Crucial tips for getting a high band score.
- It's important to accurately decipher the visuals and data before writing.
- Once you get the main idea of the graph, you should look for trends and patterns, so as to identify the main features.
- Next, you should organise your introduction, middle paragraph, and conclusion in the standard style of academic reports.
- Now your challenge is to actually describe the graph, table, or chart using formal, academic English. This part takes a lot of practice, but once you have mastered it, you can feel safe knowing that these are standardised phrases that you can use again and again in all kinds of reports. There is no need to reinvent the wheel every time you write a report.
- In order to master sentence structure, it's a good idea to practice fine-tuning your micro-skills with parts of speech, prepositions, syntax, and grammatical construction.
- Check that you have avoided repeating phrases from the set task, or too many repetitive verbs, adjectives, nouns, adverbs, or other phrases throughout your report. The key to avoiding repetition is to paraphrase and use synonyms, as well as varied sentence structure.
- An indispensable secret weapon in getting a top band score in writing is to use collocations.
- Grammar, vocabulary, and collocations are difficult to master if you don't have enough opportunity to practice. This is why it's a good idea to use interactive quizzes that target all of these skills in great detail.
- Remember to use effective cohesive devices so as to establish smooth transitions between your paragraphs.
- When you have learnt how to organise paragraphs you shouldn't have to worry about word count. Follow a good plan and you will almost always be within range of the required number of words. Lastly, make sure that you get detailed feedback on your reports. You learn through feedback and practice.
My blog is dedicated to writing posts about IELTS writing and other exam skills. Therefore, I will go through each of these ten writing skills and stages in future blog posts.
For today you can practise sentence structure ( point 5 above) by trying out the quiz below.