Improve your IELTS Writing Score - Quickly!

Not sure how to improve your IELTS writing score in a short amount of time? It might be easier than you think. 

We'll focus on Task 2 (the essay), which is included in Academic and General Training IELTS. However, the banding criteria is very similar for Task 1 and 2 so much of what you'll read applies to both essays and graphs/letters. 

Criteria for IELTS Writing Task 2 

The first step to improve your IELTS writing score is to ensure you understand what you are being graded according to. Once you are familiar with the criteria, you can analyse your writing and identify areas where there is room for improvement. 

The criteria you get scored according to are:

• Task Response
• Coherence and Cohesion
• Lexical Resource
• Grammatical Range and Accuracy

But what exactly do each of these entail?

Let’s delve into the boxes you need to tick in order to ensure you’re on the right track to improving your score. 

Tick Box for a High IELTS Writing Band Score

How to Improve your IELTS Writing Score

Now that you know what the examiner is looking for, it’s time to take the steps to improving your writing. 

We’re going to go over how you can make sure you get the highest possible score for each criteria by incorporating simple strategies. The examples that are going to be provided will all be in reference to the essay question below.

Task response

It’s crucial that you take the time to understand the prompt properly before you start writing and decide what your opinion is and your arguments will be to support that opinion.

So make sure before you start writing you:

• Analyse the question
• Brainstorm ideas
• Organise your ideas (for your coherence and cohesion)

For the above question, if you agree, make sure you’re giving clear reasons why you agree and give further support/examples to back each of your reasons up. View any of our sample essays to see how to answer different question types and provide good support.

Coherence and cohesion

By incorporating cohesive devices accurately, you can improve the flow of your writing along with the score.

The following cohesive devices are fine for a higher band if used sparingly, but try to replace some of them with more advanced ways of joining ideas.

It’s crucial not to overuse or force too many of these type of initial position transitional words if you want to improve your IELTS writing score as it will make your writing seem robotic. The key difference between a high and a low score is that the higher scoring essay will use cohesive devices more naturally. 

Look at how these lower score paragraphs that have initial position transitional words been improved to achieve a higher score:

Also stick to a clear overall essay structure with an introduction, two (possibly three) body paragraphs and a conclusion. 

Prompt planning can go a long way. It might look something like this:

• Introduction
• Body 1
• Body 2
• Conclusion 

Lexical resources

To improve your IELTS writing score, incorporate uncommon vocabulary and paraphrase using synonyms to avoid repetition. Make sure you know how to collocate.

"Idiomatic items when appropriate" is also mentioned in the band descriptors at the higher levels. However, as task 2 is an academic writing task, your common informal idioms that you might know are not suitable. 

A few examples of informal idioms that you should AVOID are: a piece of cake, costing an arm and a leg, raining cats and dogs, etc. 

A few acceptable idioms for academic writing are:

• Climbing the corporate ladder
• Double-edged sword
• At a crossroads
• A means to an end
• Call into question
• Tip of the iceberg
• Raise the bar

Grammatical range and accuracy

Apart from reading over your essay to spot any punctuation or grammatical errors, you can practice creating complex, compound and simple sentences in preparation for the exam. 

A complex sentence consists of dependent and independent clauses. 

For example: 

• While many argue that advertising merely boosts sales of unnecessary products, it is also true that some advertisements play an essential role in informing consumers about valuable innovations.

To improve your IELTS writing score and reach a higher band, you also want to think about other complex structures such as nominalisation ('nouning') if appropriate, complex noun phrases, and the passive voice:

• It is unclear if his choice words were appropriate 
• The appropriateness of his choice of words is unclear (nominalisation)
  
  
• The proportion of people in education increased by 15% (complex noun phrase)
  
  
• The need to help lower income families has been taken for granted for too long (passive voice)

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