IELTS Writing: answering the question asked

Two tasks, sixty minutes, and the lowest average band of the four skills for most candidates. The single most common reason is not grammar: it is writing a competent essay about a slightly different question than the one on the paper, which caps the task-response criterion no matter how good the English is.

The one-minute version: twenty minutes on Task 1, forty on Task 2, and five of those forty spent planning before you write a word. Task 2 is worth double. Meet the word minimums (150 and 250). Read the question twice and answer its shape — not the shape of the last essay you practised.

What is being marked

Four criteria per task, equally weighted:

Because they are equal, a strong essay with no paragraphs loses as much as a well-ordered one with weak grammar. Find your lowest criterion and work there.

Task 2: the five question shapes

Almost every Task 2 is one of these, and each wants a different essay. Misreading which one you have is the expensive mistake:

• Opinion ("To what extent do you agree?") — take a position in the introduction and defend it throughout. A balanced both-sides essay here answers a question you were not asked.
• Discussion ("Discuss both views and give your own opinion") — both views genuinely covered, and your own stated. Leaving out your opinion is the usual half-band loss.
• Advantages and disadvantages — often with a twist: "do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages?" is an opinion question wearing a list's clothes, and needs a verdict.
• Problem and solution ("What problems does this cause and how could they be addressed?") — two jobs. Solutions must answer the problems you actually raised.
• Two-part question — two direct questions in the prompt. Answer both, roughly equally. This is the shape people most often half-answer.

The introduction, in two sentences

Paraphrase the question, then state your thesis. That is all it needs. "Nowadays in modern society" and its relatives say nothing and are instantly recognisable as filler.

The thesis is the sentence a marker could point at to say what you think. If your introduction has no such sentence and the question wanted a position, you have capped your task response before the first body paragraph.

Body paragraphs

One idea per paragraph, and in this order: a topic sentence that states the idea, two or three sentences explaining why it follows, then one concrete example. The middle step is what most essays skip — they assert and then illustrate, with no mechanism in between, and the result reads thin.

Examples can be hypothetical or drawn from your own experience; you do not need statistics, and invented figures ("studies show 73% of...") read as padding to an examiner who marks several hundred of these a month.

The conclusion

Restate the position and the main reason for it, in one or two sentences. Do not introduce a new argument, and do not apologise for having had one. An essay with no conclusion looks unfinished even when it is long enough.

Cohesion is not a bag of linking words

This is the most widely misunderstood criterion. Coherence and cohesion marks whether the reader is carried through the argument: paragraphs with clear jobs, a thread between them, and reference that works. Mechanical overuse of connectives counts against it — an essay where every paragraph opens with "Moreover", "Furthermore", "In addition" is exhibiting a habit, not cohesion.

What actually helps: pronouns and demonstratives that point back cleanly (this problem, such schemes, the latter), a topic sentence that names the paragraph's job, and the occasional genuine signpost where the logic really does turn.

Two myths worth putting down

"Never use I." In an opinion essay, I is appropriate and usually clearer than the contortions people use to avoid it. "It could be argued by some that" is longer, vaguer and weaker than "I think". Academic register means precise and impersonal where that fits — it does not ban the first person from a question that asked what you think.

"Use the most advanced word you know." Lexical resource rewards the right word, used the way a native speaker would use it. A misused rare word costs more than a plain one used accurately, because it breaks the sentence. Collocation beats rarity: heavy traffic, strong evidence, widespread concern.

Task 1

Academic: charts, tables, processes and maps

Your job is to select the main features and compare them — not to list every number, and not to explain causes or give an opinion. Two things carry the band:

• Include an overview. One or two sentences stating the biggest picture — what rose, what dominated, what the overall shape is. This is the single cheapest gain available in Task 1, and a report without it is capped.
• Group, then quantify. Describe the categories that behave alike together, with a few well-chosen figures as evidence. Approximations are fine and often read better: "roughly a quarter", "just under 40%".

Get the tense from the axis: a chart of 1990–2010 is past, a projection to 2040 takes future forms, and a chart with no dates is present. For a process diagram, the sequence is the structure and the passive is natural ("the beans are then roasted"). For maps, the subject is change over time.

General Training: the letter

Register is the criterion that decides a GT letter. Work out who the recipient is — a friend, a manager, an unnamed official — and keep one tone from the greeting to the sign-off. Then cover all three bullet points; each one is part of the task, and a letter that develops two beautifully and forgets the third loses on task achievement.

Why this is not a university assignment

People with real academic writing experience are often surprised by a 6.0 here, and the reason is that the two tasks reward different things. There is no research, no reading list and no citation; the examiner spends a couple of minutes on your script; and there is no redrafting. A forty-minute hand-written argument with a visible structure is the target. An assignment-shaped essay — slow build-up, position revealed late, hedged throughout — reads as an unclear position, which is exactly what task response penalises.

Topics, and the memorised-essay trap

Task 2 topics do recycle: education, technology, environment, crime, work, health, urban life. Reading widely around them is genuinely useful preparation, and so is building the vocabulary each one needs.

Memorising whole essays is not. The prompt will differ from the one you memorised in some small way — it will ask about a different group, a different extent, a different consequence — and a pre-written essay cannot bend to it. Examiners read memorised material constantly and it is conspicuous: an essay that is fluent in its body and oddly unrelated to the exact question is a capped task response.

How to practise so it transfers

1. Unmarked practice is close to worthless. Writing ten essays with the same invisible error ten times entrenches it. If you cannot get feedback from a teacher, mark against the published band descriptors yourself with a fixed checklist: Is there a thesis? Does each paragraph have one idea and a topic sentence? Is there an overview in Task 1? How many sentences are complex, and are they correct?
2. Write to time, by hand, if the test is on paper. Forty minutes including planning. Handwriting speed and legibility are real variables, and so is typing without a spellchecker on computer-delivered.
3. Plan on paper for five minutes. Two ideas, one example each, position decided. Essays that go wrong usually went wrong before the first sentence.
4. Rewrite one essay instead of writing a new one. The second draft is where the learning is. Most people never do this, which is why it works.

The rest of this section

Each skill has its own page, and the practice-test page covers how to use them together. The section overview has the band-score arithmetic and the Academic/General Training split.