Lesson 34 – More in checking your work

We started with checking yesterday and I think that it is so important that I want to say more today   I think two keys (not magic keys – the writing is the most important) of IELTS writing are Planning and Checking

Let’s begin with some tips and advice

 

1. I work with a lot of band 7 and 8 students – many of them have already achieved band 7 and 8 in the other part of the test and writing is the ‘last hurdle’ as one student recently said to me. This is often the case with high level students.
2. If we look at this last hurdle then the last hurdle of the last hurdle is often grammar.
3. Grammar mistakes are really bad for your IELTS health and the only way to ‘cure’ yourself is by checking and rooting them out!
4. Knowing your grammar mistakes is half the battle and recognising them is the other half.
5. Now is the time to improve your ability to spot errors, not on the exam day.
6. I haven’t said this for a while, but the better your English the better your ability to do this will be so remember to widen your practice beyond the IELTS exam.
7. You can (and I hope that you are), do this via the Gapfillers Daily Practice to which you all have access.
8. It also doesn’t hurt to consult your grammar book from time to time to check your knowledge of how particular grammar items are used.
9. Other elements of correction and checking that you need to do are style (especially in General training letters), paragraphing and the general balance of the writing.

 

Key skills to develop:

 

Practise being quick at spotting errors look at exercises for correction.

 

• Did you write down your list of errors yesterday? Now look at your most recent writing and see if you can find these errors in it – did you check for these errors? Knowing what to look for makes it easier to find (this is also true in reading and listening – prediction helps)

 

• Next time you write an IELTS Task 1 or Task 2 think about the 3 errors you selected yesterday and make sure that you don’t make these mistakes. Eliminating 3 errors is a good start!

 

• Have you tried the timings for writing your Tasks – next time you do a timed essay try to keep to those timings and see what happens.

 

• Don’t time every task you do as it is more important to hit the band level that get the time right but once your writing is more consistently at your band then you ca start to speed up and this should not be hard of you are planning well and checking as you go – these timings are really possible I know students who have done this and been successful in their exam.

 

 

Don’t forget, if there is anything you don’t understand or can’t find send a message via Contact us

 

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Let’s think about correction again

 

Here is another exercise to check tenses (it’s a narrative so you won’t be writing like this but it will help yo understand the tenses and how the work together). There are elements of narrative in the letter (when you have to explain what happened) and also in some of your task two examples when you want to explain a situation or something that happened.

 

See how you get on.

 

Here’s another error exercise

 

And

 

More spelling

 

And

 

More punctuation

 

Don’t forget, if there is anything you don’t understand or can’t find send a message via Contact us

Now you’re done!

Good luck and let’s make great progress with IELTS!