3 tips to improve your band score for IELTS Writing

Hello everyone.

I am Hong from Learn English with Cambridge.

Today let’s talk about writing.

This is the last video in the series of four videos

to help you improve your IELTS band score in each skill.

If you have missed the other three videos,

you can check out the links in the description box below.

But before we begin, if you find our work useful,

please consider subscribing to this channel or visiting

our website, weloveielts.org.

Right now, let’s dive right in with three

tips to help you improve your writing band score.

You know, the quality of our productive skills highly

depends on our receptive skills.

So, in other words, you’ve got to be good

at reading and listening in order to be good at writing and speaking.

Well, when it comes to writing, of course both reading

and listening help, but I personally prefer

using language that I learn from reading into my writing.

What should we read?

There are three reading resources that I highly recommend.

The first one is, of course, IELTS textbooks.

Besides giving you lots of tips and strategies on how

to improve your writing skills, these books, and here’s something

I particularly like about them, is that they provide lots of sample

answers that are graded by examiners so that it can give

you a picture of how a good and a bad essay looks like.

The second resource that you can look at is newspapers, magazines,

and websites in English because they are free and easily accessible.

But you’re someone who having trouble understanding advanced English in

some newspapers or websites just I used to, then you can check out some

websites that offer news or publish new for learners of different levels.

And the third resource is English books in general.

Anything you can find interesting and relevant can help you to enrich

your language input.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. All wrong.

You should know grammar rules.

You have to revise English grammar rules.

Check grammar before submitting this to me.

Grammar, grammar, grammar.

We know that we should not make grammatical

mistakes when writing, but annoyingly, we’ll still do.

And often, very basic grammatical mistakes again and again.

Here are some examples.

Can you help me identify one mistake in each sentence?

The chart illustrate how a nation’s population changed over time.

This is a subject-verb agreement problem.

The chart is a singular subject so the verb illustrate

must be singular as well, so it should be illustrates.

My mother gave me two advices.

Well, advice is an uncountable noun so we cannot say two advices,

but we should say two pieces of advice.

Managers tell employees that their salaries will be raised.

Here it’s confusing whether the word their salaries is referring

to managers’ salaries or employees’ salaries.

So, to make it clear, we can say this instead.

Managers inform that the salaries of the employees will be raised.

This essay will discuss what should we do to tackle the problem.

Here is the order of the word is incorrect.

We should say, this essay will discuss what we should do to tackle the problem.

The article reported that the unemployment rate is alarming.

The tense should be consistent here.

Because the verb report is in the past tense,

so the verb to be should also be in the past tense.

We should say the unemployment rate was alarming.

I’d love to meet queen of England in person.

If the Queen of England is used as an official title or in the proper name,

it should be capitalised and have the article the before the word queen.

Oh, by the way, if you want to know more about the uses of articles,

check out Jiri’s video.

I put the link in the description box below.

Again now, here are the six grammatical mistakes that

people usually make in IELTS writing.

So, tell me, what’s your number one fear in the writing IELTS?

For me, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. Yes, it’s about running out of time.

It felt like an impossible mission trying to finish two

tasks in just one hour.

So, what I did was, after reading a topic,

I wasted no time and started writing straight away.

But that strategy did not work at all.

Later, I found out about planning before writing on the answer sheet,

so I jotted down my key ideas, and guess what?

It didn’t work either.

It didn’t work either. Let’s take a look at this topic.

Governments should spend more money on education than

on recreation and sports.

Do you agree or disagree?

Here’s how my outline used to look

and how it’s supposed to look.

The thing is, I was in such a hurry that I didn’t do my planning very carefully.

I didn’t think about idea development or examples

or things like that when the purpose of planning before writing is to try

to separate the thinking part and the writing part.

I got the two phases mixed up.

Nice advice is you should plan before you write but remember

to plan carefully.

All right, time to recap.

Here are the three tips to help you improve your writing band score.

If you find this video useful, don’t forget to hit the like or

the subscribe button below.

Thank you very much for watching and I will see you real soon.

Bye-bye.