’re learning from our YouTube channel into practice I’ve developed a free course called I essay Builder what IL essay Builder does is it gives you a free course that structures everything from your introduction to your mainbody paragraphs to your conclusions it shows you a step by step sentence by sentence how to write everything that you’re learning here and it’s 100% free and it’s helped thousands of students get get a B 7 eight and even 9 to sign up for that for free all you have to do is just click the link in the description enter your email address on that page and we’ll send you that free I essay builder for free thanks very much now back to the video let’s move on to the first main body paragraph let’s check this out and see if this is good or not on the one hand okay this is a totally acceptable way to show I’m going to discuss this first point doctors have a duty to take care of their own people this is because doctors pay for a doctor’s training therefore medical professionals have responsible to give back to Nation likewise Engineers have many crucial skills that are valuable to their home country for example my brother is an engineer who build the high-speed rail network of my home country which is now the Envy of the world so overall this is quite good but there’s a couple of major issues here and if you read this paragraph if I gave you this paragraph before this video 80 90% of students would say you know that’s quite a good paragraph they should be getting a high score but there are couple of fundamental issues with it so if we have a look at band six for task response it says main ideas are relevant these ideas are relevant there’s nothing wrong with them but some may be insufficiently developed or may lack Clarity while some supporting arguments and evidence may be less relevant or inadequate if we compare that with a bond8 ideas are relevant well extended and supported so this is all about idea development in other words did they take each idea and fully explain each idea and provide an example to help support that idea even more so the problem with this particular paragraph is there are two main ideas instead of one Central main idea so instead of fully developing one idea they’ve put in two ideas and they have failed to really fully develop both of them because they just don’t have time they don’t have enough room to do that now when I asked the student why did you do this they said well it says in the question to talk about doctors and Engineers so I talked about doctors first and I talked about engineers my old teacher that’s what they said told me that I must talk about everything in the question in order to get a high score well let’s have a look at the question and analyze whether that is true or not some people believe that professionals such as doctors and Engineers why does it say such as doctors and Engineers well professionals is not a very clear succinct word it has many different meanings so by putting such as doctors and Engineers into the question what the people at Cambridge who wrote this question are trying to do is help you understand the word professionals they are not instructing you that you must talk about doctors and then you must talk about engineers so by following faulty advice the student is lowering their score and doing the wrong thing remember the examiners are only following what it says here in the marking criteria they’re not checking in with your local teacher and asking them well what did you tell them also this second sentence just doesn’t make any sense in relation to the explanation that they’re giving this is because doctors pay for a doctor’s training therefore medical professionals have responsib to give back to Nation when I spoke to the student about this and asked them it doesn’t make any sense it’s confusing they oh no I meant to write government this is because the government pays for a doctor’s training therefore medical professionals have responsible to give back to nation and the reason why they made this mistake is they were trying to think of way too many things on test day because they were relying on memorization if you have me memorized a bunch of vocabulary grammar templates memorized sentences you’re not really focused on one thing that you should be focused on which is answering the question and writing a clear essay students that just focus on writing a clear essay write a clear essay and answer the question students that are thinking of 17 different things at the same time write confusing things like this if we go back to the marking criteria May lack Clarity it’s not clear likewise Engineers have many crucial skills that are valuable to their home country okay what are those skills how are they valuable there’s no explanation in here for example my brother is an engineer who build the high-speed rail network of my home country which is now the Envy of the world who cares is it really the Envy of the world or are you just listening to your government telling you that it is the Envy of the world who cares about your brother you’re very proud of your brother but that doesn’t mean anything to an academic essay this is is too personal you should avoid very very personal examples like this because they only tell the story of your brother or your cousin or your mother or whoever you are talking about and I’ll show you how you can convert a very personal example like this it’s easy to think about how to convert it into a band eight example later in the video so not a bad paragraph apart from the fact that it is not clear the ideas are not developed enough and the example just doesn’t make any sense okay let’s move on to the next paragraph on the other hand a mistake right away so if we look at coherence and cohesion for a band Six cohesive devices such as on the one hand on the other hand are used to some good effect but cohesion within or between sentences may be faulty or mechanical due to misuse overuse or Omission so this student knows what on the one hand on the other hand means but because they have memorized it they don’t really know how to use it properly they’ve made a mistake and again if I had a penny for every time I’ve seen that mistake I would be a multi-millionaire it is better to write nothing and not make the mistake than it is to include things that you’re not 100% sure about on other hand doctor and Engineers might find it difficult to find job and adapt to society a foreign country there is always language barrier to face when moving to new country and many doctors require High a score in order to do their job for example doctors have to achieve the incredibly high score of 7.5 in most english- speaking countries Engineers may also face a culture shock when they move abroad to a new place many Engineers have recently moved to Africa to build large infrastructure projects and find the lack of familiar home food and work culture very different from before so can you spot the major issue in this paragraph So if you haven’t spotted it yet let’s have a look at the question again so some people believe that professionals such as doctors and Engineers should be required to work in the country where they did their training so in this paragraph they have covered that point others believe they should be free to work in other countries in this paragraph they’ve covered that point so this paragraph should be about others believe they should be free to work in other countries but is it look at the ideas the ideas are about why it is difficult to move to a new country the obstacles someone will face the question is about should they have the freedom the right to work in other countries not about whether it will be difficult or not so if we have a look at the markting criteria for ban seven for task response the main parts of the prompt are appropriately addressed for Bond 8 The Prompt is appropriately and sufficiently addressed so for the second part of the prompt they’re not addressing the question their ideas are not relevant so it’s impossible for them to get a b seven or get a band8 and this is often a problem that you’ll get very angry students that can’t believe that they got a 6.5 or a six or 5.5 because they said I answered the question I wrote A good essay no you didn’t this is why it’s so important for you to get someone who is experienced and knows what they’re doing to look at your essays and point doubt your mistakes the other main issue is they have repeated the same mistake of talking about doctors and then talking about engineers way too many ideas there are four main ideas in this essay now really there should only be one in this paragraph and one in this paragraph then fully develop each idea and the good news for this student is their writing is quite good they don’t have a huge problem they’ve just been taught the wrong thing so by fixing a few simple things that will’ll show you in the rest of the video they’ll be easily able to move from a b six to a band seven or even eight so let’s have a look at the conclusion in nutshell it’s not really appropriate in an academic essay to write in nutshell it’s a very informal way of starting a conclusion how many conclusions will you write on test day one how many cohesive devices linking words do you need to learn to put at the beginning of your conclusion one learn one properly in conclusion that’s simple easy to use and I know many of you right now are in the comments saying can I do it with this can I do it with that can I do it with this just learn one simple thing provided to you by someone who knows what they’re doing keep it simple do not learn 17 different ways to write a conclusion because what will happen is you’ll either write something inappropriate or you’ll make a mistake it’s in a nutshell they’ve missed out the article here there are plethora spelled in correctly of reasons for Medics and those from an engineering background to remain loyal to their mother country like what stop sitting on the fence stop beating around the bush give me your position what do you think about this at no point in this essay has this student given their opinion at no point what is the question asking you to do give your opinion again this might not be your fault you might come come from one of those educational backgrounds that you know for the last 15 years you’ve been taught not to do that but it’s time to grow up you’re moving to a different country you need to adopt their ways of doing things it is recommended they stay at home in order to avoid the hardships such as homesickness many face when they move abroad the question wasn’t asking you to give a recommendation why is the student doing this because their teacher told them to so if you are relying on memorizing a template or structure you’re not really thinking am I answering the question all you’re thinking about is what do I put into this part of the structure structures are helpful but they’re about you know less than 5% of your total score and you should not use them if they’re provided to you by someone who doesn’t really know what they’re doing so as you’ve seen this student is probably going to get a band six for task response probably going to get a six for coherence and cohesion but that’s only 50% of your total Mark the rest of your Mark will be for lexical resource and grammatical range and accuracy and this is a very good example of a band Six student for grammatical range and accuracy and lexical resource which is just a fancy way of saying vocabulary most students that we are working with that are getting a six or 6.5 overall they don’t have bad grammar or bad vocabulary but they’re making way too many small errors and these little errors add up so the way way that an examiner is thinking about your essay in terms of grammar and vocabulary is not did you use some words like plethora and nowadays and the debate is Raging they don’t look at that and go oh my God this person is amazing what they’re doing is they are looking at your range but most importantly your accuracy they are counting the number of mistakes and very very basically if more than 50% of your sentence es have grammar vocabulary spelling errors in them then you are going to get a b six and it’s impossible for you to get more than a band Six because all of these little errors add up so let’s take vocabulary this student doesn’t have bad vocabulary but they’re trying to use too many words that they don’t really understand and this is leading to a lot of spelling mistakes and spelling is counted in the lexical resource part of the marketing criteria so nisad days plethora Endeavor responsibility and many other small little vocabulary errors that are present in more than 50% of the sentences I’ll show you a very very quick and easy way a simple way to eliminate most of these mistakes and transform your essay from a bound six to a bound eight later in the video same thing with grammar so most of the students that we work with most of the essays that I have marked don’t have a huge problem with grammar most of the grammar is quite good in this essay but they have one or two areas of grammar so that could be articles punctuation subject verb agreement tenses for example or other areas of grammar that they have a huge problem with so if you have a look at this student you will see that there are multiple article errors in nutshell on other hand might find it difficult to find job have a responsibility and over and over and over again so again all these small errors just add up and then when you combine that with lots of spelling mistakes too many ideas not answering the question irrelevant ideas this all adds up to a student who believes that they’re getting a band seven or band eight opening up their score on results day and seeing a big fat six but the good news is is that you can easily fix all of this and transform it and over the years I wish I could have just taken each of these essays and given the student you know 10 or 15 minutes of advice and they would have really improved their score and moved to the country of their dreams and had you know a very happy high-paying job and all of those good things so the good news is for you is we’re going to do that for you in this video this video is sponsored by us I advantage and the I VIP course the I VIP course is the most successful I course in the world that is a fact because we have more band seven eight and nine success stories than any other ISS course in the entire world we do that by simplifying the whole is process supporting you with some of the best is teachers in the world and being with you every step of the way until you get the score that you need to thank you for making it this far in the video I want to give you 10% off our VIP course all you have to do is just look down in the description you will see our special link that you need to get 10% off just click that and you can sign up if you have any questions about the VIP course always feel free to get in touch with us chrisad vantage.com is my email address we answer 100% of the questions that we get hope that You’ become a VIP if not enjoy the rest of this free video so let’s rewrite this and transform it from a band six to a band eight now before we look at the introduction we need to look add the question again it is the most important thing a lot of students really focus on structures and memorizing things and taking chunks of essays from teachers out but really the students that get a band EG at about nine they focus a lot more on the question formulating the answer in their brain and then taking that answer and putting it on paper that’s really what they’re testing Can you look at something think clearly about it and then put it clearly on paper so let’s reiterate what are they asking you to do they’re asking you to do three things why do people think this side why do people think this side and what do you think now just to go into a little bit more detail this is something that we teach our VIP students it’s not why do you think this and why do you think that it’s why do other people think this side why do other people think that side and what do you think so looking at the question again you need to be thinking about why do some people believe that they should be required to work in their home country why do some people think that if you ask someone that what would they say what is the main idea behind them thinking that then others say they should be free to work why do they say that and then the third thing that you need to do is what do you think do you agree with this side do you agree with that side or do you think something slightly different I’ll show you how you can do that all in your introduction so what we’re going to do is take this introduction that is meaningless and we’re going to show you how to transform this into an introduction that answers the question which is what you should be doing so whilst many people think that professional workers owe a debt to the country they trained in so what have we done there we’ve explained why people believe this side they believe this side because they think that these doctors Engineers nurses lawyers whoever was trained in that country they owe a debt not necessarily money but they owe that country they have a responsibility to remain there and work there so what we’ve done in that sentence is we have immediately said this is why people think this the compare that with you know this is a Hot Topic that is Raging and some people think that meaningless to exactly what people think the difference between these two we often describe this as a shotgun approach so this one here is a shotgun approach if you think about how a shotgun works you use a shotgun to spray an area and hope that you hit something compare that with a rifle a rifle is one shot one kill a rifle is accurate that is why they are so deadly short to the point answer the question now let’s move on to the other side of it I believe they should be free to work where they choose because they can make more money so if you asked someone you know you’re a doctor engineer you’re a lawyer you’re a nurse why are you moving to a western country or an english- speaking country cuz I can make more money if you ask a hundred of them why are you moving away to make more money so we don’t choose the most complex or the most high level or fancy idea we choose the simplest most straightforward most popular idea because they are easy to understand easy to write about one thing many of you are jumping up and down and you know furiously typing you can’t put I you can’t put a personal pronoun in your ielt essay remember what the question says give your opinion what do you believe easiest way for you to do that is just say I believe I think it is my opinion you’re not going to lose any marks for that in fact you’re going to gain marks because you’re making it super duper clear what you think and how you are answering the question and nowhere does it say in the official marking criteria or the official guidance that you’re not allowed to do that so what have I done with this sentence I’ve done two things this is why these people believe this because of money and I agree with them I believe this too so you’ve done all three things in one sentence here’s what these people think here’s what these people think and this is what I think now many of you will look at this and think it’s not long enough it’s too short size does not matter thankfully there is nothing in the marking criteria that says your introduction needs to be very long like other things in this world it’s it’s not the size that counts it is what you do with it I could write a very very long introduction like the bar six student did but it wouldn’t really satisfy the examiner this one is short it’s small but it’s mighty in fact what this does is it shows the examiner that you’ve understood the question you’ve answered the question and you’re telling the examiner what is coming up in the rest of this essay cuz all we need to do now is take this side write about it in our main body paragraph fully develop that main idea then take the other side fully develop that main idea and then summarize everything in our conclusion so that’s what we’re going to do now so in our first main body paragraph we’re going to like the band Six student we’re going to talk about this first view but we’re going to reduce the number of ideas from two to one so we’re going to change nothing about the cohesive device on the one hand showing the examiner I’m going to talk about this side first so on the one hand professionals often receive considerable funding from their government to become fully qualified so this is just a much simpler clearer way of saying the same thing that the band Six student said doctors have a duty to take care of their own people this is because doctors pay for a doctor’s training not very clear this is much simpler but clearer what I have done is put a topic sentence that just clearly states this is the main reason this is the main idea there’s no explanation here there’s no complexity you’re just saying this is why people believe this now we need to explain why they think this so big difference between Bond six and bond 8 is Bond six will just State main ideas and not really explain why those ideas are true imagine you’re arguing with this person imagine you’re saying well why should they do that you know I don’t agree with you can you explain more it is only fair that they should repay this support by working in that place so if someone helps you it is fair it is the right thing to do to repay them but again we need to explain this why why is it fair so we need to continue to explain so that’s a difference again between a bound six and a bound eight Bond six when their writing explanations they might write just one sentence where as a band Seven band eight band nine they will develop that explanation a lot more they will fully explain it they will fully develop it so that anyone could read this and understand this person’s point this is because they often do jobs that greatly benefit society and this is why their government invested in them in the first place place so explaining why do governments pay for doctors and engineers and lawyers and all of these professional people why do they pay for that is it just to keep them happy to keep them busy no it’s actually quite selfish they do it so that that investment pays off in the future normally governments and politicians don’t do things just to make people happy they do it to get a benefit so we’re explaining that and also I’m made a mistake here and don’t worry Bond 8 band n is not about writing the perfect essay without any mistakes without any messiness you can easily just cross something out and continue on you’re not going to lose marks for that and band nine students even make little slips it says that in the markting criteria so we fully explained that what we need to do now is we need to include an example to support that so remember the example of like my brother built the railways all by himself what you can do is you can take a personal example so I actually do have a member of my family that is a doctor and the government did pay for them I was a lawyer and the government paid all of my University fees so I got a law degree and went to law school for free now I do have those examples in my brain but they’re too personal I’m not going to write for example my brother is a doctor and the UK government paid for everything but I can take that personal example and I can expand it to talk about the general idea the general population and it’s not just my brother it’s thousands of doctors every single year that are trained by the UK government so take my brother expand it out the UK pays for thousands of doctors every year so for example the UK let’s put spend it’s a little bit more accurate millions of pounds training Junior doctors through University tuition fees and on the job training so as you can see we’ve taken multiple ideas we’ve reduced that idea down to one relevant idea that answers the question fully explained that idea and then supported it with an example that makes sense now we’re going to move on to the second paragraph where we’re going to show the counter argument going to show the other side of it because that’s what the question is asking us to do do apologies this is going to look really messy I’m thinking about what to say to you guys and thinking about the cameras instead of focusing on what I’m doing however every individual should have the opportunity to reach their maximum potential so I’m showing the counterargument these people think that governments pay lots of money so they should stay and pay off that debt however other people think you should have the freedom to earn as much money as you would like to so what I’m doing here is I’m explaining it and what I do is I use this so what technique whenever I was in English class I had an English teacher and what he would do is he would walk over look over your shoulder and point to topic sentences point to ideas and say so what he would do it very violently I’m not going to do that with you um but what that English teacher was trying to beat into me was explain what you mean so they should have the opportunity to reach their maximum earning potential what does that mean well those in the professions those jobs are some of the most highly skilled highly sought people in the world so what keep explaining there is a global market for their skills and they can command much higher salaries by moving abroad so you could go into a lot more detail you could talk about globalization and post globalization that now we live in a world where there is one market for labor it’s a very complicated thing but a very simple way of saying it is there is a global market for their skills and they can command much higher salaries by moving abroad if they move abroad they make more money more money is good they should be able to do that so what keep explaining if they were blocked from doing so it would be a substantial Financial disadvantage for the individual so this would be a bad thing if people were not allowed to leave imagine you’re a doctor or a nurse and you’re not allowed to leave your home country that would be a very very bad thing and you wouldn’t be happy about that so we’ve just explain that put yourself in the shoes of that person a big difference between a about six student and band 8 student is you will often hear band Six students saying I don’t know anything about this I’m not a nurse I’m not a doctor I’m not a lawyer I’m not an engineer but you have an imagination you have a brain you can put yourself in the shoes of that person imagine you are a highly qualified doctor making $110,000 a year and you could be making $110,000 a year in an other country would you be happy if they blocked you from leaving the country so we fully explained that next we need to think of an example personally I don’t know anybody in this position because I live in a free country where you’re allowed to come and go as you please but I can think of other jobs where you can earn a lot more money by moving countries an obvious one that Springs to mind would be petroleum Engineers you know I live in Ireland there’s no oil or gas here or very very little if you’re a pet petroleum engineer in Ireland you are at a huge financial disadvantage but if you can move somewhere that has lots of oil and gas you will make a huge amount of money so let’s use that as an example and that will also use the question doctors Engineers we’ve given the example of doctors here we’re going to give another example of Engineers here so to those people that think oh you didn’t answer the question well we just did you don’t have to do that again we’re using the question to help us so for instance petroleum Engineers can make hundreds of thousands of dollars more in oil rich countries such as Saudi Arabia compared to remaining in Europe is this true yes is it related to the main idea yes so this part we’ve only really talked about why people believe this side we need to reiterate our opinion remember we’re doing those three things that wasn’t done in the second mainbody paragraph in the original essay and the easiest way to do that is I agree I agree that the individual’s right to work wherever they please trumps any nationalistic considerations the individual a person’s right to work wherever they want is more important than some nationalistic belief that you know everyone should stay at home okay let’s change change this conclusion so we’re going to change in nutshell to just simply in conclusion so we’re not going to talk about plethora of reasons we’re going to actually State the reasons we are going to summarize our main points so we’re going to say these people think this other people think that I believe this and do not worry about repeating yourself so in the original conclusion the person really didn’t take a position and they were introducing some new ideas because often people are taught that your conclusion cannot repeat any of the ideas in your essay this comes from a Mis understanding of what a conclusion is and what an essay is and really it’s confusion about not repeating words so many many teachers believe that if you repeat a word you will get a low score a lot of them confuse that with not repeating main ideas a conclusion is a by definition a summary of the main ideas of the essay that is what it is if you disagree with me then you don’t know what a conclusion is so in conclusion although there is a tremendous amount of investment in a professional’s development so I’m conceding I’m saying yes there is this argument there is a huge amount of money poured in to training these people I re recognize that so you’re conceding that and you’re just summarizing what is in that first main body paragraph they should have the right to choose whether to repay that by working in their home state or moving to a region that pays them the highest value for their skills sorry that is very messy this has taken hours to make and my brain is turning to Mush I should have really produced this essay and wrote this essay before writing it all so again what I’m doing here is I’m conceding yes this is what people think but this is what other people think and I agree with them I believe this there’s no recommendation there’s no prediction it is just stating the main points and stating what I think now if we look at the whole essay I’m a native English speaker I could have used a lot fancier high level vocabulary but I choose not to because you’re not being judged Jed on how fancy your vocabulary is you’re being judged on how topic specific it is and how accurate it is it also reduces complexity which it reduces mistakes reduces grammar errors that is far far better and a more realistic representation to you guys about what a band 8 and band n essay looks like after marking thousands and thousands of essays I can truly tell you that people who get a band eight and band n their essays look simple and easy to understand in fact let me tell you a quick story whenever I used to teach in the classroom what I would do is I would get band Six essays like this and band eight and nine essays like this and on the first day of class I would put them up on the walls of the classroom and I would give students stickers one said band six one said band 8 b n and I would get them to put the stickers on the essays 99 % of students always got them wrong because what students believe is Bond 8 and bond N is a complex Essay with lots of complex ideas complex grammar complex vocabulary what students are always shocked by is how simple and easy to understand band 8 and bond n essays actually are and what I always said to the students was what are they testing are they testing how much fancy stuff you know or are they testing your ability to communicate clearly in writing using English they are testing the ladder they’re testing when you move to a new country when you move to London or Singapore or Sydney or New York or wherever English-speaking City you move to can you clearly communicate with people and you do that by avoiding all of the mistakes that are commonly in these essays and replacing it with simple easy to understand language and clear easy to understand ideas is if you do that your rating will improve dramatically now let’s look at how to apply all of this that you’ve been learning today with us to the specific question types you might get on test day so whether you get an opinion question a discuss both views question problem solution or whatever question comes up on test day you know exactly how to tackle it with confidence so we’re going to work on this task two question together and let’s let’s have a read of it first in some areas of the US a curfew is imposed in which teenagers are not allowed to be outdoors after a particular time at night unless they are with an adult what is your opinion about this so what’s the very first thing we need to do with this question first is read it and understand the question y so let’s have a read of it is there anything that you don’t understand in this question uh actually there it is there’s a word there I don’t understand curfew I don’t know the meaning of it so we have two choices really if we see a question and there’s a word or maybe one or two words that we don’t understand we have two choices we can just panic and go like oh I’m going to fail and then just try our best or we can do something else which is guess the meaning from Context so what what do you think I mean by guess from Context like you have to find the meaning of the that word based on what you read Bas on the meaning of the old sentence exactly exactly so if I just showed you that word uh without any other words around it it would be quite difficult to to determine the meaning of the word but because we’ve got all of this extra information we can look at all this extra information and guess what this means so what do you think this means um if I have a guess depend on I think it’s like kind of um restriction exactly yeah it’s a restriction sister fancy word for restriction a fancy word for restriction curfew is really about time it’s a time that you there’s a there’s a um a deadline that you have to be home before so if you have an 1100 p.m. curfew that means that you have to be home before 11:00 p.m. or your mom and dad are going to be so it’s normally uh for uh children young adults your your parents your guardian says you have to be home before a particular time so that that would be perfect cuz what some people would do is they would panic and they’ be like I else is so unfair I don’t know what this word means but often what they’ll do is they will give you extra information so they’ve given you particular time so they they’ve really defined it for you there so they’re actually helping you out with this they know that many people will not understand this word so they’ve helped you out by giving you this context is there anything else which you don’t understand apart from the word everything else so in some areas of the US Cur uh curfew is imposed in which teenagers are not allowed to be outdoors after a particular time at night unless so you fully understand what that means yep if we what would happen if we didn’t take the time to understand it well I we would start pic don’t know what to do where to start yes and we would also start to write about things things that that were not related to this um CU When when we looked at your writing before sometimes what you would do is you would write about the general topic rather than answer the question and there’s a big difference between writing about curfews in general uh or writing about discipline in children or something like that rather than answering the exact question so number one understand we’ve done that okay what’s the second thing we need to do then we have to understand the general topic yeah so what is the general topic here is it talking about restriction in particularly at nighttime so teenagers um permissions from the parents to the teenagers parenting yeah it’s really about parenting yeah parenting and and and uh teenagers looking after children but let’s just say it it it’s parenting okay why is it important that we understand the general topic first so we don’t talk about yeah so we don’t write everything about parenting or we don’t write everything related to looking after children at night or something like that again we’re wanting to answer the specific question what’s the third thing that we need to do then we have to understand what’s the specific yeah topic okay what’s the specific question that they’re asking us so what are what things would you underline here he says in some areas of the US and I know not what curfew is so he um and then teenagers and adults okay so it’s not talking about young children it’s not talking about you know people over 20 really it’s just talking about people between the ages of 13 and and 19 teenagers um anything else we would adults and particular time with an adult a particular time and it’s outdoors so they might be able to you know stay up and watch movies or play games indoors but it’s all about um whether they should be outdoors or not because this is going to inform your decision because we we will then start to think about okay what is it about the outdoors that is dangerous why would parents not want children to be outdoors what is it about what’s the difference between a child being outdoors and a child being indoors so that helps us start to form our opinion and start helps us to start to generate ideas without even getting to the idea generation phase by thinking about these things the specific thing and the fourth thing and now we have to understand what type of question were they asking us yeah so what’s the type of question and what is the type of question it’s an opinion cuz it’s asking about my opinion what’s weird about this it’s got the what inside what is your opinion yeah so again often students get a bit freaked out because it doesn’t say do you agree or disagree uh because people learn these static rigid ways of answering a question and then when they they inevitably I will often change the wording a little bit instead of saying do you agree or disagree they’ll say what is your opinion about this or what do you think about this it but it’s exactly the same as a do you agree or disagree question so we answer it in the exact same way yeah can we move on yeah yeah okay good so what’s the next stage that we need to get to I need to start to generate ideas okay so what are the two ways that we can answer this ask for my own opinion before we start generating ideas what what are the two ways that we can remember we talked about before agree we can agree with this or we can disagree with it so you said to me earlier today uh could we you know some people say this some people say that I kind of believe that you can do that but it’s very very complicated the simple way to answer these questions is just choose that one or that one okay so before we you know put a line down the board and and go like agree and disag disagree is there one that you think as a mother that you probably are thinking about already easier for me agree agree yeah so what I don’t I don’t think we need to do you know think of three or four ideas for this side because as a mother and somebody who knows a lot about parenting you’re probably going to choose this one anyway and so what an idea I would have is you know instead of brainstorming both sides and wasting a lot of time I would just do you agree yeah okay so let’s talk about some of the ways that we generate ideas that we talked about earlier today because one of the problems that you had uh was how do I generate ideas I don’t know how to do this and you were talking about brainstorming we were talking about that successful unsuccessful so waste of time so what was the one of the ways that we said that the first one was the which is the obvious one the most obvious yeah so instead of trying to think of a high level idea or an idea that you know is going to impress people what’s the first idea that pops into your head why would you not want your children out on the streets of Londoner okay yeah it’s dangerous that’s the most obvious answer what’s another way that we could the 100 people room well if we ask 100 people if you asked 100 people in London why do you not want your 15-year-old daughter at one on the Streets of London at 1:00 a.m. What would most of them say it’s unsafe for them it’s dangerous dangerous so we’ll give this a double tick yeah because you you’ve you’ve generated the same idea twice by uh by by a different method yeah if you let’s say that would be the top option what would the second most popular option or the second most common option be maybe because they’re too young they you know when they make decision then they won’t make the right decision maybe they just irresponsible yeah irresponsible Reckless they won’t think as much as an ad would think they won’t think twice okay so we have two good ideas I would be careful just with these two ideas to make sure that they don’t mean the same thing because you don’t wouldn’t similar they’re similar but I don’t think they’re the they’re the same thing but you would want to think about that before you start writing because what can happen is you write your introduction you write your first main body paragraph about this one and then you start writing about this one and you’re like oh this is actually pretty much the same thing so you just check those this is more about third parties this is more about what other people could do to your children this is what they’ll do to themselves a which is probably the the most worrying but um what are what are some other ways that we could think of ideas if we wanted to you know keep going with this we have to put ourself in the somebody else position opposite position what I will what I will think different person so you’re a mother what would a father say you are you are um a nurse what would someone from a different occupation you live in London what would somebody in Paris say or Dublin say you’re from Albania what would someone from a different country say can you think of any other ways of thinking about it putting yourself into someone else’s shoes if I think it’s dangerous somebody El must say is safe because it depends where they live if it’s small village they know each other probably not a good for agree though no again these are just tools to help you so one you know if you using a tool to fix your car one tool might not work that’s fine put it down pick up another tool that actually does work this way of generating ideas just doesn’t help you because what you don’t want to do in the exam is go like oh what would someone else think what would and you sit there and you start to stress about it and you start to worry about it we can move on to something else if that doesn’t work that’s why we have multiple ways of generating ideas number four is there any other way I have to ask myself yeah you personally my personal opinion so you as a mother imagine your son is 13 on his 13th birthday and he said I’m going to go into Lester Square in London tonight and I’m going to be there till 3:00 a.m. what would you say to him what what what but he’s arguing with you what excuse would you give I say it’s dangerous for you you don’t know what you’re doing you don’t know who so let’s give you’re irresponsible you’re too young so we when we have a double tick when we have more than one tick for we know that these are probably reliable relevant specific ideas that answer the question and we would always want to go back and just read the question again and think of our ideas do our ideas support our opinion so some areas of the US a curfew is is imposed in which teenagers are not allowed to be outdoors after a particular time at night unless they are with an adult I agree because the world is dangerous and teenagers are irresponsible does that make sense yeah yeah I think I think that makes total sense so now that we have our two ideas what is the next stage now we have to start with um generating um main topic and planning um paragraphs two main parag so we have main body paragraph one we have our topic sentence we have our explanation we have our example main body paragraph two topic sentence explanation example okay we did this slowly before we’re going to do it fast now so I’m going to give you 2 minutes minutes oh let’s say four minutes okay so topic sentence is going to be obvious so that is dangerous but how would we describe that how would we how is the world being dangerous a reason to put a curfew on children uh because we see the increase in the violence out on the streets lots of crimes violence crime same thing not exactly the same and you boxing is not a crime and it’s violence but you know what I mean within this context violent crime yeah just don’t want you repeating the same thing you know saying there has been an increase in violence there has been an increase in crime within this context that’s basically saying the same thing so we could change that to violent crime this is one of those questions also that this is so obvious to a parent you know of course I don’t let my children out at 1:00 a.m. like but it’s so obvious that people don’t explain it properly because they think that the examiner and everyone else knows what they’re talking about but remember we talked about before you the examiner can’t phone you up and say did is this what you me you mean is this what you meant um you need to explain it to them so why would an increase in crime in violent crime you as a parent because they’re more vulnerable compared with an adult teenagers are one unable to protect themselves remember we talked about Outdoors the different between outdoors and and and indoors how could we finish this [Music] up because you don’t have the comfort of their own house the safety of their own home you don’t know who who you’re going to meet on the street you don’t know the person you don’t know you can trust that person so linking it back to the question at the end I would encourage you to to say it’s therefore it’s safer to be at home where the parents can can see them because what what you tend to do is you will explain things and sometimes you’ll start to just scatter lots of ideas okay there’s an increase in violence there’s an increase in crime they’re more vulnerable they’re not able to protect themselves maybe start with this one expon and keep that as a logical chain okay as we talked about before um we were doing a question on why do people uh who work too much get get fought okay or why do they get diabetes they work too much therefore they don’t move therefore they get fought therefore they get they get diabetes it’s like a logical chain of events there’s an increase in violent crime making them more vulnerable they’re they therefore they’re unable to protect themselves and they’re at high risk therefore it’s safer for them to be at home yeah so it’s just one chain of events an example examp we can you when we talk to say we can’t we have we can use personal examples but we have to make it more General you can first of all think of a personal example so you or your sister who has children or something like that um but then make it make it more General yeah oh we can refer to the numbers from the police they’re saying that they show there’s an increase in in crime and especially the victims we can see more victim is teenagers rather than adults yeah you live in London is there any examples recently in London you see lots of me newspapers every time you open newspaper you will see you know uh 14 years old has been stumped 13 years old been stum yeah so the big thing in London the past year or two years is a massive increase in stabbings and the vast majority of the victims our young our young teenagers um so you know we could so you can think of your own personal examples and try and widen it out but also personal doesn’t mean just you as a person it’s the city you live in the country you live in so it could be uh London it could be England it could be Albania um you know what what’s generally that you could the time I don’t know is there a general time that children have to be at home in Albania um in Ireland I would say you know for teenagers it’s probably 9 or 10 p.m same we expect in as well so there’s lots of different ways that we can we can think of examples and what which one do you want to choose I thought I would choose the one from the newspapers that you know statistic sh so stop victims in London and you don’t have to be a criminologist to know that like it’s on the radio it’s in the newspapers in in London every single day you know so you don’t have to say on the 24th of January in the Sun newspaper it said this you say you know there has been a massive increase in stab victims in London and most of them are teenagers proving why you should keep them indoors yeah so again yeah it’s not like you don’t need a criminology PhD level answer or anything like that um okay so the next one so the the next the next topic was they are irresponsible mhm when I I’ve say responsible that means that they no one think twice of the actions like what the consequence of the action is going to be so they don’t think of consequences and they can be easily manipulated by others or there a different topic is that a different topic so you you have a tendency to do that where you in order to explain something you will explain it in three different ways which is if we’re having a conversation and let’s say I’m really dumb and I’m letting my teenager go out till any time he wants you could say to me well he’s not thinking of the consequences and he might be drinking and other older boys might have an influence on him and there are lots of drugs around which makes him even more respon that’s kind of like four and that’s fine if we’re talking to each other but in a essay where we’re being marked on coherence and cohesion we need to just focus on this and have one logical chain of an explanation so they don’t think of consequences therefore make mistakes yeah more likely to make mistakes what stops them making the mistakes if you put them at time restriction so they will if Endor they will won make this mistakes curfew they will not get in trouble yeah or something something like that it’s just a it’s just a plan so it doesn’t have to be absolutely perfect doesn’t have to be full sentences but we want to be thinking logically about it because if we have three or four different disparate ideas in the plan then we’re definitely going to have it in the essay so we want to do our thinking here uh do all of our our thinking and our planning here so that when we’re writing we can just focus on writing an example I put example so so I put like um a recent survey that was done in the USA showed that teenagers are more prone you know to be responsible and make more mistakes so remember what we talked about that you would only use statistics if if they were as a last resort if You’ no other choice can you think of any idea of any examples of teenagers being irresponsible all the time when they go out get drunk and then come home yeah you could say say something like that so you do teenage drinking yeah you could say in well if I was using an example in Northern Ireland where I am every weekend the police um stop and catch very young teenagers with big bottles of alcohol every weekend you know that’s obviously a problem um is there from if we weren’t going to use that example anything from your own life so that could be something in Albania something in London you’re a nurse is there anything that you can think of in terms of nursing we’ve got lots of you know young people being admitted with overdose or with over drinking so NHS at the weekend at the NHS the admissions admissions yeah there you go so again using your own life your own experience um if it was me I would use Northern Ireland Northern Ireland has a problem a problem with um Teenage well teenagers don’t think it’s a problem they think it’s great but the police aren’t too happy about it um but the best thing about teenage drinking is getting chased by the police but anyway um and as a nurse I’m sure you have either worked in a casual casualty Ward or you have colleagues in casualty and you see on a Friday night Saturday night all the teenagers coming in and getting their stomach pumped and you know took took too much drug too many drugs um okay so are we happy with that night yep on do you want to try and um spend 20 minutes doing the introduction in the first main body paragraph writing it yeah and then we’ll put it up and we’ll talk about it in 10 minutes [Music] okay so what’s the first thing that we need to do when we’re reading our paraphrase what’s the first thing that the most important thing you have to paraphrase first so what is what is a paraphrase you take a sentence you try to keep the same meaning by use different words it doesn’t mean the same thing yeah the first thing we need to do is does this in general mean the same thing as the question so in some parts the US adolescence are not permitted by their parents to go out after a certain time unless they are with a grown-up does that mean the same thing no what I’m not saying is are the words have you changed every single word but in general does this mean the same thing as the question in some areas of the US a curfew is imposed in which teenagers are not allowed to be outdoors after a particular time at night unless they are with an adult does it mean the same thing try to keep it yeah it does mean the same thing you didn’t talk about adors for example but that doesn’t matter because we can infer from the the the context permitted by the parents to go out that’s fine okay so it means the same thing uh now we need to think are is it grammatically correct are there any vocabulary issues so let’s read in some parts of the US adolescence are not permitted by their parents to go out after a certain time unless they are with a grownup is that okay sounds okay it’s good well done cuz before you were making lots and lots of grammatical errors you were making lots of uh collocation errors for example so that’s a very very good paraphrase well done it’s great start to your essay the only thing we might change is just put a hyphen in so we would make that grown and up when we hyphenate it when we put it together grown up you mean grown up yep okay I totally agree with this so this is your my opinion your opinion Okay so your position what you think about this question needs to be clear throughout the essay so we put it in here in the introduction so we’re making it super clear to The Examiner this is what I think about it so that’s good all right because it is dangerous for young people to be out late at night so what is that it means that there is dangerous no it’s our first main idea yeah so this is our first main idea so we’ got it here and most of them are irresponsible when it comes to make decision anything you want to change about that most of them they make when it comes to making decisions again verb tenses sometimes you get confused about the continuous versus the um present simple um to making U when it comes to making decisions okay so that’s our second main idea here very good okay so the next stage would be we’re going to take our first main idea and develop it in know that’s going to be our first main body paragraph and then the second idea that’s going to be our second main body paragraph and then we would summarize it all in our conclusion I need to get you to the airport before you miss your plane so what we’ll do is you write your um two main body paragraphs on your conclusion I’ll put it up on the board here next week and I’ll make the video as if you are in the room and I’ll do it and then we’ll have a full video okay all right so what we’re going to do here is give syvan some feedback on the rest of her essay what I’m looking at in the very first sentence um in the main body paragraph what I’m looking for for here is a topic sentence and the thing I’m looking for is does the topic sentence um match her main idea here all right so this is her first main idea let’s highlight this is this highlight yeah it is dangerous for young people to be out late at night okay so pretty obvious it’s dangerous so does this topic sentence match that and does the topic sentence tell me um this main idea succinctly what tells me what the rest of it is about because what we teach our students this is not the only way to write an essay by the way but what we teach our students is to outline the main idea here in the introduction and then state it again here in the topic sentence that means that all you have to do is just look up here at your idea in the introduction and you know what to write about in your first main body paragraph um it also makes it extremely easy for the examiner to then look at this and know exactly what you’re talking about so making it easy for you and easy for the examiner keep it simple make things as simple and as easy um as possible for you on test day um and easy for the examiner to read recently many parts of the U us have seen an increase in the number of violent crimes so this is not a topic sentence this is a background sentence so I don’t know why students do this um I think it’s because they see so many other sample essays and so many other teachers um teaching this online where you put a background sentence in at the beginning of your introduction and then for some reason you put another background sentence in here um that is a complete waste of time every sentence every word should contribute to you answering the question we already know this because it was stated in the question and you’ve already know it because we paraphrased the question so there’s no point in repeating this so this sentence has wasted the students time but it has also wasted the examiner’s time and made it more difficult for the examiner to understand what the point of this whole paragraph is because the topic sentence all it is doing is just holding up a little flag and saying hello this is what um we’re talking about here so let’s help Savannah out with this a little bit and change it um children should remain indoors at night because it is not safe all right children should remain indoors at night because it is not safe so that’s just stating the same idea I’m making a CLE clear what the main idea is your main argument is here okay let’s have a look at this one reports from the police suggest that the most affected age group is between 13 and 19 years old so this doesn’t really connect up with the the main idea so we would we need to explain why it is not safe to be outdoors as a child at night um so let’s just delete this one and see what is here this age group is suffering more due to being more vulnerable than other age groups why while an adolescent is Outside Alone he will be more vulnerable and easy talking about with why all right so this isn’t really explaining why it is not safe for children to be outdoors at night all right um and this would be the main area of concern for me that the explanation doesn’t really explain why children should should remain indoors at night because it is not safe all right so all the explanation should do is like prove this argument all right imagine you’re explaining this to somebody who knows nothing about the topic so imagine a little four or five-year-old boy and he’s saying that’s a really good example actually cuz imagine your teenager saying why do I not have to why do I have to stay inside it’s not safe why because there are criminals outside why like so you’re you’re explaining why they can’t go outside why it’s too dangerous outside um let have a look at the example for example London has seen a double in the number of stubbing so let’s just simplify this has seen an increase in the number of stabbings or stabbing victims age between 13 19 old and the majority of this is related to crimes are happening during the late hours of the night so that’s pretty good um because it what she’s done is she lives in in London she lives close to London and she just thought about um why would I not let my child go outside okay in London at the moment there it is in the news all the time that um there’s a huge increase of stabbing victims and most of them are teenagers so she has used a real example from her own experience to prove this point which is really really good um so topic sentence make it simpler make it clear match it to the main idea and then the big thing that I would do um if I sylvan’s really work on just simple liying this and proving your explanation why um maybe this was just a a difficult one for her because often the answers are so obvious like if you were talking to a mother or or a father in London and you said would you let your 13 go out at 3:00 a.m. and play with their friends they say no and the the mother or father knows why innately it’s natural to understand why that is you don’t need to explain it something are so innate they are so obvious that it’s difficult to explain them um and I think this is maybe why sylvana had a problem with this um you know i’ I’ve met syvan she’s a very responsible mother and there’s no way that she would let her kids out but maybe this is so obvious that um it’s difficult to explain um so let’s have a look at her second main idea here let’s put this in blue they are irresponsible when it comes to making decisions okay let’s have a look at our topic sentence adolescents talking about them in general as young people with little experience often will end up making IR responsible decisions good so this is a good topic sentence because as a reader of this if you are the examiner The Examiner is reading this they understand what the rest of the paragraph is about let’s have a look at their her explanation at this age their body will go through important hormonal changes which will make them Rush while making decisions yep let’s see very often they will be unaware of the consequences of their action oh will be unaware of the consequences their actions will have on them and other s and make mistakes okay some clunky grammar in there but overall quite good that the explanation is good that’s why they should that’s why they should be helped by adults during this process okay I see what you mean for example Ireland doubled the police force in order to deal with the drunk teenagers who thought it was fine to get drunk and cause trouble on the streets late at night so this is kind of true um Ireland does have a problem I think like most Western countries with um teenagers drinking but Ireland didn’t double the police force to tackle this Ireland has bigger problems than this and most countries have bigger problems than this so they wouldn’t double the police force just because of some drunk teenagers so you could make this a little bit more believable it is true that they probably increased the police force um Ireland increased the size of the police force in order to deal with drunk teenagers who thought it was fine to get drunk and cause trouble in the streets late at night okay that makes a little bit more believable um if I was to make this a little bit better um just based on my own experience as a teenager when I used to drink um as a teenager um we would change it to increased the number of police Patrols at the weekend cuz that’s when we used to drink um in order to deal with drunk teenagers who thought it was fine to get drunk and cause trouble in the streets later at night okay and so that you see that makes it a little you don’t want to make up examples that just don’t make any sense whatsoever because the examiner is going to look at it and think you just made that up it it’s not logical it doesn’t make any sense um so read your example and think about does this make sense and that’s why it is much better to think think of examples that are real from your own experience um because you’re decreasing the likelihood that they’re going to sound wrong in conclusion comma I believe people as young as adolescence want to just I believe adolesence people as it’s it’s as if you’re trying to avoid saying the word adolescent because you’ve repeated it but like a native English speaker would never say people as young as adolescence why not just say adolesence um in general you should try to uh vary your language as much as possible but don’t add in things like that that just don’t make any sense I believe adolescence should not be allowed to go out in the late hours of the nights because they will not be able to protect themselves from danger okay the heist is a safe place for them to be and it will prevent them from making irresponsible decisions good good conclusion overall cuz you’ve summarized your main ideas um you’ve made it clear um what your opinion is I believe adolescent should not be allowed to go out in the late hours of the night that’s your opinion there um protect themselves from danger it’s dangerous first main idea and then this is your second main idea so overall conclusion is quite good so sylvana um apart from a few careless spelling mistakes some grammar especially articles um some vocabulary issues overall you did a good job I think just the main things that I would say is topic sentence make it really clear what your main idea is take it from your introduction and then ex explain logically and simply that main idea H and then think of a an example that makes sense for from your own experience um and the overall the conclusion is good so you’re definitely making progress syvan um I think just as always you can’t look at this video and well let me put it another way there’s there’s two types of students one type of student would would get feedback like this and think I don’t know how to do topic sentences I don’t know how to explain things I don’t know how to write good examples I’ll never be able to do that as seeing it as evidence that you’re not good enough and you’ll never improve I don’t think you are that type of student the second group of students see this vocabulary and they go great now I know that I need to work on my topic sentences I need to work on my explanations I need to work on my examples now what I’m going to do is get more questions I’m going to practice them again learn from my my mistakes um and then improve and that second group of students sees massive progress um so that is what I would suggest that you do syvan you get more questions and you really really focus on those things um and get more feedback and you will improve bit by bit the aim of this lesson is to show you how to generate and develop ideas lots of students complain about this that they they don’t know how to generate ideas we’re going to show you that it’s not that complicated and one of the main things that you need to do is develop your ideas I’m going to show you how to do that and then we’ll also show you how to understand the structure of a problem and solution task 2 essay and overall we’re going to show you that it’s not as complicated as you think we’re going to normalize all of these things cuz when students talk about generating ideas and developing ideas and structure they tend to over complicate everything and it’s way simpler than you think so that’s one of the sort of ancillary aims of the lesson so what I want you to do at first so there’s going to be seven tasks for you to complete what I want you to do is take two minutes and think of this what are the main problems associated with using social media platforms so take two minutes to think and write down at least one problem so you can write write it down on the worksheet or you can type it out on the worksheet or what you could do is type it right in the comments it’s really important that you don’t just skip this and don’t don’t even think about it because you’re you’re watching the video now you’ve invested this time don’t waste your time so take 2 minutes and try and think of it all right and pause the video and come back when you have done that okay so you should have paused the video and let’s look at some common ideas so many people don’t like to use social media because it is very very addictive and they do nothing but all day every day just look at Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and all those things and then related to that is you’re wasting a lot of time it’s kind of you’re not doing anything really productive um if unless you’re watching um one of my lessons on social media there’s a lot of spam on social media so you’re not actually looking at things that are interesting to you people are you know spamming you all the time there’s a lot of scams on social media um in the IELTS industry people trying to sell you um certificates or you know all those sorts of scamming things related to the ielt industry and political interference you’ll often get people trying to get you to vote a certain way or influence the way that you think politically and there are a lot of fake accounts there’s a huge number millions and millions of of fake accounts on different social media platforms so if you didn’t think of one of these ideas no problem uh there are thousands of different ideas that you could use um what matters is it’s relevant to the actual topic and you could talk about it you could explain it you could use an example and the main thing to remember is in the context of IELTS the examiners are not looking for fancy ideas or complex ideas or impressive ideas they’re just looking for ideas that are relevant to the question that will help you actually answer the question and you’ll notice that these ideas are probably the most popular ideas if you spoke to 100 people and asked than this question these would normally be the most popular answers the most obvious answers the simplest answers and those answers are the best um because they’re easy to think of and easy to develop in your essay so task two you should be continuing on with these tasks all right make sure you’re doing them click on the new story so new story is Task two on the worksheet so it’s a PDF worksheet so you can just click on that will take you to a BBC article and identify which of those problems so which of these problems is the main focus of that article so pause the video click on that article read the whole article you don’t have to read every single word you can skim through it if you want but try and identify the main topic the main idea in that so pause the video and have a look at that and you should have done that by now don’t cheat pause the video video and you should have identified that the main problem is this one so they’re talking about fake accounts so if you read it um thoroughly enough you would have identified that so why am I getting you to read a newspaper article why am I getting you to do that just to to waste your time no well one of the main things that students ask me is what if I get a question and I know nothing about that topic and I always say to them where do you think the the writers of the exam get their ideas they just go on to sites like the BBC News look at technology news education news environment uh Health news these are the most common topics when it comes to task two and they will look at those new news articles and they’ll develop um questions out of those so one of the best ways that you can guard against knowing nothing about the topic as many students do just go once a day to the BBC news read one story from the technology section one story from the education section one story from the health section one story from the environment section doesn’t matter how many you do as long as you’re doing a little bit every day and that’s going to improve your idea generation but also your idea development your vocabulary absolutely everything your reading skills um so that’s a really really worthwhile thing to do so task number three what I’d like you to do now is pause the video again and you can take 1 two 5 20 minutes however long you want to do it um probably doing it in 2 or 3 minutes is the best because you can tend to overthink these ideas uh one of the big problems that I see with students is whenever they’re s sitting down on test day is they will overthink everything and try and think of this amazing idea when there’s no such thing as an amazing idea normally the first one or two or three ideas that pop into your head are the best ones so think of possible solution to the problem of fake accounts so imagine you’re Mark Zuckerberg or you work at Facebook and you have all these fake accounts how would you solve that problem so just try and think of one problem and try and think of a problem that you would be able to explain properly and you maybe use an example to help you explain it imagine you’re talking to a friend in a coffee shop and they ask you oh there’s all these fake accounts how would you solve this problem what would you say so pause the video and and think of this and write it down on your worksheet because the act of writing it down is going to help you remember all of this and it’s going to help you on test day so pause the video again don’t cheat and let’s have a look and think about this so when I worked with some other students on this these were the four ideas they came up with one was require ID so you have to enter your passport number or or your driver’s license or whatever so that would guard against uh requiring ID artificial intelligence so AI looks at all of the accounts and tries to figure out which ones are fake and which ones aren’t and just automatically blocks fake accounts user reporting so asking the different users to report fake accounts um manually and education so Facebook educating people about the difference between a real account and a fake account so people can ignore those fake accounts so you might have had one of these ideas it might be a different idea what matters is think about if it is actually relevant to the question if you were imagine you’re talking to a friend and you came up with this solution what would your friend say would they say what are you talking about that makes no sense or would they say yeah that does make sense explain that to me okay yeah that makes total sense that would be viable so you’re not trying to think of one ultimate magic solution you’re just trying to think of one viable option that would work and that you could explain so let’s move on to task four imagine you have to tell a friend about this problem write a short paragraph telling what the problem is why it’s a problem and an example to help them understand so imagine you are sending an email to somebody and you’re writing about this state the problem State why you think it’s a problem in order in other words explain and then use an example doesn’t have to be a very complicated example to help them understand what you mean so on your worksheet just write one paragraph doesn’t have to be very long you could be between 50 and 100 words we’re not writing an essay here we’re just using this to help us understand what to do so again take five or 10 minutes to do that don’t take too long to do it and then come back after you pause the video and you have completed that make sure that you do this again you’re wasting your time if you don’t do it okay so you should have completed that by now task five do the same with a solution so try and think of a solution that is relevant to the problem that you discussed all right so the problem that you’ve just explained what would be a possible solution to that what is the solution how can it help and an example to help them understand again just take five or 10 minutes to write this on your worksheet take or if you need more time take more time take all the time you need if you need to do that you need to start slowly if if you’re just beginning or if you’re a little bit more advanced try and do it in 5 or 10 minutes so pause the video again and do this so why did I get you to do that well I was getting you to do that by just simplifying the overall structure of what you’re doing the first task that I gave you write the problem is basically going to be like a main body paragraph MVP main body paragraph 1 Your solution MVP main body paragraph 2 so this is problem and this is solution all right so this is the whole structure of a problem and solution essay it’s not the only structure there’s no one structure to answer any particular type of I um question this is the one that I teach my students um and the one that has worked very very effectively for my students so what I’d like you to do is guess what these are what would you do here so there’s two things you need to do in the introduction three things you need to do not three sentences but three things you need to do in your main body paragraph three things you need to do in this main body paragraph and two things you need to do in your conclusion on your worksheet what I’d like you to do is take five minutes and just guess what these are don’t go on and cheat and look in the internet and look on the weite and try and find out what these are just try and think from what you have learned so far in this lesson what would your structure look like what would be the what would be the key elements in your essay so again pause the video write this out on the worksheet and take some time to think about this and here are the answers don’t cheat so in introduction paraphrase the question and then answer both questions so paraphrase the question this is what’s happening this is the problem and this is the solution all right you’re not explaining anything here you’re not going in into any detail you’re just stating this is what’s happening and this is the problem and this is the solution main body paragraph one state what the problem is explain why it is a problem and then give an example not three sentences but three elements to it main body paragraph 2 State solution explain high and an example again not three sentences three elements and the conclusion summary of the problem this is what the problem is and summary of the solution now many of you right now are going but the question normally says problems and solutions can’t you why don’t you put multiple problems and multiple Solutions into one paragraph you can do that if you want but I don’t recommend it the reason why I don’t recommend it is you have to fully develop your main ideas this is going to be your main idea here this is going to be your main idea aidea here you have to fully explain it and give an example in order to be getting a seven or above you need to fully develop your main ideas so you have a choice if you want to put multiple problems and multiple Solutions in one paragraph you can either write an essay that’s like five or 600 words long and develop your ideas fully you’ll never be able to do that or don’t develop your ideas properly you’re going to get a low score so you can debate all you want about whether whether to do this or whether not this is what I use with my students we have more success stories than any other course in the world if we didn’t know what we were doing that wouldn’t be the case also I’ve spoken to multiple senior examiners about this and one problem one solution is totally fine so this is the overall structure and if you got a different structure that’s fine but what I would recommend doing is decide which structure you want to use for these different different types of questions because when you’re doing the test um when you’re preparing your writing is going to reflect your thinking so if you’re going into the test and you have seven different structures in your head and you’re not sure about any of them you’re very very confused your writing is going to be very confused so pick someone you trust and follow that structure it doesn’t have to be mine I don’t care if you follow mine or you don’t but pick one structure that you’re happy with and then use that on test day and use that when you’re practicing ing so you don’t want to be using seven different structures when you’re practicing just use one and make it simple and make your preparation easy Tas seven what I want you to do is take this structure take everything that you’ve learned today so how do you generate ideas what think about how I’ve taught you that today how do you develop main ideas think about how I’ve taught you how to do that today how would you structure your whole essay think about the lessons that you’ve learned today on that and then think about all of those lessons think about what you’ve learned today and do this question many social media accounts are fake what problems does this cause what Solutions can you suggest so do that pause the video If normally on test day you’ll only spend 40 minutes you can spend more than 40 minutes doing this because you’re learning what to do when you’re learning how to do anything for the first time it takes you a long time to do it much longer than is normal think about driving a car or riding a bike or tying your shoelaces when you’re first learning it takes you a long time to do it so don’t try and do it as quickly as possible unless you’re already you know your your your test is like tomorrow and you’re totally confident about what to do and you just want a little bit of extra practice so pause the video again do this and then once you’ve done don’t cheat take the time do it you don’t have to do it today you can come back and do it tomorrow when you have time here’s a checklist of things to think about when you’re looking at your own writing doesn’t make sense like this is really really really important many people write an essay and then don’t even think about this if it actually does make sense why do we write anything we write something to clearly communicate with the person reading it if you gave this to a stranger would they understand it would they understand what the essay is about would they understand what your main problem is what would they understand what your main solution is how have you develop those so did you follow the structure did you develop your answers well did you did do your ideas make sense and could you do the same for another question so if another problem and solution question came up would you be able to do the same thing on a different topic so if you can answer those questions then you have learned something and you’ve really helped yourself develop in this area we’re going to look at discussion questions or discuss both of you’s questions and we’re going to think about how to think clearly about these questions and then how to take our thoughts and structure them into a b seven8 or n essay so we’re first going to show you how to think critically about these then we’re going to look at the structure and if you wait until the end of the video I will give you a free writing course so all discussion questions follow the same format some people believe this other people believe this discuss both views and give your opinion so normally what happens is they give you a question where about 50% of people believe in this side and about 50% of people believe in this side now the problem that many students face with these questions is they can’t think clearly about them and your writing will be a reflection of your thinking if your con if your thinking is confused then your writing will be confused so we first have to think critically and clearly about the question so when students see a question like this they think well um I believe in freedom of speech but I also think that there’s some things that should be censored and you know some people believe this and some people believe that and their thinking is very muddled and Confused how we solve that for our students is we get them to do three things because these are the three things that the examiners are looking for instead of thinking why do I believe in this side or why do I believe in that side what we do is first why do other people believe view one and why do other people belief view two so what this does is it cuts through all of that confusion you’re not thinking about what you believe you’re thinking about why do other people believe this so why do other people believe view one and why do other people believe vew 2 just think of one reason why people believe this and why people believe that so what this does is it forces you to to think clearly about it and it also forces you to do the first two things in the question discuss both views both views means one two here and then number three your opinion and quite simply which do you agree with keep it very very simple don’t be like well I kind of agree with this and I kind of agree with this and in this situation I do this and in don’t do that you don’t have time to do that just pick one side that you agree with think of why you agree with it and then that’s done so let’s now look at how we would take those thoughts and structure them into an essay so we’re going to start off with our introduction so we have our first point of view here and then we have our other point of view here okay so we’re going to take the point of view that we disagree with we’re going to put it here in our introduction although y people believe view view2 so I disagree with V2 and then we’re going to put in here I agree with V1 because why people believe view one so what this introduction does is it does those three things discuss both views and give your opinion here’s view two so I’ve discussed that why do people believe that so I just give one reason my opinion I agree and I’ve discussed vew one so I’ve discussed both views and I’ve given my opinion then we’re going to move on to main body paragraph one we’re going to take why people believe V2 and we’re going to put it in here so why people believe V2 then we’ll explain why they believe it and we’ll give an example so all we’re doing here is saying why do other people believe in censorship then we can move on to main body paragraph 2 we’re simply going to take this from the introduction so y people believe view one we’re going to explain why people believe that we’re going to give an example of that and then we’re going to take our opinion I agree with this view so what we’ve done in our main body we’ve discussed view two we’ve discussed view one and we’ve given our opinion discuss both views and give our opinion then we’re going to finish our Essay with our conclusion so we’re going to look up here summary of vew two and we’re going to look up here summary of vew one and your opinion so if we look back at this the introduction discuss both views and gives our opinion the conclusion discusses both views and gives our opinion the main body discusses both views and gives our opinion but the main thing that this does is it takes the thinking it takes all of our thoughts out of our head and it organizes them clearly on the paper discuss both views and give your opinion discuss both views and give your opinion in this video I’m going to share with you 100 real band 7 8 and N essays these essays have been marked by real ex examiners and the students that wrote them all went on to get either about seven eight or nine in the real test but our goal is not to just give you a bunch of essays our goal is to help you improve your writing score so on top of giving you these essays what we’re going to do is do two more things that are going to help you improve your writing scores using these essays so we’re going to first show you what not to do when using these sample essays number two most students are unaware of great strategies and techniques that they can use so we’re going to share with you 10 strategies that you can use that will help you use these samples to improve your writing skills and improve your writing score to make sure that we’re only helping the students that want help and want to improve you will only get access to these essays by watching the whole video there is no special link to click and we’re going to show you in the whole video how to access these sample essays so let’s start off with five don’ts these are five things that you should not do when using any ielt sample essays number one is the most common one which is don’t use fake sample essays I’d say that more than 95% of the supposed band n essays that you’ll find online are not anywhere near band n and if you are reading and copying people that have never even got close to the score that you’re hoping to get then you’re learning lots of bad habits but don’t worry we’ve solved that for you by giving you these real sample essays and we’ll show you how to get those in the rest of the video number two don’t just pick up the essay read it and think that you will magically through osmosis become better at writing you cannot read an essay and become better at writing by just passively reading it I think a lot of people have been convinced that all you have to do is read the essay and some magic thing will happen in your brain and you will improve that is simply not going to happen if you don’t believe me think back to last month when the World Cup was on I think something like more than a billion people watched the World Cup final were any of those people better at football after the World Cup final after watching two of the greatest footballers that have ever lived no you would think that that’s ridiculous but thousands of students every single month fail the test because they believe all they have to do is just read lots and lots of sample essays it is not going to help you but the good news is we’re going to give you these 10 strategies these 10 techniques that will actually help you in the rest of this video another thing that you should not do is look at the essays and try and figure out why you’re better than these students in some way or why these students students are not good or these students are not high level let me tell you a little story about a trick that I used to play on my students in the British Council so on the first day of a new iarts class with new students what I would do is I would give them band Six essays band seven essays Bond eight essays and band nine essays and I wouldn’t tell them which were which and I would put them around the room and i’ ask the students to go and look at these essays and give them a score and every single time and this is like hundreds and hundreds of students every single time they thought the band Six was band nine and they thought the band nine was band Six you are a student you are not an a examiner if you had the knowledge of an i examiner you wouldn’t be watching this video most students look at a band 6 essay which normally has lots of complicated words and complex language and think that it is very very high level most students look at band n essays and think that they are lowlevel band n essays are actually quite simple and easy to understand and very very clear most students look at b seven essays and think there’s lots of grammar mistakes there’s lots of vocabulary mistakes this must be a really low-level student band seven essays have mistakes in them please do not waste your time and your energy trying to find out why you think these are not good if you were an expert you wouldn’t be watching this video the fourth thing that you should not do is look for things that you can copy from these essays and there’s a very simple reason for that number one you are not doing a memorization test I know many of you come from educational backgrounds where the emphasis in your education system is just on memorizing things and that’s how they test intelligence this is not a me memorization test this is a writing in English test this is a can you communicate clearly in English test you cannot memorize words and phrases and chunks of essays and hope to just put those in on test day and get a higher score that is not how it works you can use these to improve your grammar and your vocabulary and we’ll show you how to do that in the rest of the video but don’t just memorize them it is not going to help you and number this might sound really silly but a lot of students do this do not copy the entire essay and put it in to your response on test day a lot of students believe that if they copy a highlevel essay and then just put it in no matter what the question is that they’re magically going to get a high score I don’t know why students do this but they do please do not do this I don’t want to be responsible for students failing the test so please please please do not do those five things it is a waste of your time and it is a waste of money these days The Isle test cost a lot of money don’t throw it away by using these incorrectly but there are now 10 ways that we’re going to show you that you can use them correctly to improve your writing skills and improve your writing score so this is how to find the 100 sample essays on our website I’ve purposely hidden them so that only stud students that are serious about getting the scores that they need will find them first thing you want to do is go to Google and type in IELTS writing task 2 it will bring up a list of different websites and what you want to do is find the I Advantage One it might be number one it might be somewhere on this page just click on the I Advantage one that should bring you to this page on our website I writing task 2 in 2023 three that’s step one now I continue to watch the video and I’ll show you in step two how to find the essays so I’m going to give you these 10 things that you can do these 10 techniques but you don’t have to use all 10 of them what I would recommend doing is watching them all and picking the one that you think is your biggest weakness that’s what you should always start with not just for writing but for all areas of the test don’t work on things that you’re already com comfortable doing don’t work on your strengths work on your weaknesses I know that’s tough and I know as human beings we don’t like to do difficult things but this is the best way for you to pass the test as quickly as possible and then move on with your life and you never have to think about this silly test again so I’m going to go through these 10 now watch them all and then pick the ones that you think are most difficult for you or you think that you need to work the most on so the first thing thing that we’re going to teach you is how to use sample essays for improving your idea generation a lot of students uh really struggle with this area and once you start to see what real band 78 and9 ideas look like it removes a lot of the stress because what you will notice is most of them are a lot simpler than you think you don’t get extra marks for coming up with complex ideas you get extra marks for thinking of ideas that answer the question that are relevant to the question and most of the time these are going to be simple ideas so the first thing that you can do to improve your idea generation is don’t look at the answer to the question don’t look at the actual essay take each one and cover up the actual essay and just look at the question and what we’ve done here is we’ve limited the number of questions we’re giving you like a 100 essays but I think there are only like 10 questions um so that will mean that you see a wide variety of different ideas so what you’re going to do is you’re going to look at the questions and think of ideas yourself so what I would recommend doing is not brainstorming what I would recommend doing is simply look at the question and think what is the simplest idea that answers this question what is the most obvious idea the most straightforward idea if I asked a 100 people this question what would be the most popular answer and if you write down a few of them and then look at the answer identify the main ideas they will normally be in the introduction and they will be in the main body paragraph and they will be normally in the conclusion identify those main ideas and then compare with your ideas if you’re getting similar ideas to these students that got b s 8 and n then you’re probably on the right track if you have different ideas that doesn’t mean that you’re wrong doesn’t mean that your ideas aren’t relevant but think about whether they are relevant or not are you getting different ideas because they’re just different relevant ideas or think about whether your ideas are relevant or not if they’re you think about them and you compare them and you’re like actually my ideas are completely irrelevant that might mean that you didn’t understand the questions you you have to work on that more or it could mean that you’re just complicating everything and making your ideas way more complicated than they need to be so that’s Technique One the second thing that you can work on would be idea development so so this is taking ideas and developing them into mainbody paragraphs so step one look at the question understand the question and then identify the main ideas so for this person focus on their careers idea number one and have more time for themselves idea number two so there’s two benefits two advantages here and then what you do is you do not look at the main body so you just identify those two main ideas and then what you could do on this blank piece of paper you could pick one so for example you could write an explanation you could write an example and then you could compare that with what the student has done in this essay so here focus on the careers this is because they have less responsibility and distractions in their lives compared to the couples that have a child so if it’s the same then you’re probably on the right track but you could also make this better you might think well I could maybe explain this a little bit more again you’re not looking for exact matches what you’re doing is thinking about what they have done and what you have done and this is just one essay you might look at five six seven other essays for this question and then look at all of the explanations and compare those with your explanations compare those with your examples and then that’s going to help you develop your own the next thing you can work on is structure so what you can do is read the question read the whole essay and then think about the structure that they used so for example this is their introduction this is their main body paragraph one this is their main body paragraph 2 and this is their conclusion so what we’re going to do here is discuss both views and give your own opinion this is the type of question that we’re talking about here so they’re using this four paragraph structure but then within each paragraph what are they doing so here in the first sentence what they have done is they have paraphrased the question they have given their opinion here they’ve talked about the first point here and they’ve given the reason for the latter Point here so what you could do is look for more discussible views essays for example this one and you could compare them so are they using a similar structure here well seems like they actually are they’ve paraphrased the question in the first sentence here they’ve given their opinion and they’ve said why they believe that here they are slightly different but again if you look at 7 8 9 10 of those you’ll be able to see similar structures and then that is going to help you write your own structure so what you could do is actually go through them all if you wanted analyze the structures and then look at all of the differences between the different types of essays so you could go and look at for example here we have a causes and solutions essay where do they put the causes where do they put the solutions what do they put in their conclusion are there any similarities between the different students answering this same question and you’ll start to learn the different structures and then use them yourself it’s a great way to actually learn structures rather than just looking at them as if you give students just a bunch of structures they tend not to be able to use them on test day but if you do it this way it kind of internalizes it a lot better and they’re able to use them rather than memorize them okay so when you’re on this page what you want to do is scroll down there’s a lot of information on this page so keep scrolling keep scrolling until you get to here sample essays now we have have a lot of different options here continue to watch the video and I’m going to show you which one to click in step three the next thing you could do is work on your coherence and cohesion by identifying linking words or cohesive devices some people call them cohesive devices some people call them linking words so for example with this one you could identify that there are only really four linking words or cohesive devices here in other words for example for instance and in conclusion if you were to look at another 10 band 7even 8 and N real essays and you only seen linking words are used very sparingly there are not that many then that would be a clear indication that that’s what you should do most of these essays are not going to have lots and lots and lots of linking words in them because lots and lots and lots of linking words actually lower your score they don’t increase it another thing that you could do is think about why they used each cohesive device so for example why did they use that well they were giving an example did they use it correctly well in this instance they seem to have that is helping you understand okay if I’m giving an example that’s what I should use or you might Identify some linking words that they used incorrectly that is going to help you improve because identifying other people’s mistakes is helping you improve your knowledge and your use of linking words as well remember these are real essays which means that they have mistakes in them they are not perfect perfect essays are not actually going to help you as much as real students that are at your level and have got the scores that you need and that brings us on to number five which is identify grammar mistakes as I’ve just said one of the best ways to improve is to identify other people mistakes so what you would do is you would go through and highlight any mistakes that they have made so for example this one you could write here this is an article mistake here’s another article mistake so by identifying these mistakes and correcting them you can think about the rules of Articles and your knowledge and your ability to use them correctly will improve not just articles but any mistakes so identify the mistakes and then think about why those mistakes were made or categorize the mistakes into is it a preposition mistake an article mistake a punctuation mistake and then you will improve too the sixth thing you can do is also related to grammar and thinking about the different grammatical structures and tenses that were used in the essay and why they were used so for example if we take this essay obtaining this type of information in most cases means breaking the law why did they use obtaining Ing and breaking ing rather than furthermore to obtain this information in most cases means to break the law and this will force you to think about whether this is correct or incorrect if you think that it is incorrect what is a better way to use it and why do you think that or if it’s correct why did they use that here’s another one however not only are Paparazzi hired to invade properties belonging to PO politicians to take photos without their permission but also not only but also what does that not only but also grammatical structure allow this student to do why did they choose this grammatical structure what were they able to do is it correct could you use this grammatical structure in your essay again not copying it not blindly copying this and inserting it into your essay but adding tools to your toolbox the more tools that you have in your toolbox grammatically and for vocabulary then the better able you are able to build your essay on test day yourself number eight is vocabulary and improving the range of your vocabulary and you can do that simply by reading the question reading the essay and identifying any unknown vocabulary or vocabulary or collocations or phrases that you’re unsure about you’re not 100% sure what they mean or how to use them in a sentence so for example you might see the collocation discover their talents what does that mean to discover their talents here’s another one potential talents what’s the difference between discovering your talent and a potential Talent what does potential mean what does po potential Talent does a collocation actually mean so you would note down those words or phrases or collocations and then you would guess the meaning from the context so you would read the whole sentence read the whole paragraph and try and guess what that word means that is going to help with your reading skills it’s going to help you identify and understand unknown words in the reading test and it will also help you improve your vocabulary because you can take those new words or phrases put them into a vocabulary book add all the new information like the meaning the synonyms the example sentences and then after a while if you do this you’re going to have a massive Bank of new words and new phrases and then if you review those and use those in your own essays then you’re improving your ability to write essays another thing you could do with vocabulary number nine is identify any vocabulary errors so for example in this essay if we look at this sentence recently the pictures of a famous politician of Milan while playing football with local children were published in many newspapers and he instantly became famous so there’s a problem here because it’s saying a famous person became famous well they were already famous so either there is a meaning error here with this word or we need to change this word to something different another thing that you could do is look for repetition are there words that are maybe repeated a few many times and then you could try and change it to a synonym that means the same thing but has um a different you know a different word that means the same thing and last but not least number 10 what you can do is look at the question write the whole essay and then compare your essays compare everything with what the students have done but I wouldn’t recommend doing that right away what I would recommend doing is use you know one or two of the other nine techniques work on your weaknesses and then once you are more confident then you can write the whole essay and then compare it with what the other students have done and but please please please don’t think that if your essay is different that it’s wrong there are hundreds of different ways that you can write a band seven or a band eight essay it is not mathematic ICS it is not you know there’s only one answer to the question so don’t look at these essays and think that you’re on the wrong track just because yours are different what you’re looking for is are the main things like the ideas are they relevant is the structure similar did you develop your ideas in a similar way if you focus on those big things then your essays will be fine and you will really really improve okay so you should be here the one that you want is this one how to use task two sample essays if you click on that you will get access to 100 B 78 and9 I rating task 2 essay samples it will introduce them it will tell you how to use them and then it will give you all of these samples so thank you very much for watching the video and I hope that you enjoy using these samples and they help you improve your score well done for making it this far it is a very long video so congratulations for making it this far you have my respect as a special bonus I’m going to share with you something I’ve never released before it’s a live recording of me doing the actual writing test what you should do is watch and listen to me talk through how I would think about the question and how I would answer the question this is not only a great way for you to review all of the things within this video but really get inside the head of someone who has got a band online in I writing and somebody who does this for a living I also made two errors I made two mistakes when I was writing if you can spot both of these mistakes pop it into the comments and I’ll give you a coupon code that gives you 20% off our VIP course it is very important that you not only just watch this but watch it with a critical eye think about all of the things that you have learned and imagine yourself as an examiner think about what feedback you would would give me what am I doing in relation to the things that I’ve taught you in this big long video but also think about the official markting criteria what am I doing right could you give me any feedback how could I improve by thinking like a teacher by thinking like an examiner it is a huge benefit you will be ahead of 99% of other students if you start to think in this way so the first thing I need to do is just read the question and understand it so let’s move this down here here so we can just focus on this one some people say that no is the best time in history to be living what is your opinion about this what other time in history would be interesting to live in okay so I’ve understood all the words I understand the sentences I understand exactly what they’re looking for and understand what type of question this is this is a double question they’re asking me two separate questions okay so now that I’ve understood it what I need to do is plan it out so what I’ll do so I’m going to paraphrase I’m going to disagree because of social media um what other time in history will be okay so it doesn’t really matter what I choose here it’s just something that is easy to write about it’s easy to write about why social media makes this not the best time to be living in history um I also need to make sure that I reference other times because really what what it’s asking us to do is compare now with all the other times in history so I’m just putting that in just as a quick note other time 60s because of music now I I could have chosen World War II because I know a lot about that period um but it’s a bit difficult to say why that would be interesting cuz a lot of people were dying and the’ 60s I know a lot about music in the 60s so I’m not picking the definitive answer this is not a intelligence test or a general knowledge test this is a writing test so I’m just going to be writing about something that’s easy for me to write about um so the best time keyword there is best and keyword there is interesting so it’s about the best time and an interesting time okay so that’s my introduction planned out and basically this plans out the the rest of my essay just keep an eye on the time I think I started at about 5 okay so I’ve got okay main body paragraph one topic sentence disagree because of social media okay so why why does social media make it not the best time to be living um okay why being constantly connected to other people what what is why does this make it a bad time to live okay I’m happy with that one let me just go back so I’m just adding little ideas that are popping into my head but I’m constantly going back to the question for okay so why is it interesting well before the 1960s music was very boring was very conservative um and then the Beatles happened so I’ll talk about the Beatles and and what they did to music um on then an example I’ll use one of the songs um and talk about why that’s interesting again it doesn’t have to give a definitive history of the 60s just has to talk about what I think is interesting about it okay I know what I’m going to put in the conclusion so I’m not going to spend too much time okay how am I for time that took me about s minutes so I think I’m just looking at the watch on my wrist to try and make it realistic um okay taking the question down again because I’m paraphrasing this okay many PE many believe that the modern era is the is the most optimal time to be alive very kind of optimal is a very scientific techy word um but right now that’s the best I can think of what I’m not going to do is spend five minutes trying to worry about one word um so let’s move on for okay so let’s check that many believe at the modern era is the most optimal time to be alive I strong strongly I’ve turned off spell check to make it hard as strongly disagree with this statement due to the stress social media causes on the 1960s would have been a more interesting decade to live through so I missed out the reason so I want to State my reason here because what I want is for the examiner to read this and know exactly what I think about the question and then this also presents a little plan for me going to read it one more time time cuz I made a few mistakes there many believe that the modern era is the most optimal time to be alive I strongly disagree with this statement due to the stress social media causes and the 1960s would have been a more interesting decade to live through because of the musical Revolution okay why did that automatically I thought I turned that off I thought I turned the automatic spell checker off apologies I don’t know how to turn it off okay that’s cheating for for all for okay let’s read this the current time is one of the worst times to exist due to the omnipresence of social media op these sites reduce quality of life for millions of people because modern humans can really switch off and relax it is important for people to have time alone in order to refresh themselves and look after their mental health constant notifications increase anxiety and make people feel inadequate due to the impossible task of competing with everyone else so I need to explain this a little bit for example Instagram portrays impossible beauty standards which make many young men and women feel they are less than those they follow okay so for example Instagram portrays impossible beauty standards which make young men and women feel they are less than those they follow so my main point is about kind of never being able to switch off and connect is this a is this a okay this is related but is this more peer pressure and comparing yourself to others rather than okay let’s change this a little bit for example for for I know I’ve repeated the word attention twice I know many of you are freaking out don’t worry all right the current time is one of the worst times to exist due to the omnipresence of social media apps these sites reduce quality of life for millions of people because modern humans can really switch off and relax it is important for people to have time alone in order to refresh themselves and look after their mental health constant notifications increase anxiety and make people feel inadequate due to the impossible task of competing with everyone else in the world for example Instagram notifies you when someone likes your picture and many young people feel stressed if they do not get enough attention but also can’t stop checking their phones I’m just changing the vocabulary a little bit sharpening it up um you know check their feeds this isn’t like check is a simple word there is a simple word but feeds is a very topic specific word um and to use this correctly um indicates to The Examiner that you know you really know this topic you know social media um and if you have the ability to use this type of vocabulary even though it’s not a very long complicated word it is very topic specific okay so I am 20 minutes in and I’m halfway through I might have made some mistakes here I don’t know but I’ll check at the end uh what other time for for okay the 60s would have been a fascinating time experience because of the Innovations Innovation yeah there were many Innovations in music before then music was quite boring and there was little experimentation BNS like the Beatles completely transformed the cultural landscape by introducing a completely new sound this would have been extremely exciting because there are very few times in history when someone can experience something completely unique for the first time for instance their album excuse me I don’t know if it was Sergeant Peppers that had Indian like the sitar and stuff I I definitely know that they used the satar um and that was quite revolutionary for Western audiences um so but it doesn’t matter because it’s not a Beatles or a music test so um it just matters that we’re able to explain to The Examiner what we think so the 60s would have been a fascinating time to experience because of the Innovations in music before then music was quite boring and there was little experimentation B like the Beatles completely transformed the cultural land SCP you new s mind this would have been exciting because there are very few times in history when someone can experience something completely unique for the first time for instance the sergeant Peppers album Forge new Grind in production when people with people hearing pop songs fused with traditional instruments from India for the first time okay so I’ve got about 12 minutes left so I better finish this up for was going to write incessant but I don’t know how to spell incessant 100% so I’m not going to take the risk um cuz I believe it or not I’m not checking the dictionary or anything like that um I have a pretty good idea how it’s spelled but I don’t want to take any risks constant I’ve used that incessant I don’t know how to spell it omnipresent I’ve already for for for and I could have talked about how terrible music is these days but I don’t have time to do that it is truly terrible so um all right in conclusion although this current time has experienced many technological breakthroughs in the digital space companies like Facebook and Twitter have a detrimental impact on our mental health making it one of the worst times to be alive so I’m linking it back to the question I would have preferred to live through the 1960s because of how exciting new new music was back then so interesting exciting okay okay let’s check the word c so I’ve got about 7 minutes to check this so I’m on time 308 so sweet spot is kind of between 260 to 300 so I’m a little bit over um but that’s not not a big deal at all um once you going much over 300 then you get into problems but you know eight words over 300 is not a huge deal what I’m going to do is read it all again because it’s very difficult to spell check grammar check for carb check whenever you’re thinking about writing at the same time so what we like to do is just focus now on not writing the essay just checking the essay for for okay I hope I haven’t missed anything or made any mistakes I’m sure I’ll be told it’s social one of the detrimental effects of social media is nasty comments so hopefully I haven’t made any mistakes but I’m sure you’ll tell me if I did um all right I still have five minutes so what I want to do is just go through this and look for are there any improvements that I could make to the vocabulary um so okay social media so social media let’s say social apps just showing the examiner I’m aware of this collocation okay I did I talked about Facebook and Twitter instead of social media Med so that’s fine um 1960s 60s the 1960s I don’t want to change it to the 60s even though in common you know it’s common knowledge that if you’re talking about the 60s it’s probably the 1960s but I don’t want to give the examp exam or any any excuse to Mark me down cuz it could have been the 1860s or the 1760s I don’t think that’s a huge deal but [Music] um Quality of Life Millions notifications optimal time fascinating time current time so got time a lot but it’s not just time time time time time it’s a lot of collocation so current time fascinating time um interesting time interesting decade fascinating and stuff like that for the first time current time so the The Examiner is not hopefully the examiner is not going to look at this and go you repeat it time you know four times or whatever they’ll look at it and think okay cocation cocation cocation mental health wellbeing music there’s no other can’t think of any other way of saying you could talk about songs like but it’s not really you know it’s music is what we’re really talking about here musical I mean I’m I’m just changing stuff for the sake of changing it it’s I don’t think that improves the essay but I just know that many of you will be screaming oh you used the word music four times what do you call the name of the producer George someone might remember it later on it’s like a really simple name but the Beatles would not have been the Beatles without their producer let’s put George come back to that if we go um if I don’t remember it I’ll just remove it um okay so I’m running out of time I spent about 40 minutes my watch is saying 45 you know it’s 6:45 a.m. I started at 6:05 a.m. so we just need to move on and if we spend too much time on this we’re not going to have enough time to get this done so what I do is I first read this your friend has been offered a place on a course at the University where you studied here or she would like your advice about finding a place to live okay so I’m going to use my real University where I actually studied and what I’m going to do is just use this as a plan so these are going to be my four main body paragraphs I’m going to check the tone your friend so I’m going to say dear will my little boy is called William so I’ll imagine I’m writing to him [Music] um for so it’s very informal just dropping you a quick note to let you know a little bit um about the best place to stay in Bristol for for okay when I was there I lived in Clifton it’s famous for the beautiful suspension brid and for its little Artisan shops but it’s also the most expensive and very few live there because of the cost of living describe where you lived when you were a student at the University okay recommend the best way for him to look for accommodation again I’m using informal language because it’s a friend I reckon the best place for you to look is on University of Bristols website because it will let you know about staying in Halls Halls is a British Irish way of saying dormitories like where students live I reckon the best place for you to look is on the University of Bristol’s website because it will let you know about staying in Halls they give you a few different options and then you can visit them in person to get a feel for where they are and what they’d be like to live in so I’m using lots of contractions they they I’m because it’s an informal ladder recommend the best way for him to look for accommodation warn him hor mistakes students make when choosing a combination for for okay it’s just an informal sign off all right so I’ve got that took me oh 9 minutes so probably a little bit too fast actually um so probably made a few mistakes um deer will I don’t know when I’m writing letters I don’t normally do this but some examiners think that this is important so I’m just going to play it safe I’m just dropping you a quick note to let you know a little bit about the best place to stay in Bristol when I was there I lived in Clifton it’s famous for the beautiful suspension bridge and its little Artisan shop so I’m adding in you know little um adjectives this is a way that you can you know expand your vocabulary quite easily as long as you know what they mean and you know how to spell them um and they they are appropriate but it’s also the most expensive area of the city and very few students live there because of the cost of living okay I re the best place for you to look is on the University of Bristol’s website because it will let you know about staying in Halls they’ll give you a diff they’ll give you a few different options and then you can visit them in person to get a feel for where they are and what they be like to live in the biggest blunder I made was choosing to live in the Polish part of t on my own Not only was I skinned for most of the year after paying my rent I didn’t really get to make many new mates because I didn’t get to live with other students Halls are cheap and you’re guaranteed to meet new people okay so going to have a bit of time left but this is all true um and it’s easiest to just write about something that is true um I went to the University of Bristol I lived in Clifton it was too expensive I lived on my own that was a mistake um so it’s just easier to write but for just trying to make it a little bit more informal and this is only like a threel word word but only you know very high level English Learners or native English speakers would really know how to use that word so just demonstrating that it’s not about using big long complicated words some sometimes you know a three-letter word can be way more impressive than a big long complicated word it’s a little bit long I think so I’m just added so the the more I if I’m write write a very long essay or a very long letter like this I can just edit it down um and that reduces the chances of making any mistakes fr frers freshers is like um uh new people first years freshers they have parties well everyone has parties University um but I’m just trying to add in as much topic specific vocabulary as possible holes are cheap and you’re guaranteed to make friends at the Epic freshers parties just sign off give me a bail again just adding in a little bit of extra a few final flourishes [Music] um give me a bell means call me so in a in a formal letter it would say you know please please phone me if you need anything else in an informal letter you can do something like that so we’re all done I think um 5 minutes early still can’t think of that name producer George Martin I think it is I knew it was a really simple name let’s check Beatles producer George Martin got it all right I forgot to check the W card for this one 193 so that’s perfect U The Sweet Spot for these is kind of between 160 and 200 um and it’s much better to write a essay around that kind of word c and spend a lot of time thinking about it and shortening it and maybe not shortening it but just tightening it up and improving it um I’m sure that I’ve made some mistakes in here um remember to get a band nine you’re allowed to make some slips so please don’t look at this if I have made some mistakes and go you’re a terrible teacher you don’t know what you’re doing hopefully that was useful um apologies that I couldn’t talk you through absolutely everything but I wanted to make sure that it was a good essay at the same time as it being educational so apologies if there was a lot of of dead um dead noise where I wasn’t actually talking um but it’s difficult to write and talk and think all at the same time hopefully that was useful guys and it was definitely useful for me to kind of see what the challenges are for students and do this um myself and put myself under pressure um and let’s see if there’s any negativity hopefully not hopefully it was useful thank you

By Amjad Izhar
Contact: amjad.izhar@gmail.com
https://amjadizhar.blog

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IELTS Writing Tips and Tricks

IELTS Test Preparation Study Guide

Quiz

Answer Key

Essay Questions

Glossary

IELTS Writing Mastery: Strategies and Pitfalls

Optimizing Your IELTS Strategy

1. How can I identify which areas of the IELTS test I need to focus on?

2. How do I optimize my study approach for the IELTS test?

3. Why is it important to get expert feedback on my IELTS performance?

4. Should I prioritize taking practice tests or focusing on improving my weaknesses?

5. How should I approach vocabulary in the IELTS writing test?

6. Is it beneficial to use lots of linking words and cohesive devices in IELTS writing?

7. Should I prioritize grammatical range or grammatical accuracy?

8. What common errors should I avoid in my IELTS writing introduction?

Mastering the IELTS: A Step-by-Step Guide

IELTS Writing Task 2: Strategies for Success

IELTS Task 2 Essay Structure

IELTS Writing Task 2: Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

IELTS Writing Band Scores: A Comprehensive Guide

Strategies for IELTS Writing Success

The Original Text

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IELTS Writing Tips and Tricks

IELTS Test Preparation Study Guide

Quiz

Answer Key

Essay Questions

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IELTS Writing Mastery: Strategies and Pitfalls

Optimizing Your IELTS Strategy

1. How can I identify which areas of the IELTS test I need to focus on?

2. How do I optimize my study approach for the IELTS test?

3. Why is it important to get expert feedback on my IELTS performance?

4. Should I prioritize taking practice tests or focusing on improving my weaknesses?

5. How should I approach vocabulary in the IELTS writing test?

6. Is it beneficial to use lots of linking words and cohesive devices in IELTS writing?

7. Should I prioritize grammatical range or grammatical accuracy?

8. What common errors should I avoid in my IELTS writing introduction?

Mastering the IELTS: A Step-by-Step Guide

IELTS Writing Task 2: Strategies for Success

IELTS Task 2 Essay Structure

IELTS Writing Task 2: Common Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

IELTS Writing Band Scores: A Comprehensive Guide

Strategies for IELTS Writing Success

The Original Text

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More posts

Jinnah, Partition, and the Creation of Pakistan by Jaswant Singh – Study Notes

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