A student wrote to me saying that he didn’t understand why his most recent writing test score was so low. He wanted my advice on how to improve his writing task 2 essays.
Before giving any advice, I asked the student whether he thought he had done well or badly in writing task 1. His answer surprised me: he hadn’t written anything at all for task 1; he had spent the whole hour in the test doing task 2.
Hopefully you can guess what my advice was! I think students often worry so much about task 2 that they really neglect task 1. If you’re not getting the score you need, it might be that task 1 is the problem.
Just to make it clear:
One-third of the score for writing comes from Task 1.
If the score for Task 2 is Band 9, and there is no attempt at Task 1, then the overall score for writing will be around Band 6.
If the score for Task 2 is Band 7, but for Task 1 only 6, then ((7*2)+6)/3 = 6.6667 which rounds to 6.5 for writing overall.
Posted by: Oleg | Friday, February 08, 2019 at 00:55
Yes sir,it is bitter truth.Task 2 can be easy for most students but task 1 is easy only for few students.Although task 1 is visual description however , we have no ideas which points we have to take for comparison or contrast AND we write whatever first comes in mind .Therefore , we are not writing in such a way that IElTS examiner is looking for.Hence,score goes down.This indicates a lot of practice and understanding is required for task 1.
Posted by: Pachu | Friday, February 08, 2019 at 02:46
Oleg
I am pretty sure that happened to me as I wrote a good w2 essay and well revised it. But wrote w1 after task 2 in hurry and last part was so incoherent s I didn’t hav time to think.
I wish I had practice w1 more then I wouldn’t require to do it again.
Posted by: Sadia ULFATH | Friday, February 08, 2019 at 14:12
Sadia ULFATH
I used to go along with the idea of doing Task 1 last, but now I think it is better to practice, practice, practice Task 1 until we can reel it off in less than twenty minutes, nothing too fancy, just accurate, complete, and focused. After all, the language and phrases for Task 1 are fairly predictable.
Posted by: Oleg | Friday, February 08, 2019 at 18:56
Hello. I have my exam on the 6th of april. You input will be valued, any advice??
Posted by: Cherelle | Monday, February 11, 2019 at 19:38
The student you mentioned was so ridiculous to ask you that question
Posted by: Hieu Huynh | Wednesday, February 13, 2019 at 05:46
For me I'm not so worried about my writing in Task 2, however due to lack of practice on writing Task 1, which is usually considered easier to the former, I'm now struggling to improve it.
Posted by: Vie | Sunday, April 14, 2019 at 04:01