Dominic Cole's IELTS blog

Writing for IELTS is quite different from academic writing for at least one very good reason: timing. In IELTS you only have 60 minutes to produce two pieces of writing, there are no second chances and it isn't practical to draft and redraft. However, in IELTS you still need to find time to check your writing and edit it for mistakes. Here are some very practical suggestions on how to go about this process.

When to check
The first step is to decide when to check. You may think the obvious time is after you have finished writing, but there are other options. None is necessarily correct: as ever I suggest you need to try each approach and see which works for you as an individual.

1. Check at the end
The conventional advice is to leave 3-5 minutes at the end to review your writing. The reason to do it this way is that you can see read the whole essay and check it for coherence as well as grammatical problems. One problem with this approach is that sometimes you run out of time and do not check. Another problem is that it is more difficult to find mistakes when you check a longer piece of writing.

If you are a higher level candidate and you have few problems with grammar, this is possibly the approach for you.

2. Check as you write
An alternative option is to check as you write: either at the end of each sentence or paragraph. This idea may surprise you, but there is a very significant benefit to this approach: you are much more likely to find grammatical errors if you look at a sentence of 15 words than an essay of 250 words.

If you know that you have consistent problems with grammar, you should certainly consider this approach. It really is much easier to find mistakes this way.

3. Check as you write and at the end
This is probably the ideal choice as it allows you to find grammatical errors as you write and problems with coherence after you have written. The one difficulty is that it probably takes more time.

How to check
Here I have two very positive suggestion to make:

1. Check with a pen in hand so that you make sure you look at every word. It's very easy to see what you think you have written and not what you actually wrote. Reading with a pen is a good way of slowing yourself down and makeing sure you read every word.
   
2. Read in complete sentences and not word by word. Very often mistakes happen because all the parts of the sentence are correct, but those parts of a sentence do not fit together.
   

What to check for
This is the big one. There are a number of different items you can check for and what follows is a longish list and I suggest that in an exam it may not practical to check for all of them. You need to make your own personal checklist before the exam: to do this you need the assistance of a teacher to advise you of your mistakes. See this exam tip for more detail.

Grammar
The main point to note here is that not all mistakes are equal. You will be penalised more heavily for basic mistakes than more complex ones, therefore you should check your basic grammar most carefully.

1. Verb tenses: make sure they are consistent and in task 1 that your tenses match the time frame in the graph
2. Articles: this is something for everyone to check for. Articles are the most common words in English and often go wrong. To get band 7 or over most of your sentences need to be correct: this means your articles need to be correct. See my post on articles.
   
3. Subject-verb agreement: this means "he does" not "he do". Even to quite a high level this is a relatively common mistake. The problem being that it is also a basic mistake that examiners will penalise more heavily
   
4. Parts of speech: this is another relatively low level mistake that is also quite common - particularly with Asian language speakers. Check that you use nouns, verbs and adjectives when you need. This is particularly an issue in task 1 when using trend language (a sharp rise, but to rise sharply).
   
5. Range of sentence structures: this one may surprise you, but it is important if you want band 6 or above to vary your sentence structures. It is not enough always to use simple but correct language.

Vocabulary
I suspect that this is something that few candidates bother to check. A mistake. Vocabulary is as important as grammar and in a way it is easier to correct.

1. Repetition: under exam conditions looking for repetition is perhaps the area where a candidate can most improve their writing. It is relatively easy for a candidate to see that they have repeated words and to correct this mistake.
   
2. Repetition (2): check that you have not repeated whole phrases and sentences from the question
   
3. Spelling: check that you get at least the basic words right

Coherence
Again, this is another area that sometimes does not get checked. You do need to think about this as it accounts for a large part of your mark.

1. Topic sentences: each paragraph starts with a topic sentence that clearly relates to the question
2. Paragraph development: each paragraph is developed with explanations and examples of the topic sentence. In task 1 this includes having enough detailed information and facts.
3. Connecting words:make sure that the connecting words you use are accurate. A frequent mistake is to overuse connecting words.

Answering the question
If you don't answer the question, the examiner is likely to penalise you very heavily. Really speaking, it is too late to check this at the end, this is something more for the planning stage.

1. Introduction: check that your introduction addresses all parts of the question
   
2. Conclusion: check that your conclusion gives an answer to the question

What not to do
Whatever you do, don't count the words. That is a complete waste of exam time. If you are worried, count how many words you write in one line and then count how many lines your writing is. (Words like "a" and "an" still count as words).

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Much of the philosophy of this blog is that the best the way to prepare for IELTS is to take care of your general English and not to focus solely on the exam. This is particularly relevant in relation to learning vocabulary which is a key to all 4 papers. Here is another "little but often" suggestion on how you should go about that learning process - this time looking at learning the words you already know.

Learn the words you already know?
This no doubt sounds a strange suggestion, but to demonstrate what I mean, here's an exercise for you. You know the word "practice" of course, so why bother learning it? To show you, see if you can complete each of these sentences with a word based on "practice".

1. You can't do three jobs at once. That's totally ........ .


2. You're ........ old enough to drive. Why don't you think about saving up for lessons?


3. You need to ........ regularly if you want to improve

The solutions are added as a comment to this post. Did you get them all right? Well done if you did, but don't worry too much if you didn't. I often take this task into class and rarely do my students get 100%, they will know the base word, but they don't know all the variations of it. This is quite normal for learners of English.

Word families - why they matter
What we are looking at here are word families: words that are related to each other. These matter because research suggests that native speakers do not in fact use so many words and that:

the 2000 most frequent word families of English make up 79.7% of the individual words in any English text, the 3000 most frequent word families represent 84%, the 4000 most frequent word families make up about 86.7%, and the 5000 most frequent word families cover 88.6%. (click here if you want to read the research)

It's not that native speakers use so many words, rather they are able to use those words much more flexibly than learners, as they know all the related words in the word family. And in many ways it is these common words and their word families that learners of English need to focus on - not the technical terms that are rarely used. Indeed, the academic word list works on the same principle of word families.

How to learn word families

Look for common words
The first step is to understand this idea: that the words you need to notice and pay attention to are the words you probably ignore as being too simple to learn. You recognise them, but can you use them? This is a small but hugely important step - don't ignore familiar looking words.

Learn to see patterns
The next step is of course to practise (note the spelling!). I will add, however, that you need to practise regularly and intelligently for this work. By this I mean you want to learn to notice patterns in different word families: to give you one example, all these words have something in common:

• widen
• shorten
• lengthen
• broaden

Not only do they end in" -en", they are verbs. The point being that once you have seen this a few times, you will learn how to make intelligent guesses about words you have not seen or used before. This is necessary because you cannot "learn" all the words as there are simple too many of them: only this week the millionth word in English was recorded!

A great site for practice
Flo Joe is a perfect "little but often" site, ideal for 15 minutes daily exercise. If you like, take a look at my brief video introduction to it showing you how to navigate and use it.

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Test yourself
Sometimes the old-fashioned ways are still the best ways. Back when I was a boy, we used to have regular spelling bees at school. The spelling bee is really little more than a competitive spelling test. Here is an interactive video for you to test your spelling skills and your listening skills at the same time. I'm not sure about the humour, but the technology is great as is the fact that you get to hear the word spoken in context.

In IELTS speaking rule number 1 is to speak. In practice what this means is that you only have a limited amount of thinking time and you cannot wait 10 seconds before you start to answer the question. Indeed, a 4/5 second pause is almost certain to be noted by the examiner. What you need to do is to start speaking almost immediately. How can you do do that?

One basic point to make is that the examiner is much less interested in what you say than how you say it. This means that you don't need to worry too much about giving the intelligent answer possible, just the most coherent answer possible. This, I suggest, is a mistake candidates frequently make: they try to be too intelligent and give smart answers. It's a natural thing to try and do, it is how most exams work.

The next point is that in parts 1 and 3 you may not get any thinking time, but that doesn't mean you have to start by answering the question. It means something else: you need to start communicating immediately. This is a super important point so let me give you an example to show what I mean:

This is not a straightforward question, it's a question you need a little time to think about. Obviously, the world is now a different place from 20 years ago, but it's quite hard to give a clear answer. One reason for that is computers now affect our lives in so many areas: work, education, leisure. Now have a look at this brief video:

Do you see the point? I haven't really answered the question yet, but I am talking about the question. While I am doing that, my mind is working and I am deciding what to say. I have given myself 20 seconds thinking time, but I am talking at the same time: there is nothing for the examiner to complain about provided I do go on to answer the question of course!

There is a definite skill involved here. The good news, however, is that it is a natural speaking skill that many people will use in their own languages: it's not something specific to English. Very probably you will do something similar in your language and so the first step is to try and use English in the same way you use your own language.

One more precise technique you may want to consider is repeating the question - something that is perfectly natural. In a second language it is perhaps less natural, so let me show you 3 different methods: