Many students often asked me, “What I should do to achieve a higher IELTS writing score?”
The first thing you need to do is minimizing grammatical errors.
You may think that this is a joke.
Well, this is based on my experience and I have data to back up my claim!
Nobody likes bad writing. Not even in Indonesian!
Bad grammar can make your writing hard to digest.
People will frown upon reading it and require immense effort just to understand our bad writing.
Examiner will be turned off because of our bad grammar. You will get a lower score as a result of it.
Produce grammatically error-free sentences
According to the research made by Amanda Muller (2015), different IELTS Band score varies in the number of error they produce.
The errors are mostly grammatical.
Per 100 words,
Band 6 has 206 errors,
Band 6.5 has 96 errors and
Band 7 has 35 errors
Notice how the higher the band you get, the lower the error they produce.
The study does not even account for writing style, indicating that grammatical error is more significant.
She argued that grammatical errors hamper comprehension more than the style!
Amanda’s study was based on sophomore students entering university. She asked the students to produce academic writing following the IELTS-like questions.
Here is the breakdown of the common error the students make:
Those of you who have taken the TOEFL course must have learned a thing or two about these grammar features.
Go back to your book and relearn all of the grammar terms you might miss.
So, students, make sure when you write, minimize errors.
I remembered that I was able to score achieve 7.5 from 5.5 in IELTS writing, merely by producing error-free sentences when writing for IELTS.
That was the only improvement I significantly made when retaking the IELTS test for the Australian Scholarship.
I hope that the writing youn send me, you arely minimize the errors
Write simply
Very often we have this great idea in our mind that we can help but tell them all.
Your ideas are clear in your mind (in your language of course).
But, by the time you ink it down, you realize that you cannot produce it in English as you did in Indonesian.
Some of you may ignore it and go on writing this great idea even though grammatically impossible.
You end up with a great idea but broken English which nobody understands!
But, if you stop and think carefully, and start making the idea simple.
Your writing is much easier to understand even though the style may be off.
Hey, what the heck. Isn’t the most important thing in writing is making your readers understand what you mean?
If your writing is clear and easier to understand the examiner can give a better score compared to broken English which he frowns upon!
Good luck with your IELTS endeavor students!
Your Teacher
Tanzir Masykar