Updated Sep. 2, 2020
IELTS Writing
Some Notes On My Model Answers
1) A couple of people using my essay assessment service have asked me to write some Band 9 answers to some Task 1 questions. (These students were close to that level already.) So I thought I would add those essays to my website. You will find that I sometimes include percentage calculations in the essays when they are not absolutely necessary. The reason for this is that I believe a moderate or occasional inclusion of percentages will probably impress examiners. The idea is that examiners are most likely to give a Band 9 for an essay that they think is as good as they, the examiners, can write themselves, if not better. Since many examiners are not very mathematically inclined, calculating and including a percentage in the essay could impress them since it is something they might not do themselves, especially if the percentage is a very valid and helpful piece of information for understanding the data. However, those model essays here with percentages included could probably get a Band 9 even without those percentages included.
2) The model answers are usually between 190 and 230 words long, and I don't think it is usually necessary to write more than 230 words in order to write a Band 9-quality answer. For many people, even people who are about Band 7.0 now, anything over 190 or 200 words might be a bit too long to write in the real test. But people who are already at the Band 8.0 level and above should be able to write a Task 1 essay of 200 to 230 words in 20 to 25 minutes.
3) Most of the essay questions come from the Cambridge Practice test books. I did not check to see if the Cambridge book has a model answer for an essay before I wrote it and, for almost all of them, I still haven't looked. But if there is a model answer in the Cambridge book, it might be similar in places to what I have written.
4) Many of the essays are written without beginning with what could be considered "an introduction" because I don't believe an introduction similar to a Task 2 introduction is necessary for Task 1. On the other hand, a good Task 1 essay should not begin in such a sudden and incoherent way that the reader immediately becomes confused. In order to better understand why I believe a formal introduction is not necessary, read the notes I wrote for Model Answer 9, on Page 15. Those notes explain how the question wording for Task 1 questions changed several years ago from, “Write a report for a university lecturer, describing the information below” to, “Summarize the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant”, which is used in the wording of Task 1 questions today.
Two major differences between ,"a report for a lecturer" and, "a summary" are that a summary requires neither an introduction nor a conclusion of the types that Task 2 requires, while a report should have some kind of introduction and conclusion.
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Index of Writing Pages
Page 1: Introduction to "My Writing Blog"
Page 2: Two Essays Graded
Page 3: Hackneyed Phrases
Page 4: Coherence and Cohesion
Page 5: a) How long should a Task 2 essay be?
b) How many times can I repeat the key word of the essay question?
Page 6: A Model Task 1 Answer (1)
Page 7: Good Internet Sources of Materials to Study for Academic Task 1
Page 8: A Model Task 1 Answer (2)
Page 9: A Model Task 1 Answer (3)
Page 10: A Model Task 1 Answer (4)
Page 11: A Model Task 1 Answer (5)
Page 12: A Model Task 1 Answer (6)
Page 13: A Model Task 1 Answer (7)
Page 14: A Model Task 1 Answer (8)
Page 15: A Model Task 1 Answer (9) (Based on the old wording for Task 1)
Page 16: My Answer to a Student's Question about a Model Answer on the Internet
Page 17: A Model Task 1 Answer (10)
Page 18: Cambridge Test Questions (Books 5 to 14)
Page 19: Model Answers from Cambridge Practice IELTS Tests, Books 5 to 14
Page 20: How to Answer, "To What Extent do you Agree or Disagree?'
Page 21: Some Useful PDF books, called "Get Band 9" in IELTS Writing
Page 22: Some of My Essay Reports
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Writing Test Band Descriptors
The following downloads show you the grading criteria that examiners use to give candidates their scores. Again, (just like the Speaking test Band Descriptors), this is mostly written for English teachers, not students, so you might find it hard to understand. There are Chinese versions of this information available in books and possibly also on the internet.
To download these documents, right-click your mouse and click 'Save Target As ...' or, in Chinese, '目标保存为 (A) …'
Task 1
IELTS Writing Task 1 Band Descriptors (Public Version) (pdf) and here: ielts-yasi.englishlab.net/TASK_1_WRITING_GRADING_CRITERIA.JPG
Task 2
IELTS Writing Task 2 Band Descriptors (Public Version) (pdf) and here: ielts-yasi.englishlab.net/TASK_2_WRITING_GRADING_CRITERIA.JPG
You will need to have a PDF reader on your computer before you can read the pdf documents. If you don't have one, you can download one for free.
Adobe Acrobat Reader from www.adobe.com at this page:
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html?ogn=EN_US-gntray_dl_get_reader
Evince. This is for those people who want to avoid using Adobe Acrobat Reader. I have found Evince to be a convenient and problem-free little program for reading pdf documents, although you cannot produce pdf documents with it.
http://projects.gnome.org/evince/
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