IELTS Writing Tasks Tips-Part-1

In addition to speaking test, the IELTS Writing tasks are also tough, especially for the students who are weak at English. The students find it very difficult to come to terms with grammar skills, vocabulary and ideas required for Task-2. At this stage of their career, they feel highly frustrated and sometimes helpless with the IELTS writing. They remain confused and in great dilemma about the penning down of these tasks. They lose patience when they work on their English Writing Skills. This blog tries to address some of these problems which the candidates face and tell.

1. Grammar Skills: The students mostly start with working with the improvement in tenses. But after doing some practice they start losing patience and stop focusing on the tenses during their writing and the problem starts revisiting them. Then the second most encountered hassle is the formation of sentences. As they are not well aware about the vocabulary and its parts of speech, they start using the learnt words without following the rules of the parts of speech. They mix the nouns with verbs or adjectives and so on. The wrong usage of words make their sentence construction highly erratic. They get trapped in a web of learning higher end vocabulary without using them in the sentences at the right place.

Even the coaching institutes start providing them with a long list of words with their synonyms or meanings in local language, without telling their various parts of speech. For instance, let us take beautiful as a word. Beautiful is an adjective, Beauty is a noun, Beautify is verb and beautifully is adverb. The sentence may be: The painter beautifully drew the picture of a beautiful girl gifted with awesome beauty which was further beautified by the strokes of the brushes of the painter. Unless and until the students do this practice, it becomes very difficult for them to use the vocab for their benefit. Also, the students must start reading a standard grammar book for the various parts of speech and their usage.

Another problem with grammar is the poor knowledge of prepositions and conjunctions. Most of the students do not know the proper use of the prepositions and use them randomly and thus put the meaning of the sentences in jeopardy. Apart from these, the auxiliaries and modals also demand attention to their usage with proper rules about verbs. Moreover, the use of articles is seldom learnt and the articles are placed according to the discretion of the students without adhering to the system of the language.

2. Connectors: The use of connectors is overly emphasized by a lot of IELTS trainers. The students get into a notion that if they use connectors in quantity, they will score higher bands. No doubt, the connecting words like however, moreover etc. are required but the overuse that too to just use them is entirely a wrong and suicidal approach. The essence of writing is the correctness of grammar, primarily, which should give sense to the sentences and then followed by the variety in structure of the sentences viz: Active-passive voice, compound-complex sentences, great and concise use of vocabulary. Candidates should be able to show the entire range of writing variations in their essay, especially as the task-1 does not give much scope of manipulation. However, the task can be made, cleverly, highly scoring.

Please start working on your grammar and keep following for the next blog. Gradually all the tricks, tips and the improvement points will be unfolded in the coming days. Any further suggestions, please feel free to post in comments or WhatsApp at 7087937009.

Keep writing with concentration and consciousness.