IELTS Writing: The Complete A-Z Guide (Task 1, Task 2, Every Question Type + Band 9 Models)

Short answer: IELTS Writing is 60 minutes and two tasks. Task 1 needs 150+ words in 20 minutes; Task 2 needs 250+ words in 40 minutes and is worth twice as much. Both are marked on four equally weighted criteria, and your Writing band is (Task 1 x 1/3) + (Task 2 x 2/3).

This is the longest guide on this site, and it is deliberate. Almost every IELTS Writing resource splits the subject into forty small pages, so candidates spend their study time navigating instead of learning.

This page holds the whole subject in one place: both tasks, every Academic visual type, all ten General Training letter types, all seven Task 2 essay types, the vocabulary and grammar systems that separate Band 6 from Band 8, the model answers, the error tables, the checklists and an eight-week plan.

Everything below is written to be worked through rather than skimmed. Read it once end to end to build the map, then return to individual sections as reference while you practise. The table of contents above is the fastest way back to any part of it.

Two promises about the model answers. Every task in this guide was written for this guide - none of them are real or predicted exam questions, and anyone selling you those is selling you nothing.

And because this page carries no images, every chart, map and diagram is presented as data you can actually read, so you can see precisely what each model answer is describing and why it selects the figures it selects.

What is in the IELTS Writing test?

IELTS Writing lasts 60 minutes and contains two tasks. Task 1 requires a minimum of 150 words in a recommended 20 minutes; Task 2 requires a minimum of 250 words in 40 minutes. Task 1 differs between Academic and General Training, while Task 2 is identical in both modules.

Both tasks are available from the start of the hour, and nobody tells you when to move between them.

The 20-minute and 40-minute figures are recommendations, not enforced boundaries, which makes time allocation the largest source of self-inflicted damage in the test: candidates who overrun on Task 1 lose marks on the task worth twice as much.

The two tasks at a glance

Task 1 is a 150-word report or letter in which you describe information supplied to you, without inventing opinions. Task 2 is a 250-word discursive essay in which you respond to a proposition or question with a developed argument of your own.

Academic versus General Training

Only Task 1 changes between the two modules. Academic Task 1 supplies visual information and asks you to summarise it. General Training Task 1 supplies a situation and asks you to write a letter.

The essay in Task 2 is drawn from the same pool of topic areas in both modules, is marked against the same descriptors, and carries the same weight.

Candidates deciding between modules should read our comparison of Academic and General Training before booking, because the choice is dictated by your visa or admission requirement, not by which task looks easier.

How is IELTS Writing scored?

Each task is marked on four equally weighted criteria worth 25 per cent each.

Task 2 counts twice as much as Task 1: the Writing band equals the Task 1 band multiplied by one third, plus the Task 2 band multiplied by two thirds, rounded to the nearest half band. Both tasks are marked by trained human examiners.

The four criteria

Each criterion is awarded a whole band from 1 to 9, and the four are averaged to produce the band for that task. A candidate scoring 8, 8, 8, 5 receives 7.25 for that task, not something in the high sevens: one collapsed criterion costs a quarter of a band for every band lost.

The arithmetic, worked

The table below shows three candidates. Candidates A and B are deliberate mirror images: identical raw ability spread differently across the two tasks, and a full band apart in the result.

Candidate A wrote an outstanding report and a weak essay; Candidate B did the opposite. The gap between them is a full band. Note also Candidate C: a Task 2 band of 7.0 pulls the reported band to 7.0 even with a Task 1 half a band below it, because Task 2 dominates the average.

The strategic conclusion is unambiguous. Time transferred from Task 2 to Task 1 is time invested at half value. Perfecting a report while leaving an essay under-developed is the most common self-inflicted band loss in the test.

If you want to model your own combinations, run them through our band score calculator, including the effect on your overall four-skill average.

What does each band actually require?

The public band descriptors define nine levels across four criteria for each task. What follows is a plain-English rendering of those public descriptors, not a verbatim quotation. Bands 5 to 9 are shown because that is the range in which almost all serious candidates operate. The official documents are published free by the test partners.

Read this section alongside the full-length treatment in our guide to how IELTS Writing is scored against the band descriptors, and download the official Task 1 and Task 2 descriptor PDFs from ielts.org so that you are working from the source document rather than a summary of it.

Task Achievement and Task Response

Two hard gates live in this table. In Academic Task 1 there is no route above Band 5 without an overview, a sentence or two stating the largest patterns in the data rather than individual numbers.

In Task 2 there is no route above Band 6 without a position that is visible in the introduction, sustained through the body and restated in the conclusion.

Coherence and Cohesion

The most misunderstood word in this criterion is mechanical, meaning linking words bolted onto sentences that would connect perfectly well without them. Firstly, Secondly, Moreover, In addition, Last but not least is a Band 6 signature, not a Band 7 one, because it signals sequence rather than logical relationship.

Lexical Resource

Note what is absent from the Band 8 and 9 rows: any requirement for rare or ornamental words. The requirement is precision. A common word used with exactly the right collocation outperforms an obscure word used approximately.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy

The operational Band 7 target is measurable: count your error-free sentences. If fewer than half of your sentences are free of grammatical and punctuation errors, you are being marked at 6 on this criterion regardless of how ambitious the structures are. Ambition without accuracy is scored as inaccuracy.

How should you spend the 60 minutes?

Allocate 40 minutes to Task 2 and 20 minutes to Task 1, and write Task 2 first. Within Task 2, spend about 5 minutes planning, 30 writing and 5 checking. Within Task 1, spend about 3 minutes identifying the overview, 14 writing and 3 checking. That leaves no unallocated time, which is intentional.

A minute-by-minute plan

The planning blocks are not optional padding. A five-minute plan converts Task 2 from composition into transcription, which is what protects the writing block from stalling. Our method for producing a usable plan in five minutes is set out in the guide to planning an IELTS essay.

Why write Task 2 first?

Task 2 carries two thirds of the marks and is the task most damaged by time pressure, because Task Response and Coherence and Cohesion both depend on development that cannot be rushed.

Writing it while you are fresh and while the clock is not yet threatening protects the higher-value asset. If something must be sacrificed, sacrificing three sentences of detail in a report costs about a third of what sacrificing a whole body paragraph in an essay costs.

The counter-argument, stated fairly

Two objections are legitimate. First, Task 1 is a mechanical task with a fixed shape, so completing it first banks a predictable score in 20 minutes and reduces anxiety, which some candidates need more than they need marginal Task 2 quality.

Second, candidates who habitually overrun on Task 2 will simply consume Task 1 time if they start there, arriving at minute 45 with no report written at all.

The rule that actually matters is not the order but the hard boundary: whichever task you begin, stop it at its allotted time and start the other one, even mid-sentence.

Test the boundary under real conditions in our timed writing test rather than discovering on exam day which of these two failure modes is yours.

How many words should you write?

Write at least 150 words in Task 1 and at least 250 in Task 2. There is no fixed automatic penalty for falling short, but an under-length answer cannot fully address the task and is marked down under Task Achievement or Task Response.

Target 170 to 190 words in Task 1 and 270 to 320 in Task 2.

Length against risk

The same logic applies to Task 1: below 150 words the report has almost certainly omitted a key feature, and above about 220 words it has started listing data instead of selecting it. The full rule set is covered in our note on IELTS essay length rules.

Estimating length on screen

The answer box displays a live word count, so estimation is obsolete. Two cautions remain. The counter counts everything in the box, so never paste the prompt in as a starting point. Numbers written as digits and hyphenated compounds are normally counted as single items, so padding with figures does not help.

What changed for IELTS Writing in 2026?

In March 2026 the IELTS partners announced that paper-based IELTS is withdrawn worldwide from mid-2026, with final paper sittings around 27 June 2026. IELTS Writing is now delivered on computer. Confirm arrangements with your test centre, because local timing varies. Handwriting advice is legacy; typing and on-screen editing now determine your working speed.

What changes in practice

Typing speed, quantified

The requirement is lower than candidates fear. Producing 320 words in the 28-minute writing block is a composing rate of roughly 11 words per minute, and composing, not typing, is the bottleneck.

The safe threshold is a raw typing speed above about 35 words per minute; beyond that, faster typing buys nothing. Below about 25 words per minute, typing becomes the constraint and is worth two weeks of deliberate practice.

Memorised answers

A memorised answer is pre-learned text reproduced regardless of the actual question, and enforcement against it has tightened. Template-heavy writing is penalised, and an answer judged to be fully memorised can be discounted altogether.

Digital delivery makes identical strings across candidates trivially detectable, which is why formulaic openings circulated in preparation courses are now a liability rather than an insurance policy. Frames for organising your own content are legitimate; pre-written sentences of content are not.

If you want an unbiased read on how formulaic your writing has become, submit a draft to our AI essay checker, which grades against the four criteria and flags template language.

How to use this guide

This page is designed for both linear reading and targeted use. Roughly two thirds of it applies to every candidate, because Task 2 is identical in Academic and General Training.

Use the routing table below to jump to what your target band actually requires, then return to the sections you skipped once the immediate gap is closed.

One instruction applies to every route through this page. Reading model answers improves your recognition of quality; it does not improve your production of it.

Every chapter here contains original practice tasks written for this guide, and the intended use is to write your own answer under the clock before reading ours.

Candidates stuck at Band 6 should pair that habit with our targeted route from Band 6 to Band 7, which isolates the two changes that move the needle fastest.

What is Academic Writing Task 1 actually asking for?

Academic Task 1 asks you to write a factual report of at least 150 words in 20 minutes, summarising a visual by selecting and reporting its main features and making comparisons where relevant. It is one third of your Writing band. No opinion, no causes, no conclusion.

The instruction wording on the question paper is almost identical every time, and each clause of it is a marking instruction rather than a stylistic suggestion.

The standard rubric reads: the task instruction - the fixed sentence "Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words." Examiners read your script against those verbs.

If you have not summarised, not selected, not reported main features and not compared, the Task Achievement mark falls regardless of how elegant the English is.

It is a report, not an essay

The single most damaging misunderstanding is treating Task 1 as a miniature Task 2. A report has no thesis, no argument and no personal stance. Three specific moves are marked down every time they appear:

• Opinion - any evaluative judgement about whether the trend is good, worrying or encouraging. "This is a positive development" is not reportable from a chart.
• Speculation about causes - explanations the visual does not contain. "Sales fell because of the recession" invents information; the chart shows only that sales fell.
• A conclusion paragraph - Task 1 requires no conclusion. A closing paragraph that restates the overview wastes 25 words that could have carried a comparison instead.

Task 2 is where opinion, cause and argument belong; the division of labour between the two tasks is set out in the scoring rules and repeated across the Task 1 band descriptors. Note also that this whole method applies to the Academic paper only.

General Training candidates write a letter for Task 1, which is a different genre with different criteria, explained in the Academic versus General Training comparison.

The four-paragraph structure that works for every visual

Every Academic Task 1 answer takes the same four-paragraph shape: introduction, overview, body one, body two. That structure holds for line graphs, bar charts, pie charts, tables, mixed visuals, processes and maps, because the four jobs it performs are demanded by the rubric itself, not by the picture.

Those figures add to roughly 170 to 190 words, which is the sweet spot: comfortably above the 150-word minimum, short enough to finish and proofread inside 20 minutes.

There is no automatic penalty for writing fewer than 150 words, but a short script cannot cover the main features, so it loses marks under Task Achievement anyway. The reasoning behind the target range is set out in the essay length rules.

Why the shape never changes

Each paragraph maps onto a criterion. The introduction proves you have understood the task. The overview is the direct answer to "report the main features".

The two body paragraphs deliver "selecting" and "make comparisons". Coherence and Cohesion rewards a clear progression with logical paragraphing, and four paragraphs with one job each produce exactly that. Change the visual and the content changes; the container does not.

If you can write these four paragraphs reliably, the individual chart types covered later in this guide become variations on a single routine rather than seven separate skills.

How do you write the introduction?

The introduction is one sentence of 25 to 30 words that paraphrases the rubric. Change the verb, the noun phrasing and the time expression, but keep four elements intact: what is measured, where, when and in what units. Copied rubric wording is not counted towards your word total.

Two failure modes dominate. The first is copying: reproducing the question sentence verbatim, which examiners discount, leaving a shorter effective answer and a weaker Lexical Resource impression.

The second is over-paraphrasing into error: swapping "the number of" for "the percentage of", or "spending" for "income", which changes the data and costs Task Achievement marks. Paraphrase the frame, never the facts.

The techniques generalise well beyond Task 1 and are drilled in the guide to paraphrasing techniques.

Five rubric phrasings and three paraphrases each

What must survive the paraphrase

Band 6 against Band 8, one sentence

How do you write the overview?

The overview is a two-to-three sentence paragraph stating the general shape of the data without any specific figures. It is the highest-value 40 words on the page: an answer with no identifiable overview cannot score above Band 5 for Task Achievement, however accurate the rest is.

The descriptor language is explicit. At Band 5 the script "presents a limited or unclear overview", at Band 6 it "presents an overview with information appropriately selected", and at Band 7 and above it "presents a clear overview of main trends, differences or stages".

There is no route past Band 5 on that criterion without one. Because Task Achievement is 25 per cent of the task mark, a missing overview drags the whole Task 1 band down by roughly half a band even when the other three criteria sit at 7.

A dedicated walkthrough with more examples lives in the overview sentence guide.

What belongs in it, and what must not

The prohibition on figures is practical, not decorative. The moment a number enters the overview, the paragraph starts doing the body paragraph's job and stops functioning as a summary. Reserve every digit for paragraphs three and four.

Five overview frames

Worked overview one: a trend with a crossover

Practice task written for this guide. The line graph below shows the number of visitors, in thousands, to three types of attraction in one European city between 2010 and 2022. The data it contains is set out here as a table so that the model wording can be checked against it.

Introduction and overview, written for this guide:

The line graph illustrates how many people, measured in thousands, visited museums, theme parks and historic houses in one European city over a twelve-year period from 2010 to 2022.

Overall, theme park attendance rose steadily across the period and overtook both other categories, while visits to historic houses fell continuously. Museums attracted the largest number of visitors for most of the period but were surpassed by theme parks by the end.

Exact word count: 71 words.

Worked overview two: a static comparison with no time axis

Practice task written for this guide. The bar chart below shows average weekly household spending, in currency units, on four categories by three income groups in one country in a single year.

Overall, housing was the largest single expense for every income group, while leisure was the smallest for the two lower groups. Differences between the groups were narrowest in food spending and widest in leisure.

Exact word count: 33 words. With no time axis there is nothing to describe as rising or falling, so the overview turns instead on rank order and on the size of the gaps between groups.

Candidates who have only rehearsed trend vocabulary freeze on this shape; the fix is to ask what is biggest, what is smallest and where the spread is widest.

Worked overview three: proportions at two dates

Practice task written for this guide. Two pie charts below show the proportion of electricity generated from five sources in one country in 2005 and in 2025.

Overall, the electricity mix shifted decisively away from coal and towards wind and solar over the twenty-year period. Coal fell from the dominant source to the smallest, while wind and solar moved from the smallest share to the largest, and the remaining three sources changed comparatively little.

Exact word count: 46 words. The reversal of first and last place is the main feature; naming it, and then dismissing the three stable sources in a single clause, is exactly the selection the rubric asks for.

How do you select and group the data?

Select five to seven figures in total for the two body paragraphs and ignore the rest. Then group the data one of three ways: by time period, by category, or by shared behaviour. Grouping is what converts a list into a report and is the difference between Band 6 and Band 7 organisation.

A typical line graph with three lines and six years contains eighteen data points. A table can contain forty. Reporting all of them inside 190 words is arithmetically impossible, and attempting it produces the flattest, lowest-scoring answer type there is: the inventory.

Five to seven quoted figures, each chosen because it anchors a comparison, is the working budget. Anchor points worth spending a figure on are the start value, the end value, the peak, the trough, the crossover point and any value that departs sharply from its neighbours.

The three grouping choices

Decision table

Listing against grouping

Grouping decisions also drive your cohesion. Once the bodies are split by behaviour, the linking language writes itself: in contrast, conversely, a similar pattern was seen in.

The full inventory, with a warning about overuse, is in the guide to linking words and cohesive devices, and the underlying selection principle is developed further across the Academic Task 1 graphs overview.

Which tense should you use?

Tense in Task 1 is decided by the dates printed on the visual, not by preference. Past dates take the past simple, undated visuals take the present simple, dates beyond the present take future forms, and process diagrams take the present simple, frequently in the passive. Choose once, then stay consistent.

Tense inconsistency is one of the commonest Grammatical Range and Accuracy deductions in Task 1, because candidates start in the past simple and drift into the present when they reach a comparison. If you need to rebuild the underlying system rather than memorise the table, work through the verb tenses guide.

How do you plan a Task 1 answer in three minutes?

Spend three of your 20 minutes planning, 14 writing and three checking. The plan is not prose: it is four decisions, made in a fixed order, written as fragments beside the visual or in the on-screen notes area. Candidates who skip it lose more time recovering mid-answer than the plan would have cost.

1. 0:00 to 0:30 - read the rubric and mark the four survivors. Underline what is measured, where, when and in what units. These four go straight into your introduction sentence and dictate your tense.
2. 0:30 to 1:00 - find the extremes. Circle the highest value, the lowest value and any crossover point on the whole visual. These are the raw material of the overview.
3. 1:00 to 1:45 - write the overview in note form. Two fragments: the overall direction, and the biggest contrast. If you cannot express the visual in two fragments, you have not yet found the main feature, and you should keep looking rather than start writing.
4. 1:45 to 2:30 - choose the grouping and label it. Write B1 and B2 beside the categories or years each body paragraph will take. Use the decision table above; do not deliberate for more than 45 seconds, because two defensible groupings score the same.
5. 2:30 to 3:00 - pick your five to seven figures. Tick them on the visual. Anything unticked will not appear in your answer, which is the point.
6. 3:00 to 17:00 - write in order, introduction first and overview second, without revisiting the plan. Writing the overview before the bodies prevents the single most expensive omission in Task 1.
7. 17:00 to 20:00 - check four things only: tense consistency, singular and plural agreement on the measured nouns, that every figure carries its unit, and that no opinion or cause has crept in. Then move to Task 2 whether or not you are satisfied, because Task 2 carries twice the marks.

Two mechanical notes for the computer-delivered test. From mid-2026 the IELTS partners have withdrawn paper-based IELTS worldwide, with the final paper sittings around 27 June 2026, so you should assume you will type your answer and confirm the delivery mode with your test centre.

Typing changes the checking step in your favour: the on-screen word counter removes any need to count words by hand, freeing perhaps 40 seconds, and the edit cursor makes it realistic to fix a tense error in the middle of paragraph three, which was never practical on paper.

It also removes handwriting legibility as a risk entirely.

Drill the three-minute plan against fresh visuals until it is automatic, then submit full answers to the AI essay grader for criterion-by-criterion feedback, and use the band score calculator to see what a given Task 1 band does to your overall Writing result once Task 2 is weighted at two thirds.

How do you describe a line graph in IELTS Writing Task 1?

A line graph shows change over time, so describe movement, not position. Group the lines by shared behaviour, put the highest and lowest end points plus the largest change into a two-sentence overview, then cover the data in two body paragraphs across roughly 170 to 190 words.

What a line graph actually tests

The line graph is the purest test of trend description, the ability to state the direction, speed and shape of a change rather than its individual values.

An examiner reading your script is checking three things at once: whether you can see the movement, whether you can rank the movements against each other, and whether you can express a rise, a fall, a plateau and a fluctuation without repeating the same verb four times.

Everything else on the page is decoration.

Line graphs also test selection under pressure, the decision about which of the available numbers deserve to appear in 180 words. A graph with three lines and six time points contains eighteen data values. A Band 9 answer quotes perhaps eight of them.

The other ten are sacrificed, and the sacrifice is itself a scored skill, because Task Achievement rewards an answer that presents key features, not an answer that presents all features.

The single trap that sinks most candidates

The trap is sequential narration, the habit of walking along each line from left to right and reporting every point in turn.

It produces sentences such as "In 2010 it was 950,000, in 2014 it was 880,000, in 2018 it was 700,000, and in 2022 it was 430,000." Every number is correct and the answer still caps at Band 6, for two reasons.

First, no comparison has been made, and the rubric explicitly asks for comparisons. Second, a list of four values buries the one fact that matters, which is that the figure more than halved.

The cure is mechanical. Before writing a body paragraph, decide the shape of the whole line in one word (rose, fell, fluctuated, held steady), write that word first, and only then attach the two or three numbers that prove it.

Numbers are evidence for a claim, never the claim itself.

Our deep-dive on line graph technique works through this reordering line by line, and the Task 1 common mistakes guide shows how sequential narration also damages Coherence and Cohesion by removing any reason for one sentence to follow another.

Practice task: cultural venue attendance

The following task was written for this guide. It has never appeared in a live examination and is not a prediction of one.

The line graph below shows the number of visitors, in thousands, to three types of cultural venue in one European city between 2010 and 2022. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.

Because this page carries no images, the underlying data is set out below exactly as the graph would plot it.

All figures are in thousands of visitors. Note the two structural gifts this data contains: a crossover between museums and cinemas somewhere between 2018 and 2022, and one line that behaves differently from the other two by staying flat before jumping. A Band 9 overview names both.

Band 9 model answer: line graph

The line graph illustrates how many people, measured in thousands, attended public museums, commercial cinemas and live music venues in one European city at four-year intervals from 2010 to 2022.

Overall, the two most striking features are the reversal in the relative popularity of museums and cinemas, and the fact that every venue type except cinemas attracted more visitors at the end of the period than at the start. Cinemas fell from first place to last, while museums moved in the opposite direction.

In 2010, commercial cinemas were by far the most popular venue, drawing 950,000 visitors, more than double the figure for museums, which stood at 420,000. Cinema attendance then declined without interruption, losing roughly a quarter of its audience by 2018 and reaching only 430,000 in 2022, less than half its original level.

Museum attendance, by contrast, climbed steadily throughout, rising to 640,000 in 2018 before accelerating to 880,000 in 2022, at which point it overtook cinemas by 450,000. Live music venues remained broadly flat until 2018, hovering between 300,000 and 340,000, and then almost doubled to 610,000.

Word count: 180 words. That is inside the recommended 170 to 190 band for Task 1 and roughly 20 per cent above the 150-word minimum, which is the margin you want. On computer-delivered IELTS the on-screen counter updates live, so there is no reason to guess: check it once when you finish the second body paragraph and stop writing.

Upgrade table: line graph sentences

How do you describe a bar chart in IELTS Writing Task 1?

A bar chart compares quantities across categories, so the score comes from comparison, not narration. Identify the largest and smallest bar, the widest gap between groups, and any category that reverses the pattern, then organise your two body paragraphs by group rather than by bar.

What a bar chart actually tests

A bar chart tests grouping, the ability to see which categories belong together and to write about them as a set. A grouped bar chart with four categories and three series contains twelve bars.

There are twelve ways to write a bad answer and about two ways to write a good one, and both good ways involve deciding, before you write anything, which variable you are organising by.

You may organise by category (all three age groups for streaming, then all three for reading) or by group (everything the youngest cohort does, then everything the oldest does). You may not switch halfway.

The second thing under test is comparative grammar, the structures that express difference precisely: twice as many as, three times the figure for, marginally higher than, half as much again, the second largest.

Bar charts exist to be compared, so an answer that avoids comparative structures cannot demonstrate range on the very grammar the task invites. The bar chart deep-dive catalogues these patterns with worked examples, and the Task 1 band descriptors guide shows where they land on the official scale.

The single trap that sinks most candidates

The trap is bar-walking, describing the bars in the physical order they appear on the page. Left to right is a visual accident, not a logical order, and following it guarantees that unrelated facts sit next to each other.

The tell is a paragraph in which every sentence begins with a new category name and nothing connects them.

The second version of the same trap is subtler and costs more: giving every bar equal weight. If one cohort dominates three of the four categories, that dominance is the story and it belongs in the overview, not in sentence nine.

Ask which single sentence a reader would need if they could read only one. That sentence goes in the overview, and Section B of this guide covers how to build it.

Practice task: weekly leisure hours by age group

This task was written for this guide and is not drawn from any live examination.

The bar chart below shows the average number of hours per week that three age groups in one country spent on four leisure activities, according to a single national survey. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.

The grouped data behind the chart is as follows.

Three patterns are available here and a strong answer uses all three: one activity leads in every cohort, two activities rise with age, and one activity collapses with age. The middle cohort is also the quiet outlier, recording the lowest figure in two categories.

Band 9 model answer: bar chart

The bar chart compares the average number of hours per week that three age groups in one country devoted to four leisure activities, according to a single national survey.

Overall, streaming video was the most time-consuming activity for all three age groups, while the remaining three activities divided the generations sharply: social gaming was heavily concentrated among the youngest respondents, whereas reading and outdoor exercise were dominated by the oldest.

Adults aged 18 to 29 spent 11.4 hours a week streaming video, the single highest figure on the chart and almost three points above the 8.6 hours recorded by the 30 to 49 group. They also devoted 7.9 hours to social gaming, more than double the middle group's 3.4 hours and nearly ten times the 0.8 hours reported by those aged 50 to 69.

The oldest respondents showed the reverse pattern. They read for 5.7 hours a week, over four times the 1.3 hours of the youngest group, and exercised outdoors for 6.5 hours, over half as much again as any other cohort. The 30 to 49 group recorded the lowest figure for two of the four activities, including streaming video.

Word count: 191 words. The body is organised by cohort, not by activity, which is why the middle group can be handled in a single closing sentence instead of being mentioned four separate times.

Upgrade table: bar chart sentences

How do you describe a pie chart in IELTS Writing Task 1?

A pie chart shows proportions of a whole, so every figure is a share, not a quantity. With two pie charts, the marks come from comparing the same segment across both charts, naming the largest and smallest slices and the biggest percentage-point shift, in about 170 to 190 words.

What a pie chart actually tests

Pie charts test proportional language, the vocabulary of shares: accounted for, represented, made up, a quarter, almost two thirds, the largest single category. They also test discipline, because a pie chart gives you very little data and a great deal of temptation to pad.

Two five-segment pies contain ten numbers. Ten numbers do not fill 180 words unless you compare them, so the task forces comparison structurally.

The deeper test is arithmetic honesty. Percentages invite three specific errors: adding slices incorrectly, confusing a percentage change with a percentage-point change, and inferring absolute quantities from shares. Examiners notice all three, and all three are Task Achievement problems rather than grammar problems, which means they cost a full criterion.

The single trap that sinks most candidates

The trap is treating a share as a quantity. If landfill falls from 62 per cent to 21 per cent, you may not write that the amount of waste sent to landfill fell, because the chart does not tell you the total.

If the region produced twice as much waste in 2025, the tonnage going to landfill could have been broadly unchanged. Write proportion, share or percentage every time, and the error disappears.

Alongside it sits the percentage-point error, the difference between two percentages expressed wrongly. A drop from 62 to 21 is a fall of 41 percentage points, or a fall of roughly 66 per cent, but it is not a fall of 41 per cent.

Our pie chart guide drills this distinction, and if you want a machine reading of whether your own script commits it, the AI writing checker flags proportional language errors against the four criteria.

Practice task: household waste disposal

This task was written for this guide and did not appear in any real examination.

The two pie charts below show how household waste was disposed of in one region in 2005 and in 2025. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.

The two charts are rendered below as a two-column percentage table, so that each slice can be compared directly across the twenty-year gap.

Two pie charts separated by time are a hybrid: the data is proportional, but there is a before and an after, so change language is permitted. The organising decision is whether to give each year its own paragraph or each segment its own paragraph. With five segments and a clean reversal, chronological paragraphs win.

Band 9 model answer: pie charts

The two pie charts compare the methods used to dispose of household waste in one region in 2005 and 2025, with each figure expressed as a percentage of total waste rather than as an absolute quantity.

Overall, the region moved decisively away from landfill and towards recovery. Landfill lost its dominant position over the twenty-year period, while recycling replaced it as the leading method, and composting grew four times over.

In 2005, landfill accounted for almost two thirds of all household waste, at 62 per cent, which was more than three times the 18 per cent sent for recycling. Composting was marginal at 6 per cent, and incineration with energy recovery handled a further 11 per cent.

By 2025 the picture had reversed. Landfill had fallen by 41 percentage points to just 21 per cent, whereas recycling had risen to 38 per cent and had become the largest single category. Composting showed the sharpest proportional growth, quadrupling to 24 per cent. Incineration edged up modestly to 14 per cent, and the residual category remained unchanged at 3 per cent.

Word count: 179 words. Note that the opening sentence does the safety work: by stating that the figures are percentages of the total, the writer licenses every proportional claim that follows and forecloses the quantity error.

Upgrade table: pie chart sentences

Which structure do you use when the chart has no time axis?

When there is no time axis the data is a snapshot, so you cannot describe trends. Split the two body paragraphs by rank or by group instead of by period: paragraph one takes the dominant categories, paragraph two the smaller or contrasting ones. Tense stays fixed throughout.

The one question that decides your structure

Look at the horizontal axis or the chart title and ask whether it contains dates. If it does, the visual is dynamic data, information measured at two or more points in time, and your paragraphs may be split chronologically.

If it does not, the visual is static data, a single snapshot with no before and after, and chronological paragraphs are impossible. That one question governs your verbs, your overview, your paragraph split and your comparison language.

Three ways to split static body paragraphs

Static data still needs two body paragraphs of roughly equal weight. Choose the split before you write, and state the basis of the split in each topic sentence so the examiner can see the logic.

The language that must not appear in a static answer

Trend verbs are the giveaway. In a snapshot chart, a category cannot increase, decline, grow, peak or remain stable, because none of those words means anything without a second point in time.

Candidates import them from memorised line-graph phrase lists and lose Task Achievement marks for describing change that the data does not show.

Replace the trend verb with a ranking or share verb and the sentence becomes accurate immediately: not "reading increased in the oldest group" but "reading was highest in the oldest group, at 5.7 hours".

The mirror-image error also exists. A chart that does have a time axis is under-answered if you only rank the categories and never say which way anything moved.

If your line graph answer contains no movement verbs at all, you have written a static answer for a dynamic chart, and the overview will be missing by definition.

Section B of this guide sets out the overview requirement in full, and the overview sentence guide gives a formula for each case.

Mixed charts and the hybrid case

Some tasks give you a bar chart whose categories are years, which is dynamic data drawn in a static form, and some give you two pie charts twenty years apart, which is proportional data with a time dimension.

In both cases you use the dynamic structure and the dynamic verbs, because a before and an after exist. Treat the shape of the drawing as irrelevant and the presence of two or more time points as decisive.

Where a task presents two different visual types side by side, the mixed charts guide explains how to write an overview that spans both, and the broader Academic Task 1 overview maps every variant you can be given.

When you are ready to write one against the clock, the timed writing test runs a full 20-minute Task 1 with the same on-screen conditions as the computer-delivered examination.

How do you write an IELTS Writing Task 1 table answer?

A table answer follows the same four-part shape as any Academic Task 1 response: paraphrased introduction, overview, two body paragraphs. The difference is selection. A table can hold thirty or more figures, and you must group them, so report roughly six to eight numbers in about 170 to 190 words.

What the table tests, and its signature trap

A table is the only Task 1 visual that gives you no visual shape at all. A line graph draws its own trend; a pie chart draws its own proportions.

A table gives you raw numbers in a grid and tests one thing above everything else: whether you can impose a structure on data that arrives without one.

Selection is the act of choosing which figures to report and which to leave out, and on a table it is worth more marks than any other single skill.

The signature trap is data dumping, which means writing one sentence for every cell in the grid.

A four-by-three table has twelve cells; a candidate who describes each one produces twelve short, parallel sentences, exceeds 250 words, runs out of time for Task 2, and still scores Band 5 or 6 for Task Achievement because no overview and no comparison were ever made.

The examiner is not counting how many figures you copied. Band 7 for Task Achievement requires that you select and report the key features; Band 8 requires that the selection is clear and well chosen. Copying everything is the opposite of selecting.

Two further traps are specific to tables.

First, many tables include a total row or column, which is a sum rather than a category, so it must be used as context ("of the 7,970 students recorded") and never compared against the categories as though it were one of them.

Second, tables frequently combine categories moving in opposite directions, and the single most valuable sentence you can write is the one that names that contrast.

If you are still unsure how the overview differs from the introduction, the dedicated walkthrough at how to write the Task 1 overview sentence isolates that one sentence in detail.

Practice task: a table of university enrolments

The following task was written for this guide. It has never appeared in a live IELTS test and should not be treated as a prediction.

The table below shows the number of international students enrolled in four subject areas at one university in 2012, 2018 and 2024. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.

Before writing, read the grid in two directions. Reading across a row gives you each subject's trend; reading down a column gives you the ranking at one point in time.

The three facts worth reporting here are visible in under a minute: business and management leads in every year, health sciences grows fastest in proportional terms, and fine arts is the only category that falls. Those three facts become the overview and the spine of both body paragraphs.

Band 9 model answer: the enrolments table

The table shows the number of international students enrolled in four subject areas at a single university in 2012, 2018 and 2024.

Overall, total international enrolment more than doubled over the period, and business and management remained the most popular field at every point. The clearest contrast is between health sciences, which grew fastest, and fine arts, which was the only subject to lose students.

Business and management attracted 1,240 students in 2012 and 3,460 by 2024, an increase of almost 2,200. Engineering followed the same upward path, rising from 980 to 2,240, although it never closed the gap on business. Between them, these two fields supplied roughly seven in ten enrolments in the final year.

Health sciences began as the smallest field, with only 410 enrolments, but more than quadrupled to 1,880 in 2024, overtaking fine arts in the process. Fine arts moved in the opposite direction throughout, falling from 620 to 540 and then to 390, so that by the end of the period it accounted for fewer than one in twenty of the 7,970 students recorded.

Word count: 179 words. Eight figures are reported from a grid containing fifteen, and the total row is used once, as context, rather than compared.

How do you answer an IELTS Task 1 question with two charts?

A mixed-chart task presents two visuals about one topic and still allows 20 minutes and 150 words. Report both, but do not write two separate mini-reports: your overview must contain one sentence per visual, and at least one body sentence must link a figure in the first chart to a figure in the second.

What the mixed task tests, and its signature trap

A mixed-chart task is any Task 1 prompt that supplies two or more visuals, usually of different types, about a single subject. Common pairings are a pie chart with a line graph, a table with a bar chart, or two bar charts measuring different things.

The examiner is testing integration, meaning your ability to treat two data sources as one body of evidence rather than two homework exercises.

The signature trap is the split report: two paragraphs that never speak to each other, each with its own miniature overview, joined by nothing more than the word "meanwhile".

A split report can still reach Band 6 for Task Achievement because both visuals were covered, but it cannot reach Band 7, because the key feature of a two-chart task is almost always the relationship between the charts.

A second, quieter trap is unit confusion: comparing a percentage from one chart directly against a raw volume from the other, as though 27 per cent and 84 terawatt hours were the same kind of number.

Timing is also tighter than candidates expect, because the reading load doubles while the clock does not. Spend three minutes annotating both visuals before writing a word, and decide in advance which single cross-chart sentence you will produce.

A structured drill for this, with several paired visuals, sits in the dedicated guide to Task 1 mixed and multiple charts.

Practice task: two linked tables on electricity

The following task was written for this guide. Because the page carries no images, both visuals are rendered as data tables; in the real test the first would typically appear as a pie chart and the second as a line graph.

The tables below show the share of electricity generated by each source in one country in 2024, and the total quantity of electricity generated in that country at five-year intervals from 2004 to 2024. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

Band 9 model answer: the two electricity tables

The first table gives the share of electricity produced by six sources in one country in 2024, while the second records total generation at five-year intervals between 2004 and 2024.

Overall, natural gas supplied the largest single share of electricity in the final year, closely followed by wind, and no source accounted for more than a quarter of the mix apart from gas. Total output, meanwhile, rose in every period, increasing by roughly 72 per cent across the two decades.

Generation climbed steadily from 180 terawatt hours in 2004 to 224 in 2014, then accelerated, reaching 310 terawatt hours in 2024. The largest single jump, of 49 terawatt hours, occurred between 2019 and 2024.

Combining the two tables shows what these percentages represent in volume. Natural gas, at 27 per cent of 310 terawatt hours, amounts to approximately 84 terawatt hours, while wind contributes about 74. Because total output grew so sharply, even a modest share is now substantial: solar, on 11 per cent, generated around 34 terawatt hours, more than the whole increase recorded between 2004 and 2009.

Word count: 179 words. The overview devotes one sentence to each visual, and the final paragraph exists purely to join them.

How do you describe a process diagram in IELTS Writing Task 1?

A process task asks you to describe stages rather than figures, so there is no data to compare. Use the present simple passive, count the stages in the overview, and name the first input and final output. Most diagrams contain between five and eight stages; report every one.

What the process tests, and its signature trap

A process diagram shows how something is made, how a natural cycle operates, or how a system works, using arrows between labelled stages.

It appears in roughly one Academic Task 1 in six, and it rewards a completely different skill set from the data tasks: no comparison, no trend vocabulary, no percentages. Instead it tests sequencing, the passive voice, and the discipline of reporting only what the diagram shows.

The signature trap is invention, which means explaining why a stage happens or adding technical detail the diagram does not contain.

A candidate who writes that the glass is melted "to remove impurities and improve the quality of the finished product" has supplied information no arrow provided, and Task Achievement penalises unsupported content just as firmly as it penalises omission.

A close second trap is the missing overview: because there are no numbers, candidates assume there is nothing to summarise and jump straight into stage one.

There is always something to summarise, and it is always the same three things, namely how many stages there are, what goes in at the start, and what comes out at the end.

The third trap is tense drift. Processes are timeless, so they take the present simple, and a candidate who slips into the past simple halfway through loses marks under Grammatical Range and Accuracy for inconsistency rather than for any individual error.

If tense control is a recurring weakness, the full treatment in the IELTS verb tenses guide is worth an hour of study before you attempt process practice.

Practice task: how recycled glass becomes new bottles

The following task was written for this guide. The diagram is rendered below as a numbered list of stages with the input and output of each, so that the model answer can be checked against the visual facts.

The diagram below shows the process by which used glass containers are recycled into new bottles. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features. Write at least 150 words.

1. Collection. Input: used glass containers from household bins. Output: mixed waste glass delivered by lorry to a sorting depot.
2. Sorting. Input: mixed waste glass. Output: glass separated into clear, green and brown, with metal, plastic and paper contaminants removed.
3. Crushing. Input: colour-sorted glass. Output: cullet, meaning fragments a few millimetres across.
4. Washing and drying. Input: cullet and water. Output: clean, dry cullet.
5. Mixing. Input: cullet plus sand, soda ash and limestone. Output: a raw batch.
6. Melting. Input: raw batch fed into a furnace at approximately 1,500 degrees Celsius. Output: molten glass.
7. Moulding. Input: molten glass. Output: bottles formed by pouring and blowing into moulds.
8. Annealing and inspection. Input: newly formed hot bottles passing through a cooling tunnel. Output: finished bottles packed for distribution.

Band 9 model answer: the glass recycling process

The diagram illustrates the eight stages by which used glass containers are recycled into new bottles.

Overall, the process is linear, beginning with the collection of household waste and ending with packaged bottles ready for despatch. It falls into two broad phases: a preparation phase, in which waste glass is cleaned and reduced to fragments, and a production phase, in which those fragments are melted and reshaped.

In the first phase, used containers are collected from household bins and transported to a sorting depot, where they are separated by colour and any non-glass material is removed. The sorted glass is then crushed into cullet, small fragments a few millimetres across, which is washed and dried before use.

Once dry, the cullet is mixed with sand, soda ash and limestone to form a raw batch. This batch is fed into a furnace and melted at approximately 1,500 degrees Celsius, after which the molten glass is poured into moulds and blown into shape. Finally, the newly formed bottles pass through a cooling tunnel, where they are annealed and inspected before being packed for distribution.

Word count: 182 words. Every one of the eight stages is covered, no reason for any stage is invented, and the present simple is maintained without a single lapse.

The passive voice and sequencing language for process tasks

Two grammatical decisions carry most of the marks in a process answer. The first is voice.

Where a human or machine performs the action, use the present simple passive, formed with is or are plus the past participle, because the agent is unknown and unimportant: the diagram shows that the glass is crushed, not who crushes it.

Where the subject acts on its own, as in a natural cycle, the present simple active is correct and the passive would be wrong: water evaporates, a caterpillar emerges, sediment settles. Manufacturing processes are predominantly passive; life cycles and water cycles are predominantly active.

Many diagrams mix both, and switching correctly between them is itself a marker of Band 8 grammatical range.

The second decision is sequencing. Avoid opening every sentence with "then" or "after that". The table below gives a working set of transitions, arranged by the position in the process where each is most natural.

Three rules govern the overview of a process, and they never change. Count the stages and state the number. Name the raw input at stage one and the finished output at the final stage.

State whether the process is linear, which means it has a distinct beginning and end, or cyclical, which means the final output feeds back into the first stage. A candidate who does those three things has a Band 7 overview before writing a single body sentence.

The wider comparison of process and map answers, including several further diagrams, is set out in the guide to Task 1 maps and process diagrams.

How do you compare two maps in IELTS Writing Task 1?

A map task shows one location at two dates and tests your ability to describe change in space. Organise by area, not by feature list: two body paragraphs, typically north versus south or the built-up area versus the open land. Report every change, and name the features that stayed the same.

What the map tests, and its signature trap

A map task presents the same site at two or occasionally three points in time and asks you to summarise how it has changed.

There are no numbers, so Lexical Resource is assessed almost entirely on your command of location language and verbs of transformation, and Task Achievement is assessed on coverage: an examiner can count the changes on the map and check them against your answer.

The signature trap is the sequential description, in which the candidate describes everything on the first map in paragraph three and everything on the second map in paragraph four. This feels organised and reads as two inventories.

It forces the reader to hold the first map in memory while decoding the second, and it makes comparison impossible, which caps Coherence and Cohesion at Band 6.

Organise by geography instead: everything that happened in the west in one paragraph, everything that happened in the east in the next, with both time periods handled inside each paragraph.

The second trap is omitting what did not change. Unchanged features are key features.

A single clause such as "while the river, Mill Lane and the original houses remained in place" demonstrates that you examined the whole map rather than only the obvious construction, and it is one of the cheapest Task Achievement marks available.

The parallel error list, including the location prepositions candidates most often confuse, is collected in the most common Task 1 mistakes.

Practice task: the village of Ashdown in 1995 and 2025

The following task was written for this guide. The two maps are rendered as numbered lists of the features present in each period, with compass positions given so the model answer can be verified against them.

The maps below show the village of Ashdown in 1995 and in 2025. Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant. Write at least 150 words.

Ashdown in 1995

1. A river runs from east to west across the northern edge of the map.
2. A watermill stands on the southern bank of the river in the far north-west.
3. Mill Lane, the only road, runs north to south through the centre of the village.
4. Fifteen detached houses line both sides of Mill Lane in the centre.
5. Farmland occupies the entire western half of the map.
6. A small primary school stands in the north-east, south of the river.
7. Woodland covers the south-east corner.

Ashdown in 2025

1. The river is unchanged and still runs east to west across the north.
2. The watermill in the far north-west has been converted into a museum.
3. A footbridge crosses the river immediately beside the museum.
4. Mill Lane remains, and a ring road now curves around the east and south of the village.
5. The fifteen detached houses on Mill Lane are unchanged.
6. Farmland in the west has been reduced to a narrow strip along the western boundary; a housing estate of approximately eighty homes occupies the rest.
7. The primary school in the north-east has been extended, with a car park immediately to its south.
8. The woodland in the south-east has been cleared and replaced by a supermarket and car park.

Band 9 model answer: the Ashdown maps

The two maps show the village of Ashdown as it was in 1995 and as it appears in 2025.

Overall, Ashdown changed from a small agricultural settlement into a substantially larger residential village. The most significant developments were the loss of most of the farmland in the west and of the woodland in the south-east, both of which were built on, while the river, Mill Lane and the original houses remained in place.

In the west, the farmland that once occupied half the map was reduced to a narrow strip along the western boundary. In its place, a housing estate of roughly eighty homes was constructed, and a ring road was added to the east and south of the village to serve it.

Elsewhere the transformation was equally marked. The woodland in the south-east corner was cleared and a supermarket with an adjacent car park was built on the site. The primary school in the north-east was extended, and a car park was laid out immediately to its south. The watermill on the northern river bank was not demolished but converted into a museum, and a footbridge was constructed across the river beside it.

Word count: 194 words. All eight changes are accounted for, three unchanged features are named, and every location is fixed with a compass point or a preposition.

The language of location and change, and the tense rules

Map answers reward a small, closed set of vocabulary used accurately. Learn the following four groups and you have almost everything a map task can ask for.

Two points of accuracy separate strong candidates here. First, converted into means the original structure survives in a new function, whereas replaced by means it was destroyed; using them interchangeably is a factual error, not merely a lexical one.

Second, relocated means the same feature moved to a different position on the same map, which is a single change, not a demolition plus a construction.

Tense is decided entirely by the dates in the prompt, and there are only three possibilities.

A word of caution on the third row: when the second map is a proposal, nothing has happened yet, so every future change must be marked as planned rather than completed.

Candidates who write "the car park was replaced" for a proposed development lose marks under both Task Achievement, for misreporting the visual, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy, for the tense itself.

Finally, practise these four visual types under the clock rather than reading about them.

Twenty minutes, an on-screen word counter, and no dictionary is a different exercise from writing at leisure, and a full timed attempt in the timed writing test followed by a criterion-by-criterion breakdown from the AI writing checker will tell you within minutes whether your overview, your grouping and your tense control actually hold up.

If the report comes back weak on Lexical Resource, the trend and transformation vocabulary lists in Task 1 vocabulary for describing change are the shortest route to the next half band.

What vocabulary do you need to describe data?

You need roughly forty words, not four hundred: about eight verbs of increase, eight of decrease, four of stability, four of fluctuation, their noun forms, and six adverbs of degree. Lexical Resource is 25% of your Task 1 band, and examiners reward precise, varied re-use over rare words used wrongly.

The commonest Lexical Resource failure at Band 6 is not a small vocabulary. It is a vocabulary that never changes grammatical shape. A candidate who knows increase only as a verb writes eight sentences that all begin with a subject and end with a figure.

A candidate who also owns an increase, increasing and increasingly can restructure every one of those eight sentences. Build your bank in four columns from the start: verb, noun, adjective, adverb.

Verbs of increase

Verbs of decrease

Verbs of stability and fluctuation

Nouns, adjectives and adverbs: the four-column bank

This is the table to memorise as a grid rather than a list. The noun form is the version of the word that lets you put the change at the start of the sentence and the size of the change in an adjective, and it is the single most valuable structural move in Task 1.

Note the two traps in that grid. Growth is uncountable, so you write rapid growth and never a rapid growth. And the columns are not interchangeable: the adverb attaches to the verb while the adjective attaches to the noun.

Writing a dramatically increase or increased dramatic costs you under Grammatical Range and Accuracy every time it appears.

Adverbs and adjectives of degree, ranked

Do not mix a size adverb with a speed adverb that contradicts it. Rose dramatically and gradually is incoherent. Rose steadily but substantially over the twenty-year period is fine, because steadily describes the shape and substantially describes the total distance travelled.

The verb-to-noun conversion, in both directions

Every data sentence in Task 1 can be written twice. Learn the swap and your Grammatical Range and Accuracy score stops depending on inventing new structures under time pressure.

Three carrier structures make the noun version work: There was a [adjective] [noun] in X, [Time period] saw a [adjective] [noun] in X, and X experienced / underwent / recorded a [adjective] [noun].

The second of these, with the time period as grammatical subject, is the highest-value single sentence pattern in Task 1 because it is uncommon at Band 6 and completely natural at Band 8.

Practise converting ten sentences each way; if you want the conversions marked automatically, paste a paragraph into the AI essay grader, which flags collocation errors alongside band estimates.

The trend-vocabulary drill in our deep dive on Task 1 trend vocabulary extends this grid with a further set of collocations.

How do you write about approximation and precision?

Use an approximation phrase whenever the exact figure is not printed on the chart, and never invent decimal places. About eight phrases cover every case: approximately, around, roughly, just over, just under, nearly, well over and in the region of. Precision you cannot read is a Task Achievement error, not a strength.

Approximation language is the set of hedging phrases that let you report a value you have estimated from a scale rather than read from a label. Examiners expect it.

A chart with gridlines every 10 units gives you no basis for writing 37.4%, and a reader who checks your figure against the data will find it wrong. The safe move is to round to the nearest gridline and hedge.

Four rules that stop approximation errors

1. Never stack two hedges. Approximately just over 50 is wrong. One hedge per figure.
2. Never hedge a labelled figure. If the table prints 47.3, write 47.3 or write just under 50, but do not write approximately 47.3, which reads as though you doubt a printed number.
3. Do not invent decimals. If the axis is marked in tens, your figures should be multiples of five at finest. Manufactured precision is the fastest way for an examiner to see that you are guessing.
4. Keep the unit attached. Around 50 means nothing; around 50 tonnes, around 50% and around 50 million litres are three different facts. Dropping units is scored under Task Achievement because the data has not been accurately reported.

How do you write about proportions and fractions?

Convert percentages into fractions to vary your language, but only for values close to a clean fraction: 12.5% is one eighth, 25% one quarter, 33% one third, 50% a half, 66% two thirds and 75% three quarters.

Also keep percentage point distinct from percent - a rise from 20% to 30% is ten percentage points, not a 10% rise.

Percentage to fraction conversion table

Where a value sits between fractions, hedge the fraction rather than force it: 38% is almost two fifths; 28% is a little over a quarter; 55% is slightly more than half. Do not write one third for 45% simply because you want variety.

Pie chart work depends heavily on this table, and the worked examples in our pie chart guide show it applied across a full four-segment answer.

The language of majority and minority

Percent, percentage point and proportion

The percentage point distinction matters because it changes the fact you are reporting. A move from 20% to 30% is a rise of ten percentage points and also a relative rise of 50%. Both statements are true; only one of them is what a careless rose by 10% conveys, and that one is false.

How do you make comparisons and superlatives accurate?

Task 1 is comparison work: most charts are scored on whether you compare rather than list. Use three frames - simple comparatives (higher than), multiples (twice as many as, three times higher than) and superlatives (the highest, the second lowest) - and keep more than for counts and higher than for rates, levels and percentages.

Comparison frames

Multiples: the exact grammar

Use twice, not two times. From three upwards, use times: three times, five times. And check the arithmetic before you commit, because a multiple that does not match the data is a Task Achievement error as well as a lexical one.

More than, higher than, and compared with

One more accuracy point that costs real marks: when you compare, complete the comparison. Spending was significantly higher is unfinished. Higher than what?

Add the second half - higher than in any other category - or the sentence tells the examiner nothing. Comparative precision is treated as part of task fulfilment across every chart type, as set out in our breakdown of the Task 1 band descriptors.

Which prepositions go with change?

Nine patterns cover almost every preposition error in Task 1: rise TO a figure, rise BY an amount, rise FROM x TO y, a rise IN something, AT a rate of, BETWEEN two dates, OVER a period, an increase OF a figure, and IN a single year or month.

Preposition slips are counted under Grammatical Range and Accuracy and are the most frequent error type at Band 6.5.

Ten gap sentences with the answers shown

Cover the right-hand column, complete each sentence, then check. Each one targets a preposition that examiners see wrong every session.

Two silent killers hide inside that set. First, increased with 10% is a direct translation from several European languages and is always wrong in English; the answer is by.

Second, compared to last year the sales was increase mixes three errors at once, so treat preposition drilling as inseparable from tense and agreement drilling. The wider grammar picture is covered in our grammar for Band 7 guide.

The 25 most common Task 1 mistakes and how to fix each one

Twenty-five recurring errors account for the great majority of Task 1 scores stuck at Band 6 or 6.5. Roughly half are Task Achievement failures - no overview, listed figures, invented data, opinions - and half are language failures. Fixing the top five typically moves a Band 6 answer to Band 7.

Errors 1, 2, 3, 15 and 23 are the five to attack first, because they are Task Achievement problems and Task Achievement is 25% of the task band on its own.

Since Task 1 contributes one third of your Writing score, a jump from 6 to 7 on Task 1 alone lifts the overall Writing band by roughly 0.33 before rounding - enough to convert 6.5 into 7.

Model the arithmetic on the band score calculator before deciding where to spend your revision time, and see the full inventory of slips in our dedicated list of Task 1 common mistakes.

One practical note for tests taken from mid-2026 onwards: the IELTS partners announced in March 2026 that paper-based IELTS is being withdrawn worldwide, with final paper sittings around 27 June 2026, so nearly all candidates now type. That changes error correction.

You have an on-screen word counter, so the length errors above are avoidable; you can edit mid-paragraph without rewriting; and you should reserve two minutes at the end to reread on screen, where missing plural -s and preposition slips hide far more easily than on paper.

Confirm arrangements with your test centre, and see the current format notes on ielts.org.

A 60-word Task 1 sentence bank you can adapt

Below are sixty reusable frames grouped by function. They are frames, not scripts: every one contains a slot you must fill from the actual chart. Used unchanged across every answer, they read as a template and are penalised; varied by verb, adverb and clause order, they simply read as competent academic English.

Introducing the visual

Writing the overview

Describing movement, level and comparison

How to vary the bank so it does not read as a template

Memorised or template-heavy answers are penalised, and an answer an examiner judges to be fully memorised can be discounted entirely. Four habits keep these frames on the right side of that line.

1. Never open two consecutive sentences with the same structure. Alternate verb-form and noun-form: one sentence with rose sharply, the next with saw a sharp rise in.
2. Change the subject of the sentence. Rotate between the category (Rail use rose), the time period (The 1990s saw) and the figure (The proportion of rail users reached).
3. Fill every bracket with chart-specific content. A frame with a generic filler such as this category is what makes an answer look pre-learnt. Name the country, the year, the unit.
4. Cut any sentence that would be true of any chart. The graph is very interesting and gives much information adds words and no marks; delete it and use the space for a comparison.

Drill these frames against real prompts rather than reading them. Write one 20-minute answer, submit it to the essay grader for criterion-level feedback, then rewrite the same answer using different frames from the bank for the same data.

Two versions of one task teach more than two separate tasks. If you want prompts on tap, the timed writing test runs a full 60-minute simulation, and the Academic Task 1 graphs guide supplies further chart types to practise the bank on.

What is General Training Writing Task 1?

General Training Writing Task 1 asks you to write a letter of at least 150 words in about 20 minutes, responding to an everyday situation. The prompt gives a scenario and three bullet points, and every bullet must be covered fully or Task Achievement is capped at Band 5.

The letter is the single structural difference between the two IELTS versions: Academic candidates describe visual data, General Training candidates write a letter, and everything else is identical. The full comparison is set out in our guide to Academic versus General Training.

The situation is the two or three lines of context that open the prompt and fix your identity, your recipient and therefore your register.

A prompt beginning "You recently stayed at a hotel and were unhappy with the service" makes you a paying customer writing to an institution, which settles the greeting, the sign-off and the tone before you write a word.

The three bullet points are assessed content requirements, not suggestions. The Task Achievement descriptor at Band 7 requires all bullet points to be covered and clearly highlighted. Covering a bullet in four words is mentioning it, not developing it, and that is the more common and more expensive error.

Timing is fixed at 20 minutes because Task 2 is worth twice as much and needs the remaining 40: two minutes reading and deciding register, thirteen writing, five checking.

From mid-2026 the paper test has been withdrawn worldwide, so that final check is an on-screen proofread with a live word counter rather than a scan of handwriting; confirm the format with your test centre. Our deep-dive on General Training Task 1 letters covers timing drills.

How do you choose the right level of formality?

Register is decided by who receives the letter, not by the topic. Write formally to a stranger or an institution, semi-formally to a named person you know professionally, and informally to a friend or relative. One rule is absolute: Dear Sir or Madam pairs with Yours faithfully.

Register is the level of formality a text sustains through its vocabulary, grammar and conventions. It is assessed twice over: under Task Achievement, which requires consistent and appropriate tone, and under Lexical Resource. One informal slip in a formal letter is noticed; three establish a pattern and pull the band down.

Reading the register signals in the prompt

Greeting and sign-off pairs

This is the one examinable convention in the task, and it is not a matter of taste. Open with Dear Sir or Madam and you close with Yours faithfully; open with a name and you close with Yours sincerely. Nothing else in the letter is as cheap to get right or as visible when wrong.

What actually changes between the three registers

What structure should every letter follow?

Every GT letter uses the same five-part shape: greeting, a one-sentence purpose statement, one body paragraph per bullet point, a closing line, and a sign-off. Across a target of 170 to 190 words, the three body paragraphs should take roughly 140 of them.

The shape is deliberately rigid because no marks are awarded for structural invention. They are awarded for covering three bullets clearly, in a logical order, in appropriate language. A predictable frame frees your attention for content and accuracy, where the other three criteria live.

Aim for 170 to 190 words rather than the 150 minimum. There is no automatic penalty for a short letter, but three bullets cannot be developed in 150 words without one being reduced to a clause, and thin coverage is penalised under Task Achievement.

Above 200 words you borrow time from a task worth twice as much, an arithmetic explained in our note on IELTS length rules.

Leave a blank line between blocks. On the computer-delivered test the examiner sees exactly what you typed, so a wall of unbroken text is a Coherence and Cohesion problem you can fix with two keystrokes.

Do not include postal addresses, a date line or a subject heading: none is required, none is assessed, and together they consume words that should be developing a bullet.

The ten letter types, with a model answer for each

Ten letter functions account for almost every General Training Task 1 prompt: complaint, request, apology, invitation, job application, resignation, thank-you, giving information, seeking or giving advice, and making arrangements. Each block below gives an original practice prompt and a complete Band 9 model letter of 160 to 190 words.

Every prompt below was written for this guide. None is a real examination question and none is a prediction. Use them as practice sets: write your own version under 20 minutes first, then read the model.

If you want a band estimate on your attempt before you compare, our AI essay grader marks against the same four criteria.

1. Letter of complaint

Register: formal, in almost every case, because the recipient is an institution rather than a person you know. Practice prompt: You recently bought a laptop from an online retailer and it arrived damaged. Write a letter to the customer service manager.

In your letter, describe the item and when you bought it, explain exactly what is wrong with it, and say what you want the company to do.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to complain about a laptop computer that I purchased from your online store on 14 April, order number 8873-B.

The device, a fourteen-inch model advertised as new, arrived on 21 April in packaging that had clearly been crushed in transit. When I opened the box, I found a deep crack across the lower right corner of the screen and a hinge that no longer closes flush.

The machine powers on, but roughly a third of the display is unreadable, which makes it unusable for the design work I bought it for.

I have already contacted your online chat service twice and received no substantive reply, so I would now ask you to intervene personally. I would like the laptop to be collected at your expense and replaced with an identical unit within fourteen days.

If a replacement is not available, I expect a full refund of 749 pounds.

I look forward to your written confirmation.

Yours faithfully,

Daniel Reyes

Word count: 166 words.

The examiner is checking that a complaint stays firm without becoming rude, that the desired outcome is stated explicitly rather than implied, and that dates, amounts and reference numbers make the account concrete.

2. Letter of request

Register: formal or semi-formal, depending on whether the recipient is named. Practice prompt: You are studying at a college and need more time to finish an assignment. Write a letter to your course tutor.

In your letter, say which assignment you mean and when it is due, explain why you need more time, and state the new deadline you would like.

Dear Dr Whitfield,

I am writing to request a short extension to the deadline for the Research Methods portfolio, which is currently due on 3 November.

The portfolio requires two hundred hours of fieldwork, and I completed the first half on schedule. In mid-October, however, I was admitted to hospital with pneumonia and spent nine days there, followed by a fortnight in which my doctor advised me not to travel.

A copy of the medical certificate is attached. As a result, the interview stage of my fieldwork has not yet begun.

I would be grateful if the submission date could be moved to 24 November. Three additional weeks would allow me to conduct the remaining eight interviews, transcribe them, and revise the analysis chapter to the standard expected. I am willing to submit an interim draft on 10 November so that you can monitor my progress.

Thank you for considering this request. I would be happy to discuss it at your convenience.

Yours sincerely,

Amara Okonjo

Word count: 166 words.

The examiner is checking that the request is specific rather than open-ended, that the reason is credible and briefly evidenced, and that politeness is achieved grammatically rather than by piling up the word please.

3. Letter of apology

Register: usually semi-formal, since apologies are most often owed to a named colleague, manager or neighbour. Practice prompt: You missed an important meeting at work. Write a letter to your manager. In your letter, apologise for missing the meeting, explain why you were absent, and say what you will do to put the situation right.

Dear Mr Halvorsen,

I would like to apologise sincerely for my absence from the quarterly budget meeting on Tuesday morning. I understand that the marketing allocation could not be settled without my figures, and I am sorry for the delay this has caused the team.

The reason for my absence was a family emergency. My father was taken to hospital at six o'clock that morning and I travelled with him in the ambulance.

In the confusion I did not think to notify the office until the afternoon, which was a failure of judgement on my part rather than any lack of concern for the meeting.

To put matters right, I have circulated the full budget breakdown to everyone who attended and asked our administrator to arrange a thirty-minute follow-up session on Thursday, at which I will present the figures in person. I have also saved the office number to my phone so that any future absence can be reported immediately.

Yours sincerely,

Priya Ramesh

Word count: 164 words.

The examiner is checking for a genuine apology in the first sentence, an explanation that does not read as an excuse, and a concrete corrective action rather than a promise to do better.

4. Letter of invitation

Register: informal when the recipient is a friend, semi-formal when inviting a colleague or a client. Practice prompt: You have moved into a new flat and are holding a party to celebrate. Write a letter to a friend.

In your letter, invite them to the party, give the date, time and directions, and suggest something they could bring or do.

Dear Marco,

I have finally moved into the new flat, and I am holding a small celebration to mark the occasion. It would not feel like a proper housewarming without you, so please come.

The party is on Saturday 12 July, starting at seven in the evening and running until late. The address is 14 Ashbourne Court, on the third floor, roughly ten minutes on foot from Kingsway station.

If you prefer to drive, there is free parking behind the building after six o'clock, although the entrance is easy to miss.

There will be around fifteen people, mostly friends from the old neighbourhood, and I am cooking everything myself, so you do not need to bring a thing. If you insist, a bottle of something cold would be very welcome.

One more request: you promised me months ago that you would bring your guitar to the next gathering, and I intend to hold you to that.

Do let me know by Wednesday.

Best wishes,

Elena

Word count: 165 words.

The examiner is checking that the tone is warm and clearly informal, that the practical details are complete enough to act on, and that the third bullet is a real suggestion rather than a throwaway line.

5. Job application letter

Register: formal, and normally to an unnamed recipient. Practice prompt: You have seen an advertisement for a part-time weekend receptionist at a sports centre. Write a letter of application.

In your letter, say which job you are applying for and where you saw it, describe your relevant experience, and explain when you would be available to start.

Dear Sir or Madam,

I am writing to apply for the position of part-time weekend receptionist at Riverside Sports Centre, advertised on your website on 9 March.

I have worked in customer-facing roles for four years. For the past two years I have been employed as an evening receptionist at a two-hundred-room hotel, where I manage bookings, process payments and resolve guest complaints, frequently under considerable time pressure.

Before that I spent two years as an assistant in a busy pharmacy. I am confident with reservation software, I speak fluent Spanish in addition to English, and I hold a current first-aid certificate, which may be of particular value in a sports facility.

I am available for both Saturday and Sunday shifts, including early mornings, and I could begin on 1 April, allowing two weeks of notice to my present employer.

My curriculum vitae is attached. I would welcome the opportunity of an interview at any time convenient to you.

Yours faithfully,

Tomasz Nowak

Word count: 163 words.

The examiner is checking that the experience given is relevant to the advertised role rather than a full career history, and that availability is stated as a date and a pattern of hours.

6. Letter of resignation

Register: formal or semi-formal, addressed to a named manager. Practice prompt: You have decided to leave your current job. Write a letter to your employer. In your letter, state that you are resigning and when your last day will be, explain your reasons, and offer to help with the handover.

Dear Ms Fairbairn,

I am writing to give formal notice of my resignation from the post of logistics coordinator at Brightline Freight. In accordance with my contract I am giving one month of notice, so my final working day will be 30 September.

My decision follows an offer of a supply-chain management role in another city, where my family has recently relocated. The position carries responsibilities that my present grade does not include, and it removes a daily commute of three hours. The move reflects nothing but circumstance, as I have found this department unusually well run.

I am genuinely grateful for the four years I have spent here, and particularly for the training in customs documentation that you funded, which made the new appointment possible.

To ensure a smooth transition, I will prepare written handover notes for every live account and would be glad to help interview or train my successor during the notice period.

Yours sincerely,

Karl Andersen

Word count: 160 words.

The examiner is checking that notice is unambiguous, that the reason is stated without bitterness, and that the letter leaves the professional relationship intact.

7. Thank-you letter

Register: semi-formal for a neighbour or colleague, informal for a close friend. Practice prompt: A neighbour looked after your home and your pets while you were away on holiday. Write a letter to your neighbour.

In your letter, thank them for their help, explain what difference it made, and suggest a way of returning the favour.

Dear Mrs Whitaker,

I am writing to thank you for looking after the house and the two cats while we were in Portugal for a fortnight. It was a considerable favour and we do not take it lightly.

Knowing that someone reliable was collecting the post, watering the garden and feeding the animals meant that we relaxed properly for the first time in two years. My wife had been dreading the cost of a cattery, and Nutmeg in particular would not have coped well with one.

We returned to find the plants in better condition than we left them, which says a great deal.

Please allow us to return the favour. We would like to invite you and your husband to dinner on Friday 5 August at half past seven, and we have brought back a bottle of port that we hope you will accept.

If you ever need the same help while you are travelling, you have only to ask.

Yours sincerely,

Hannah Croft

Word count: 165 words.

The examiner is checking that gratitude is specific, that the middle bullet adds new information rather than paraphrasing bullet one, and that the offer in return is concrete.

8. Letter giving information or an explanation

Register: semi-formal in most prompts, because you are usually informing a colleague, an official or an organisation. Practice prompt: A new colleague is relocating to your city and has asked you about the area. Write a letter to that colleague.

In your letter, describe where most staff live and what housing costs, explain the practical steps they must take on arrival, and offer further help.

Dear Ms Delgado,

Thank you for your message. I am glad to set out what you need to know about the area before you move here in September.

Most of our staff live in the Northgate district, which is about twenty minutes from the office by tram. A one-bedroom flat there costs between six and seven hundred pounds a month, and leases normally run for twelve months with one month of deposit.

The southern suburbs are cheaper by roughly a fifth, but the tram does not reach them and the bus is slow in winter.

As for the practical matters, you will need a local bank account before you can sign a lease, and the branch on Meadow Street opens accounts for new arrivals within two working days. Registering with a doctor is free and takes about a week.

I have attached a map with the three districts marked. Please write again if anything is unclear, and I would be happy to meet you on your first morning.

Yours sincerely,

Owen Baptiste

Word count: 172 words.

The examiner is checking that the information is organised into clear categories, that quantities are given where a reader would expect them, and that the letter answers what was actually asked rather than everything the writer knows.

9. Letter asking for or giving advice

Register: informal when writing to a friend, semi-formal when advising a colleague or junior. Practice prompt: You have been offered a place on a course in another country and cannot decide whether to accept. Write a letter to a friend who has lived abroad.

In your letter, describe the offer, explain what is worrying you, and ask for their advice.

Dear Salma,

I need your opinion on something, and you are the only person I know who has actually done this.

I have been offered a place on a one-year master's course in Copenhagen, starting in January. The course is fully funded, the department is the strongest in Europe for marine biology, and my supervisor here says it would change the direction of my career.

On paper it is exactly what I said I wanted two years ago.

What worries me is everything around it. I would have to give up the job at the aquarium, which took me three years to find, and my father has not been well since the spring. I also speak no Danish at all, and I am not sure how much that matters in practice.

You moved to Berlin alone at twenty-three, so you know how the first months feel. Would you do it again, knowing what you know now? Any honest advice would be welcome, even if it is that I am overthinking the whole thing.

All the best,

Iris

Word count: 177 words.

The examiner is checking that the dilemma is explained clearly enough for advice to be possible, and that the request for advice is explicit. When giving advice instead, use should, could and I would suggest rather than must.

10. Letter making arrangements

Register: semi-formal or formal, since arrangements are usually made with a supplier, venue or organiser. Practice prompt: You are organising a training day for your staff at an external venue. Write a letter to the events manager.

In your letter, confirm the date and the number of people attending, state what you will need in the room, and ask two questions about the arrangements.

Dear Mr Achebe,

Further to our telephone conversation on Monday, I am writing to confirm the arrangements for our staff training day at the Elmwood Conference Centre.

We would like to book the Sycamore Room for Thursday 6 February, from half past eight in the morning until five in the afternoon. The final number of delegates is thirty-two, which is two more than I indicated on the telephone.

On the day we will require the room laid out in six round tables rather than rows, a projector with an HDMI connection, two flip charts, and access from eight o'clock so that my team can set up in good time.

If a microphone is available, we would make use of it in the afternoon session.

Could you also confirm two points: first, whether the lunch menu can accommodate four vegetarian and two gluten-free delegates, and second, how many parking spaces are reserved for our group?

I look forward to your written confirmation.

Yours sincerely,

Bethan Lloyd

Word count: 165 words.

The examiner is checking that every practical variable is pinned down, that requirements are listed in parallel grammatical form, and that questions are punctuated as questions.

A functional phrase bank for letters

A letter is built from about ten communicative functions, and each has a formal, semi-formal and informal form. Learning one accurate phrase per register for each function gives you thirty flexible expressions, which is enough to write any letter without sounding memorised.

Use these as patterns to adapt, never as blocks to reproduce: an answer judged fully memorised can be discounted, so change the content words every time. The technique is set out in our guide to paraphrasing.

Opening and framing

The core moves

Closing moves

The formal column relies on modal verbs and nominalisation, the informal column on phrasal verbs and short clauses. That distinction, not any list of connectives, is what makes a letter sound right. Our reference on linking words and cohesive devices explains why fewer, better-placed connectives outscore a signpost on every sentence.

The 15 mistakes that cost GT candidates a band

Most General Training candidates lose marks to a small set of repeatable errors rather than to weak English. The fifteen below account for the majority of letters that land at Band 6 instead of Band 7, and every one of them is correctable in a single practice session.

Register slips and sign-off errors are pure convention and can be eliminated in an afternoon. Under-development is harder, because it is a planning habit rather than a knowledge gap: candidates who plan in bullets rather than sentences produce fuller body paragraphs.

If accuracy rather than coverage is your limiting factor, the structures that separate Band 6 from Band 7 are set out in our grammar for Band 7 reference.

Remember how the letter is weighted. Task 1 contributes one third of the Writing band and Task 2 two thirds, so a Band 8 letter beside a Band 6 essay yields 6.5 after rounding.

Model that arithmetic for your own target with the band score calculator before deciding where the next ten hours of practice should go.

What is IELTS Writing Task 2?

IELTS Writing Task 2 is a 40-minute argument essay of at least 250 words, identical in Academic and General Training. It is worth two thirds of your Writing band, against one third for Task 1. You are given a statement or claim and asked to respond to it in formal register.

Task 2 is the second and longer of the two Writing tasks, and it is the only part of the Writing test where you are assessed on the quality of your reasoning rather than on your accuracy in reporting supplied information.

The prompt always presents a proposition, a trend or a pair of competing views, and always instructs you to do something with it: agree, discuss, evaluate, explain or solve. There is no such thing as a Task 2 prompt that asks you merely to describe.

The arithmetic matters more than most candidates realise. Your Writing band is calculated as (Task 1 band multiplied by one third) plus (Task 2 band multiplied by two thirds), rounded to the nearest half band.

A single band gained in Task 2 moves the overall Writing score twice as far as the same gain in Task 1.

Rows two and four make the point plainly: strengthening Task 1 while Task 2 stagnates buys almost nothing. If you have limited preparation time, spend it here.

The four criteria and what each rewards in Task 2

Each task is marked on four equally weighted criteria worth 25 per cent each. In Task 2 the first is Task Response, which measures whether you have answered the exact question asked, taken a clear position where one is required, and developed your ideas with relevant support.

The other three are Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy.

Length, timing and the on-screen counter

The minimum is 250 words. There is no fixed automatic penalty for writing fewer, but an under-length essay cannot fully address the task and is marked down under Task Response.

The productive target is roughly 270 to 320 words: enough to develop two or three arguments properly, short enough to leave three minutes for proofreading.

Since IELTS is now delivered on computer, the word counter is displayed on screen and you should stop guessing your length and start reading it.

If you have not yet written a full timed essay under those conditions, our timed Writing test reproduces them, and finished essays at the target length are shown in the Task 2 sample library.

How do you decode the question in 60 seconds?

Spend the first 60 seconds splitting the prompt into three parts: topic words, task words and limiting words. Missing one limiting word such as "in developing countries" or "only" produces an essay that is fluent, well organised and off-question, which caps Task Response at Band 5 regardless of language quality.

Topic words are the nouns that name the subject area, such as tourism, artificial intelligence or public transport. Task words are the instruction verbs that tell you what operation to perform on the topic, such as discuss, evaluate or explain.

Limiting words are the small modifiers that narrow the scope of the topic, and they are where most candidates lose marks because they are easy to read past.

The 60-second decoding routine

1. Read the prompt twice, at normal speed. Do not skim.
2. Mark the topic words. Ask what field of life this belongs to.
3. Mark the instruction verb and count how many separate questions it contains. Two questions require two answered questions.
4. Mark every modifier: adjectives, prepositional phrases, adverbs such as only, always, best, main, mainly, in some countries.
5. Write one sentence stating what a complete answer must contain. If you cannot write that sentence, you have not decoded the prompt.

How do you identify which essay type you have?

Nine instruction wordings account for almost every Task 2 prompt. Six of them require a clear personal opinion sustained from the introduction to the conclusion; three do not, although two of those three require a judgement rather than an opinion. Identify the type in 30 seconds, because the type determines the paragraph plan.

Two rules follow from the table.

First, an opinion required is an opinion required everywhere: introduction, at least one body paragraph and the conclusion must agree with each other, because an examiner who cannot locate a consistent position marks Task Response down even when each individual paragraph is strong.

Second, when the wording is ambiguous, satisfy the stricter reading: adding a clear position to an essay that did not strictly need one costs nothing, while omitting a required one is fatal.

The paragraph architecture for each type is set out in detail in our guide to Task 2 essay types.

Where do ideas come from when you know nothing about the topic?

Ideas come from applying a fixed framework to an unfamiliar topic, not from background knowledge. Three frameworks cover virtually every prompt: the stakeholder wheel, the five lenses and consequence chaining. Two minutes with any one of them produces more usable content than ten minutes of trying to remember something relevant.

All three are demonstrated below on a single practice prompt written for this guide: Some people believe that all city centres should be closed to private cars. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Framework 1: the stakeholder wheel

The stakeholder wheel is a fixed list of seven parties affected by any policy or trend, worked through in order until you have enough material. It is the fastest framework for prompts about government action, law, education and the workplace.

Framework 2: the five lenses

The five lenses are five angles of analysis applied to the same proposition, useful when the prompt is abstract and has no obvious stakeholders.

Framework 3: consequence chaining

Consequence chaining is the technique of pushing a single idea forward two or three steps, from cause to effect to further effect, instead of listing many shallow ideas. It is the difference between a Band 6 paragraph that mentions three things and a Band 8 paragraph that develops one.

Note the shape of every sentence in the final column: two clauses linked by a causal connector, with a concrete noun at the end. That shape is worth practising on its own, and the connectors that make it work are catalogued in our reference on linking words and cohesive devices.

How do you use examples without inventing fake statistics?

Examples are graded on relevance and specificity, never on verifiability. Examiners do not fact-check. They do notice invented precision, because "a 2019 Harvard study found that 73 per cent" reads as fabricated and undermines the whole essay.

The safe hierarchy runs from real and specific down to fabricated statistics, which is the only tier to avoid entirely.

Weak against strong example sentences

One example per body paragraph is sufficient. Two short examples are better than one long anecdote, and an example that is not explained is not an example at all: the sentence after it must state what it proves.

How do you plan a Task 2 essay in five minutes?

Allocate five of your 40 minutes to planning, 32 to writing and three to proofreading. Five minutes is enough to decode the prompt, choose a position, generate two developed arguments and fix the paragraph order. Candidates who skip planning typically lose more than five minutes rewriting a body paragraph that went nowhere.

The skeleton plan to memorise

Memorise the shape, never the wording. Memorised phrasing is penalised, and an answer judged fully memorised can be discounted altogether.

1. Introduction (40 to 55 words): paraphrased prompt, then position or outline.
2. Body paragraph 1 (90 to 110 words): topic sentence, explanation chain, example, link back to the position.
3. Body paragraph 2 (90 to 110 words): the stronger argument, same internal structure.
4. Optional third paragraph (60 to 80 words): only for discussion and hybrid prompts that carry a third obligation.
5. Conclusion (40 to 55 words): restated position, compressed reasons, no new material.

Two developed body paragraphs beat three thin ones at every band above 6.0, because depth of development is explicitly what separates Band 7 from Band 6 under Task Response.

The full paragraph architecture, including when a third body paragraph is justified, is set out in our guides to Task 2 essay structure and planning an essay under exam conditions.

How do you write an introduction?

A Task 2 introduction needs two elements and 40 to 55 words: a paraphrase of the prompt and either your position or a map of the essay. It earns no marks for background, general statements about the modern world, or definitions. Write it in two sentences, three at most, and move on.

Pattern A: paraphrase plus position

Use for agree or disagree, to what extent, and positive or negative development prompts. The position appears in sentence two and never moves.

It is sometimes proposed that public sector employees should move to a four-day working week without any reduction in pay. I strongly support this proposal, because the evidence on productivity and staff retention suggests that shorter concentrated hours serve both employees and the institutions that employ them. (47 words)

A growing number of universities now deliver most of their undergraduate teaching online rather than in lecture halls. In my view this shift is largely damaging, since it removes the unplanned academic contact that shapes how students actually learn to think. (41 words)

Pattern B: paraphrase plus outline

Use for causes and solutions, problems and solutions, advantages and disadvantages, and two-part questions. The outline previews the content of the body paragraphs in the order they will appear.

Traffic congestion has become a defining feature of daily life in many large cities. This essay will argue that the problem originates in the combination of low-density suburban housing and underfunded public transport, and that the most workable remedies are congestion pricing and sustained investment in rail capacity. (48 words)

Several national governments have removed entrance charges from publicly funded museums and galleries. This essay will examine the resulting gains in access and educational participation alongside the funding pressures that free admission creates, before concluding that the benefits are the weightier of the two. (44 words)

Pattern C: paraphrase plus concession plus position

A concession is a brief acknowledgement that the opposing view has some merit, placed before your own position to make it look considered rather than reflexive. This pattern suits partial agreement and discussion prompts and reliably lifts Task Response, provided the concession is one sentence and never more.

It is frequently argued that banning advertisements for high-sugar foods during children's television programmes would reduce childhood obesity. Such a ban would undoubtedly limit one source of pressure on young viewers. Nevertheless, I disagree that it constitutes the best solution, because the decisive influences on children's diets operate inside the home. (51 words)

Opinion is divided over whether universities should select applicants purely on examination results or take a broader set of attributes into account. Academic marks are certainly the most objective indicator available to admissions officers. Even so, I believe a wider assessment produces better outcomes, because examination performance measures preparation as much as ability. (53 words)

The paraphrase is where the marks are

Every introduction above rewrites the prompt rather than copying it. Copied wording is excluded from the word count in practice and signals a limited lexical range.

Change the word class, not just the synonym: "governments should invest" becomes "state investment in", "young people are choosing" becomes "the decision made by younger adults". Systematic techniques for this are covered in our guide to paraphrasing for IELTS.

How do you build a body paragraph that examiners reward?

A rewarded body paragraph runs 90 to 110 words and contains exactly one idea developed through four moves: a topic sentence, an explanation chain, an integrated example, and a link back to the position. Paragraphs that list three ideas without developing any of them are the defining feature of Band 6 writing.

Move 1: topic sentence engineering

A topic sentence is the opening sentence that states the paragraph's single claim in the writer's own analytical language.

It must be arguable, not descriptive: "Air pollution is a problem in cities" is a fact, while "The most compelling argument for excluding private vehicles from city centres concerns air quality" is a claim the paragraph then has to prove.

Move 2: the explanation chain

The explanation chain is a fixed four-step sequence that turns a claim into developed argument: claim, why it is true, how the mechanism works, and so what follows. Each step is one sentence. If you cannot write the "so what" sentence, the idea is too weak to use and you should return to your plan.

Move 3: integrating the example

The example belongs after the mechanism, not after the topic sentence, and it must be followed by a sentence stating what it demonstrates. An example dropped in and abandoned adds words without adding development.

Move 4: the link-back

The link-back is a closing sentence that connects the paragraph's idea to the position stated in the introduction, so the examiner sees a single argument rather than a sequence of observations. It is one sentence, and it should reuse the key noun from your position.

The four moves assembled

The most compelling argument for excluding private vehicles from city centres concerns air quality. Urban traffic is a primary source of nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter, both of which are concentrated precisely where pedestrian density is highest.

When cars are removed, these pollutants disperse rather than accumulating in narrow streets lined with tall buildings, and residents who walk or cycle through the area are exposed to a measurably lower dose.

Several European cities that have pedestrianised their historic centres report noticeable improvements in street-level air quality within a few years of the change. The public health benefit is therefore not speculative but structural: it follows directly from removing the emission source from the place where people congregate.

Exact word count: 118 words.

The same content at Band 6

If you want a paragraph-level diagnosis of your own writing against these four criteria, our AI writing checker marks a full essay on all four and identifies which of the four moves is missing from each body paragraph.

How do you write a conclusion?

A conclusion is 40 to 55 words, introduces no new idea, and restates a position identical to the one in your introduction. An essay whose conclusion contradicts or softens its introduction loses marks under Task Response, because a shifting position is treated as an unclear one.

Pattern 1: restate plus compressed reasons

The default for opinion and agree or disagree essays. Name the position, then compress the body paragraphs into one clause each.

In conclusion, city centres should be closed to private vehicles. The measure improves street-level air quality, returns valuable public space to pedestrians, and makes commercial districts safer, and these gains clearly exceed the inconvenience experienced by the minority of residents who depend on a car. (45 words)

Pattern 2: restate plus implication or recommendation

The default for causes and solutions, and problems and solutions essays. Close by naming who should act and what happens if they do not.

In conclusion, congestion is driven principally by dispersed housing and inadequate rail provision. Governments that address only the symptom, by widening roads, will find the problem returning within a decade; the durable solution is to price road use and fund the alternatives properly. (43 words)

Pattern 3: restate plus weighted judgement

The default for outweigh and to what extent essays. Concede the losing side in a subordinate clause, then deliver the verdict in the main clause, so that the grammar itself carries the weighting.

To conclude, free admission does place real strain on museum budgets, and that pressure should not be dismissed. On balance, however, the disadvantages are outweighed by the substantial rise in participation among visitors who would otherwise never enter such institutions at all. (42 words)

What must never appear in a conclusion

• A new argument, a new example or a new statistic. Anything worth saying belongs in a body paragraph.
• A question addressed to the reader, which shifts the register out of formal academic writing.
• A hedge that contradicts your stated position, such as adding "however, both sides have good points" after arguing one side for 250 words.
• Word-for-word repetition of the introduction. Restate the position in different language; the examiner is reading for range.
• An apology for length or time, which is never rewarded and is always noticed.

The last three openers are worth practising because they integrate grammatically with the sentence that follows, which is what advanced writing does.

A conclusion that begins "Taking these arguments together, the case for restricting vehicle access is strong" reads as reasoning; one that begins "In a nutshell, I think it is good" reads as a formula.

Introductions and conclusions are examined together in more detail in our dedicated guide to Task 2 introductions and conclusions.

How do you answer an IELTS Writing Task 2 opinion (agree or disagree) essay?

An opinion essay asks whether you agree or disagree with a single statement, and a clear position is compulsory in the introduction, every body paragraph and the conclusion. Three positions are legitimate: full agreement, full disagreement, or partial agreement. Hold one position for all 40 minutes and roughly 280 words.

How to recognise an opinion prompt, and whether a position is compulsory

The opinion essay gives you one proposition and asks you to judge it. Candidates misread it because many prompts open with a sentence beginning "Some people believe...", which looks like a discussion essay. That opening sentence is context, not a second view on the table.

Only the instruction line determines the type, and in every variant below a position is compulsory.

Paragraph-by-paragraph structure

The four-paragraph shape below works for all three positions; only the content of the two body paragraphs changes. The underlying logic of topic sentences and development is set out in our guide to Task 2 essay structure.

The three legitimate positions and how the structure changes

Examiners do not reward a particular stance. They reward a stance that is clear and sustained. What changes between the three is what each body paragraph is for.

Partial agreement is the highest-scoring option for most candidates because it produces genuine content for two different paragraphs, but only if the boundary is concrete. "I partly agree" is not a position; "I agree that the subject should be compulsory but not beyond the age of sixteen" is.

More worked stances appear in our agree or disagree deep dive.

Practice question (education)

The following task was written for this guide as practice material. It has not appeared in any examination.

Some people believe that every secondary school student should be required to study a foreign language until the age of eighteen. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

The five-minute plan for this question

These are the notes as they appear on screen: fragments, not sentences, with the position fixed before a single sentence is drafted.

• Position: partial. Yes to compulsory, no to eighteen. Boundary = age sixteen
• Body 1 (why compulsory is right): language is professional competence not decoration; cross-border hiring; fourteen-year-olds choose subjects badly
• Body 2 (why not to eighteen): years seventeen and eighteen are university preparation; forced study plateaus; the timetable is zero-sum
• Conclusion: compulsory yes, to eighteen no
• Lexis to place: compulsion, cultural ornament, attainment plateaus, specialisation

Band 9 model essay: foreign languages to eighteen

It is sometimes argued that every secondary school student should continue studying a foreign language until the age of eighteen. I largely agree that language learning deserves protected time in the curriculum, but I would limit the compulsory element to the age of sixteen and treat the final two years as optional specialisation.

The principal argument for compulsion is that a second language is now a basic professional competence rather than a cultural ornament. Employers in logistics, tourism and technology routinely recruit across borders, and a graduate who can negotiate in Spanish or Mandarin holds a measurable advantage over one who cannot. Compulsion also protects students from a decision they are not equipped to make at fourteen, when subject choices are often driven by which teacher is popular rather than by any realistic assessment of future value. Making the subject optional at that age would, in practice, hollow out language departments within a decade.

Extending that obligation to eighteen, however, ignores the cost imposed on the final years of school. Those two years are when students prepare for university entrance, and every compulsory subject removes hours from the disciplines on which their applications will actually be judged. A reluctant seventeen-year-old translating verb tables is unlikely to reach fluency in any case, since attainment tends to plateau once motivation disappears. A cut-off at sixteen preserves the linguistic foundation while returning the final timetable to the student.

In conclusion, I agree that foreign language study should be compulsory, because its professional value is too great to leave to the judgement of a fourteen-year-old, but I do not accept that the obligation should run to eighteen. Ending it at sixteen secures the benefit without displacing the subjects that determine a student's next step.

Word count: 290 words. That is 40 above the minimum and inside the 270 to 320 band where an argument can be developed without the timing collapsing.

Why this scores

Band 6 sentence beside Band 9 sentence

The three ways candidates lose marks on this type

If you are unsure whether your own position is genuinely sustained, run the essay through our AI essay checker, which flags the sentence where a position first becomes ambiguous.

How do you write a "discuss both views and give your own opinion" essay?

A discussion essay presents two opposing views and instructs you to discuss both and give your own opinion. Both views must be developed to a similar depth, typically 90 to 110 words each, and your own opinion is compulsory. Omitting one view usually caps Task Response at Band 5.

How to recognise a discussion prompt, and whether an opinion is compulsory

The discussion essay names two positions held by other people and asks you to examine both before adding your own. The tell is a pair of sentences with contrasting subjects, followed by an instruction containing the verb "discuss".

Two traps follow: defending only the side you favour, which leaves half the task unaddressed, and reporting both views so even-handedly that no opinion is ever visible.

The non-negotiable point is that both views must be genuinely developed even when you disagree with one of them. Reporting a view you reject in two dismissive lines and then spending 200 words demolishing it is an opinion essay wearing a discussion label.

The rejected view still needs a reason and, ideally, an example, presented as its supporters would present it. You defeat it with your own argument, not by starving it of words.

Paragraph-by-paragraph structure, and the three places the opinion can sit

Keep the two body paragraphs signposted with contrastive markers that work at sentence level rather than being stacked at the front of every sentence; our reference on cohesive devices separates the markers examiners still credit from those now treated as mechanical.

Practice question (urbanisation)

The following task was written for this guide as practice material. It has not appeared in any examination.

Some people think that governments should invest in improving conditions in rural areas so that fewer people move to cities. Others believe that the money is better spent on managing the growth of the cities themselves. Discuss both views and give your own opinion.

The five-minute plan for this question

• View A (rural investment): prevention; migration caused by missing clinics, schools, paid work; electrification and farm credit; protects food supply
• View B (urban investment): urbanisation is irreversible; more than half the world already urban; build metro, sanitation, housing before the slums form
• My opinion: View B, on the criterion of timescale. Urban infrastructure cannot be retrofitted; rural services can be added gradually
• Placement: opinion in the introduction, argued in a separate fourth paragraph
• Lexis to place: the drift towards capitals, informal settlements, retrofit, sequenced

Band 9 model essay: rural investment or urban capacity

As cities in developing economies absorb ever larger populations, opinion is divided over whether public money should be directed at rural development or at urban capacity. Both approaches have merit, though I consider investment in the cities themselves to be the more realistic use of limited budgets.

The case for rural investment rests on prevention. Migration is driven overwhelmingly by the absence of clinics, secondary schools and paid work in the countryside, and a government that supplies those things removes the reason to leave. Several Asian and African governments have used rural electrification and agricultural credit to slow the drift towards their capitals. This approach also protects agricultural output, since a village that loses its working-age population cannot maintain the land that feeds the city.

The opposing argument is that urbanisation is irreversible and that money spent resisting it is wasted. More than half of humanity already lives in cities, and the flow continues even where rural conditions improve, because young people are attracted by opportunity and anonymity as much as by wages. On this reading, the responsible policy is to build the metro lines, sanitation networks and affordable housing that prevent an expanding city from turning into a belt of informal settlements.

In my view the second position is the stronger one, not because rural development lacks value but because the timescales differ. Urban infrastructure that is not built before the population arrives becomes almost impossible to retrofit, whereas rural services can be extended incrementally. Governments should therefore fund the city first and the countryside continuously.

In conclusion, although improving rural life addresses the causes of migration, the pace of urban growth makes investment in city infrastructure the more urgent priority. The most defensible strategy treats the two as sequenced rather than competing claims on the same budget.

Word count: 299 words. The two view paragraphs are 78 words each, which is the parity an examiner looks for when checking that both sides were genuinely discussed.

Why this scores

The three ways candidates lose marks on this type

Comparing your own attempt against full-length worked examples is the fastest way to calibrate paragraph balance; our library of Task 2 sample answers shows the same question answered from opposing positions.

How do you answer an advantages and disadvantages essay, and what changes when the prompt says "outweigh"?

An advantages and disadvantages essay asks you to examine both sides of a development. When the prompt only says discuss the advantages and disadvantages, no verdict is required; when it asks whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages, a verdict is compulsory and must be argued, not merely announced.

How to recognise the two variants

The advantages and disadvantages essay asks about the consequences of a trend, policy or technology rather than whether a proposition is true. One word decides your structure.

"Outweigh" turns a descriptive task into a comparative one, and that is where most marks are lost, because many candidates list four benefits, list four drawbacks, then declare a winner in the final line without having compared anything.

The full set of instruction words is catalogued in our overview of Task 2 question types.

Listing both sides versus actually weighing them

Listing tells the reader that a benefit exists. Weighing tells the reader why one set of consequences matters more.

A weighed essay names its criterion of comparison, and only a few criteria do real work: how many people are affected, how permanent the effect is, and whether one side can be mitigated while the other cannot.

The model below uses the last of these, which is why its fourth paragraph exists at all.

Practice question (remote work)

The following task was written for this guide as practice material. It has not appeared in any examination.

In many companies, employees now work from home for most of the working week. Do the advantages of this development outweigh the disadvantages?

The five-minute plan for this question

• Verdict: advantages outweigh. Criterion = the drawbacks are fixable, the gains are not replicable in an office
• Advantages: commuting time recovered, more than eight working weeks a year; hiring stops depending on geography
• Disadvantages: loss of unplanned conversation; junior staff learn less by observation; isolation for those living alone
• Weighing: hybrid day, structured mentoring and social events repair the losses; nobody can shorten a commute or abolish distance
• Lexis to place: remediable, a matter of competence rather than postcode, structural

Band 9 model essay: predominantly remote work

It has become normal in many industries for staff to work remotely for the majority of the week. Although this arrangement weakens the informal contact on which teams depend, I believe its advantages, particularly the recovery of commuting time and the widening of the labour market, are the greater.

The clearest benefit is time. A worker who previously spent ninety minutes a day travelling recovers more than eight working weeks a year, and that time is generally reinvested in sleep, family or exercise rather than in additional labour. The second benefit is structural: once physical presence is no longer required, an employer in London can hire the best candidate in Manchester or Lisbon, and a parent in a small town gains access to work that was previously confined to the capital. Recruitment therefore becomes a matter of competence rather than postcode.

The costs are real but narrower. Remote teams lose the unplanned conversation that resolves a problem in thirty seconds, and junior staff in particular learn far less when they cannot observe experienced colleagues at close range. Isolation is a further risk for employees who live alone, since the office supplies much of their weekly social contact. These effects are concentrated in specific groups rather than spread across the workforce.

Weighed against one another, the two sides are not equivalent. The disadvantages are largely remediable: a fixed office day each week, structured mentoring and deliberate social events restore most of what remote working removes. The advantages, by contrast, cannot be replicated by any adjustment to office life, because the commute cannot be shortened and geography cannot be abolished.

In conclusion, the advantages of predominantly remote work outweigh the disadvantages, because the losses can be managed through hybrid scheduling while the gains in time and access to talent are structural and permanent.

Word count: 301 words. The advantages paragraph runs to 92 words and the disadvantages paragraph to 69. That imbalance is deliberate and defensible here because the essay argues that one side is smaller, and the weighing paragraph makes the argument explicit.

Why this scores

The three ways candidates lose marks on this type

All three types are marked on the same four criteria at 25 per cent each, and Task 2 contributes two thirds of the Writing band, so a one-band gain on essay type alone moves the overall Writing score by roughly 0.5.

You can model that arithmetic in the band score calculator before deciding where to spend your remaining preparation time.

How do you answer an IELTS problem and solution essay?

A problem and solution essay requires two things in equal measure: a diagnosis and a remedy. Devote roughly 110 words to two problems or causes and 110 words to two matched solutions. Answering only half the question caps Task Response at Band 5, regardless of language quality.

How to recognise it, and what the examiner requires

A problem and solution essay is a Task 2 prompt that presents an undesirable situation and instructs you both to explain something about it and to propose measures that would improve it.

The instruction line is almost always a pair joined by "and": What problems does this cause, and what can be done about them? or What are the causes of this, and what solutions can you suggest? The prompt never asks for your opinion on whether the situation is good or bad, so an opinion sentence is optional decoration rather than a requirement.

This is the single clearest structural difference between this type and the three covered earlier in this guide, and it is worth checking against the full taxonomy in our breakdown of Task 2 essay types before you commit to a plan.

The examiner is looking for four things under Task Response: that each named element of the question is addressed, that the problems or causes are genuinely distinct from one another, that each solution is plausible and connected to something you actually named, and that both halves are developed to a similar depth.

A solution that answers a problem you never raised is treated as an undeveloped point, not as a bonus.

Problems, causes and effects are three different things

Candidates lose more marks on this type by confusing these three words than by any grammatical error. A cause is what produces the situation, an effect is what the situation produces, and a problem is any negative element of either.

If the prompt asks for causes and you supply effects, you have answered a question that was not asked, and Task Response is assessed as partial.

The practical rule that follows is decisive: solutions must attack causes.

If you list effects in body paragraph one and then propose solutions in body paragraph two, the two paragraphs will not connect, and Coherence and Cohesion is marked down for a plan that does not hold together.

When the prompt asks for problems, silently convert each problem into the cause that produces it, then solve that cause.

Which paragraph structure should you use?

The block structure is safer and it is what I recommend to almost every candidate. Under exam pressure the paired structure fails in a predictable way: candidates write a rich, confident cause and then run out of ideas for its solution, producing a lopsided paragraph.

The block structure makes the imbalance visible to you while you are writing, because you can see that your solutions paragraph is three lines shorter than your causes paragraph and can still fix it.

Choose the paired structure only if your two causes are so different that grouping them would feel artificial.

Practice question written for this guide

Traffic congestion during peak hours is becoming steadily worse in most large cities. What are the main causes of this problem, and what measures could be taken to address them?

Write at least 250 words.

The five-minute plan

Five minutes of planning is not lost writing time; it is the reason the essay does not stall at 180 words. The sequence below is deliberately mechanical, and it mirrors the longer method set out in our guide to planning an IELTS essay.

1. Minute 1 - underline and classify. Two instructions: causes, measures. Block structure. Two causes, two measures. No opinion required, though a position on which measure matters most raises the ceiling.
2. Minute 2 - generate causes. Land use separating homes from jobs. Driving is underpriced. Rejected: population growth (too vague), poor public transport (that is the absence of a solution, not a cause).
3. Minute 3 - attach one measure to each cause. Underpricing gives congestion charging. Land use and peak demand give mass transit investment plus staggered working hours.
4. Minute 4 - find one concrete anchor per body paragraph. Induced demand for the causes paragraph; Singapore and Stockholm for the measures paragraph. Concrete anchors are what separate a Band 7 body from a Band 9 body.
5. Minute 5 - write the position sentence in full. Drafting the second sentence of the introduction word for word before you start prevents the wandering opening that costs so many candidates a band under Coherence and Cohesion.

Band 9 model essay: causes and solutions

Peak-hour congestion in large cities has worsened steadily over the past two decades. In my view the problem originates chiefly in dispersed urban planning and the low real cost of private car use, and the most effective remedies are therefore road pricing combined with sustained investment in mass transit.

The primary cause is the physical separation of housing from employment. As land prices in city centres have risen, workers have been pushed into outer suburbs that were designed around the assumption of car ownership, which means that millions of people must travel long radial distances at exactly the same hour. A second, less visible cause is that driving is underpriced. Fuel taxes and parking charges rarely reflect the delay a single vehicle imposes on every other road user, so the rational individual choice, to drive, produces an irrational collective outcome. Building additional lanes does not resolve this, because the extra capacity is absorbed by newly generated trips within a few years.

The most direct solution is to correct that price signal through congestion charging. Cities such as Singapore and Stockholm demonstrate that a modest daily charge for entering the central zone can reduce traffic volumes by roughly a fifth and, crucially, that the revenue can be ring-fenced for public transport. This leads to the second measure, which must run in parallel: frequent, reliable and integrated rail and bus services. A charge without an alternative is simply a tax on the poor, whereas a charge that funds a train every four minutes changes behaviour permanently. Employers can reinforce both measures by staggering start times and permitting remote work two days a week, which flattens the demand peak at almost no public cost.

Congestion is therefore best understood as a pricing and planning failure rather than a shortage of road space, and the remedies that work are those which reduce demand rather than expand supply.

Word count: 313 words. That sits comfortably inside the 270 to 320 range recommended throughout this guide, and it was produced in about 33 minutes of writing after 5 minutes of planning, leaving 2 minutes for on-screen proofreading.

Why this scores

Band 6 against Band 9: the same idea upgraded

Mistake, consequence, fix

If you are unsure whether your solutions genuinely attach to your causes, submit the essay to the AI essay grader, which marks the four criteria separately and will show you when Task Response is dragging an otherwise strong script down.

How do you answer a two-part (double question) IELTS Task 2 essay?

A two-part question contains two separate direct questions, and both must receive a full body paragraph of roughly 120 words. The single most common failure is answering the first question thoroughly and the second in one sentence, which limits Task Response to Band 6.

How to recognise it, and what the examiner requires

A two-part question, also called a double question or a direct question essay, is a Task 2 prompt containing two distinct interrogatives that are not variations of one another.

Typical pairings include a cause question plus an opinion question, a cause question plus an effect question, or a definition question plus a policy question. The giveaway is two question marks in the instruction line, or one question mark preceded by two separate interrogative phrases joined by "and".

What makes this type dangerous is that it looks easy. There is no argument to construct and no position to defend across the essay, so candidates relax and write whatever occurs to them.

The examiner, however, is applying a simple checklist: has question one been answered with reasons and an example, and has question two been answered with reasons and an example?

Partial coverage of one question is the difference between Band 6 and Band 8 on Task Response, and no amount of sophisticated vocabulary compensates for it.

The paragraph discipline required here is the same discipline described in our guide to Task 2 essay structure: one question, one paragraph, one topic sentence.

Note one further trap. When the second question begins with "do you think", "should", or "is this justified", the essay silently becomes an opinion essay in its second half, and a clear personal position becomes mandatory.

Hedged answers of the kind "there are arguments on both sides" score as an unclear position even though the first half of the essay may be excellent.

Paragraph structure

Two structural notes. First, do not give each question two body paragraphs; four bodies in 40 minutes produces thin development and usually pushes the essay past 350 words, where accuracy collapses.

Second, the introduction of a two-part essay should preview both answers rather than announcing that the essay will discuss them. The distinction between previewing an answer and announcing a topic is worth studying in detail in our guide to Task 2 introductions and conclusions.

Practice question written for this guide

In many developed countries the number of people aged over 65 is growing faster than any other age group. What problems does this create for the economy, and should the retirement age be raised?

Write at least 250 words.

The five-minute plan

1. Minute 1 - separate the two questions. Question one: economic problems of ageing. Question two: should the retirement age rise. Question two demands an opinion, so a position is mandatory.
2. Minute 2 - answer question one in note form. Falling ratio of workers to retirees. Care work absorbs labour without productivity growth. Consequence: less fiscal space for education and infrastructure.
3. Minute 3 - decide the opinion for question two and its qualification. Yes, raise it, but gradually and with an exemption for physically demanding occupations. A qualified yes is stronger than an unqualified one, provided the qualification is argued rather than merely mentioned.
4. Minute 4 - one concrete anchor per body. The four-to-two worker ratio for body one; the historical accident of the age of 65 for body two.
5. Minute 5 - write the preview sentence. "The economic strain it creates is real, and in my view a phased increase in the retirement age is a necessary, though insufficient, part of the response." Both questions are now answered before the body has started, which is exactly what a Band 9 introduction does.

Band 9 model essay: two-part question

Population ageing is now the defining demographic fact of most high-income economies, with the over-65 share approaching a quarter of the total in countries such as Japan and Italy. The economic strain it creates is real, and in my view a phased increase in the retirement age is a necessary, though insufficient, part of the response.

The central economic problem is a shrinking ratio of contributors to claimants. Pensions and public healthcare in most developed states are funded from the taxes of people currently in work, so when four workers per retiree become two, either contributions must rise steeply or benefits must fall. The secondary problem is a diversion of labour rather than money: care of the very old is labour-intensive and difficult to automate, which means an expanding share of the workforce is absorbed by a sector that produces no measurable productivity growth. Together these pressures squeeze the public spending available for education and infrastructure, the very investments that would raise future output.

Raising the retirement age addresses the arithmetic directly, and I support it on condition that it is introduced gradually and unevenly. When state pensions were first designed, life expectancy after retirement was measured in a handful of years; it is now measured in decades, so a fixed retirement age of 65 is an accident of history rather than a principle. Adding one year per decade, announced twenty years in advance, would allow people to plan. The important qualification is occupational: a construction labourer and a university lecturer do not age identically at work, and any uniform increase penalises those in physically demanding jobs. A defensible policy therefore raises the general threshold while preserving early access for workers whose bodies have already been spent.

The answer to both questions is thus connected: the burden is genuine, and a flexible, well-signalled increase in working life is the fairest way to absorb it.

Word count: 314 words. Body one is 108 words and body two is 123 words, a difference small enough that neither question reads as an afterthought.

Why this scores

Mistake, consequence, fix

How do you answer a positive or negative development essay?

A positive or negative development essay asks for a verdict on a trend, not a balanced survey. State the verdict in the introduction, spend about 200 words defending it, and concede the opposing side in roughly 60 words. A neutral, both-sides answer is scored as an unclear position.

How to recognise it, and what the examiner requires

A positive or negative development essay presents a trend that is already happening and asks you to evaluate it.

The family of wordings is wide but the requirement is identical in each case: Is this a positive or a negative development?, Is this a positive or a negative trend?, Do you think this is a good thing or a bad thing?, and Do the advantages of this development outweigh the disadvantages? all demand a verdict rather than a survey.

The type is frequently confused with the advantages and disadvantages essay covered earlier in this guide, and the confusion is costly. An advantages and disadvantages prompt that does not ask for an opinion can be answered neutrally. A positive or negative development prompt cannot.

The word "development" or "trend" signals that the phenomenon is real and ongoing, and the question is what you make of it.

Paragraph structure

The deliberate asymmetry matters. If body one and body two are the same length, the essay reads as a survey and the examiner has to infer your position from the conclusion, which is the definition of a position that is not clear throughout.

Conceding an objection and then defeating it is the single most reliable way to look like a Band 9 writer, because it demonstrates that you have considered the trend rather than merely reacted to it.

Handle the transition into the concession with a content-bearing phrase such as "The serious objection is distributional rather than technological" rather than a bare connective; our guide to linking words and cohesive devices explains why overt connectives at every paragraph boundary actually lower the Coherence and Cohesion score.

Practice question written for this guide

An increasing number of workplace tasks that were once performed by people are now carried out by artificial intelligence. Is this a positive or a negative development?

Write at least 250 words.

The five-minute plan

1. Minute 1 - fix the verdict and its condition. Positive, conditional on distribution of the gains. A conditional verdict is still a clear verdict, provided the condition is stated once and defended.
2. Minute 2 - choose the single strongest supporting argument. Removal of repetitive, error-prone work; shift from processing towards judgement. Rejected: economic growth (too abstract to develop in 110 words).
3. Minute 3 - choose the strongest objection and how you will answer it. Objection: displacement is regionally and demographically uneven. Answer: this argues for transition policy, not against the technology.
4. Minute 4 - anchors. Radiology triage for body one; the forty-eight-year-old clerk against the new graduate for body two. A specific human case is worth more than a statistic you cannot verify.
5. Minute 5 - write the verdict sentence and the concluding reason. Knowing your last sentence before you begin prevents the conclusion that drifts into a new argument.

Band 9 model essay: positive or negative development

The delegation of routine cognitive work to software has accelerated sharply since 2023, moving beyond manufacturing into law, medicine and administration. On balance I regard this as a positive development, though the judgement holds only if the resulting productivity gains are distributed rather than concentrated.

The clearest benefit is the removal of work that is repetitive, error-prone and poorly suited to human attention. A radiologist who reviews four hundred scans a day fatigues; a system that screens the same images does not, and the sensible arrangement is one in which the machine performs the first pass and the specialist adjudicates the ambiguous cases. The same logic applies to document review, invoice reconciliation and initial customer enquiries. Where this has been implemented carefully, the effect has not been the disappearance of the profession but a shift in what the professional spends the day doing, from processing towards judgement, negotiation and explanation, which are precisely the activities people find meaningful.

The serious objection is distributional rather than technological. Automation lowers costs immediately and creates new roles only slowly, and the workers displaced from a call centre in one region rarely become the prompt engineers hired in another. A forty-eight-year-old clerk offered retraining is not in the same position as a graduate entering the labour market, and treating the two as interchangeable is the standard failure of optimistic forecasts. This is an argument for portable retraining entitlements, wage insurance and slower phasing, not an argument against the technology itself.

Weighing these considerations, the balance falls on the positive side because the alternative, deliberately preserving tasks that no longer require a person, has never produced lasting prosperity in any economy that has attempted it. The task for governments is not to slow the transition but to ensure that those who bear its costs also receive a share of its gains.

Word count: 306 words. Body one runs to 113 words and body two to 88, the deliberate asymmetry that signals a defended verdict rather than a neutral survey.

Why this scores

Band 6 against Band 9: the same idea upgraded

Mistake, consequence, fix

What should you do when the Task 2 wording does not match any standard essay type?

Unfamiliar wording is not a new essay type; it is a combination of familiar ones. Ignore the label and count the instruction verbs. Each separate instruction earns its own body paragraph, so a prompt with two instructions produces a four-paragraph essay and one with three produces five.

The counting method

A hybrid prompt is any Task 2 question whose instruction line contains elements drawn from more than one standard type, for example a cause question followed by an evaluation question. Candidates panic at these because they are trying to name the type before they can plan.

The naming step is unnecessary. Three questions decide the entire structure:

1. How many instructions are there? Each imperative or interrogative separated by "and" is one instruction. That number equals the number of body paragraphs, and in practice it is almost always two.
2. Does any instruction demand a personal position? The triggers are: to what extent, do you agree, is this positive or negative, do you think, in your opinion, should, and do the advantages outweigh. If any is present, the introduction must contain a verdict.
3. Is any instruction conditional or hypothetical? Wordings such as "what could be done" or "how might this change" require modal verbs and speculation rather than description; answering them in the present simple reads as a failure to address the task.

An embedded question is an instruction hidden inside a statement rather than marked with a question mark, for example "Discuss the extent to which this is caused by government policy." It is an instruction and must be answered exactly as if it ended in a question mark.

Scanning the prompt for verbs in the imperative, such as discuss, explain, suggest, evaluate and consider, catches these reliably.

Six unusual wordings mapped to a structure

A worked mini-plan for a hybrid prompt

Fewer young people in many countries now learn to play a musical instrument. Why is this happening, and is it a positive or a negative development?

Two instructions, so two bodies, and the second demands a verdict. Introduction, 50 words: paraphrase the decline, then state both answers, namely that the fall is driven by cost and by competing digital leisure, and that it is a negative development.

Body one, 115 words: instrumental tuition has moved from state schools to private provision, so it now tracks household income; and short-form entertainment offers reward without the multi-year delay that an instrument requires.

Body two, 115 words: verdict negative, because instrumental practice builds sustained attention and delayed gratification that few other activities train; concede that digital tools have widened access to music-making, then answer that consumption is not the same as production. Conclusion, 35 words: both answers restated together.

Total roughly 315 words.

Note that the plan is 120 words and the essay is 315. The ratio is deliberate: a plan that is a quarter of the length of the essay contains enough to write from without becoming a first draft.

If you want to see how these plans read once expanded, work through the annotated scripts in our Task 2 sample answers library.

A single decision tree for any Task 2 prompt

Four steps convert any prompt into a paragraph plan: underline the instruction verbs, count them, decide whether an opinion is demanded, then allocate one body paragraph per instruction. This works for all seven Task 2 types and takes under sixty seconds.

The four steps

1. Underline every instruction. Read only the final sentence or two of the prompt, where the instructions live. Underline each imperative verb and each interrogative phrase. Include embedded instructions with no question mark.
2. Count them. One instruction means two body paragraphs, each carrying a different reason for the same answer. Two instructions mean two body paragraphs, one per instruction. Three instructions mean three short bodies, and this is the only case in which you should write five paragraphs.
3. Test for a mandatory opinion. Search for: to what extent, do you agree, do you think, in your opinion, is this positive or negative, do the advantages outweigh, should. If any appears, the introduction must state a verdict and the conclusion must repeat it.
4. Allocate words before writing. Introduction 45 to 55, each body 110 to 125, conclusion 35 to 55, total 270 to 320. Check the on-screen word counter once, at the end of body one, and adjust body two rather than the conclusion.

The seven types in one table

Two closing observations on using this tree in the exam. First, the decision must be made before you write, not discovered while writing, because a plan changed at the 180-word mark leaves no time to repair the paragraph you have already produced.

Second, the tree tells you the shape of the essay but not its quality; a correctly structured essay with two undeveloped ideas per body still sits at Band 6.

Structure buys you the marks in Coherence and Cohesion and protects Task Response, and development is what earns the rest.

What does Band 8 vocabulary actually look like?

Band 8 vocabulary is precise, not exotic. The descriptors reward a wide resource used fluently and flexibly with only occasional inaccuracy, so a common word placed in the correct collocation outscores a rare word forced into the wrong slot. One misused academic word can pull Lexical Resource from 8 down to 6.5.

Collocation is the tendency of particular words to occur together as a fixed or strongly preferred pair, such as pose a threat or draw a conclusion.

Examiners read for collocation before they read for rarity, because collocation is the part of vocabulary that cannot be memorised from a list and therefore reveals real command. The table below tracks the same idea through four bands so the behavioural difference is visible rather than abstract.

Notice what changes between Band 7 and Band 8. The word count is similar. What rises is specificity: air pollution becomes concentrations of airborne pollutants, harms becomes placing a measurable burden on.

The Band 9 version adds one further move, naming the actual pollutants, which converts a general claim into an informed one. None of these upgrades depends on a word the reader has never met.

Why a misused rare word costs more than a well-used common one

Lexical Resource is judged on the density of errors relative to the ambition of the attempt, but an error that obscures meaning is weighted more heavily than one that merely reads oddly. Candidates who harvest vocabulary from thesaurus lists reliably produce the errors below.

The practical rule is to keep an active vocabulary of roughly four hundred academic items you can collocate confidently, rather than a passive list of two thousand you can only recognise.

A structured schedule such as the 30-day IELTS vocabulary plan is more useful than volume, and daily retrieval practice through Word Coach converts recognition into production, which is the only form the examiner can see.

The academic collocations that carry Band 8 writing

Roughly sixty collocations, grouped by rhetorical function, cover the majority of what Task 2 and the analytical parts of Task 1 require. Learn them by function rather than alphabetically, because you retrieve them by intention: you need a way to introduce a problem, not a word beginning with p.

Topic vocabulary for the 12 recurring IELTS themes

Twelve themes account for the large majority of Task 2 prompts: education, environment, technology, health, crime, work, government spending, media, globalisation, transport, family and science. Eight to ten precise items per theme, roughly one hundred in total, is enough to write on any of them without reaching for vague general vocabulary.

Education

Environment

Technology

Health

Crime and justice

Work and employment

Government and public spending

Media and advertising

Globalisation and culture

Transport and urbanisation

Family and society

Science and research

Which overused words should you upgrade, and to what?

Around a dozen general words appear in almost every Band 6 script: good, bad, big, small, a lot of, very, important, people, thing, nowadays, get and make. Replacing each with two or three precise alternatives raises Lexical Resource measurably, provided the replacement matches the register of the surrounding sentence.

The register trap

Register is the level of formality a piece of writing sustains, and IELTS Writing requires a consistent semi-formal academic register. Upgrading upwards is not automatically safe: commence for start, endeavour for try, and utilise for use read as strained in an essay.

Downgrading is equally visible: kids, a big deal, loads of and stuff like that belong to speech.

Two sentences with mismatched register damage Lexical Resource more than five plain but accurate sentences, and a submission through the AI writing checker will normally flag register clashes before it flags anything else.

Which phrases should you delete from your writing?

Memorised openers and clichés are actively penalised: the descriptors treat memorised language as not contributing to the response, and an answer judged wholly memorised can be discounted. Deleting roughly fifteen stock phrases typically saves twenty to thirty words that can then carry real content.

The same discipline applies to over-quoting the prompt.

Copying the question wording verbatim in your introduction does not count towards your word total in the examiner's judgement of your own production, which is why controlled rewriting technique matters; the methods set out in the guide to IELTS paraphrasing techniques keep the introduction original without distorting the task.

The grammatical structures that produce a Band 7+ score

Grammatical Range and Accuracy is 25 per cent of each task. Band 7 requires a variety of complex structures with frequent error-free sentences; Band 8 requires a wide range with the majority of sentences error-free. Fifteen structures, used naturally rather than inserted, cover the full range an examiner looks for.

Nominalisation is the conversion of a verb or adjective into a noun so that a clause becomes a compact noun phrase, and it is the single most efficient way to raise density without adding length.

Candidates who need the underlying grammar rebuilt rather than merely listed should work through the grammar for Band 7 guide before drilling these patterns.

How do you write complex sentences without breaking them?

A complex sentence contains at least one subordinate clause; a long sentence merely contains many words. Band 7 requires variety of complex forms with frequent error-free sentences, so accuracy outranks length. A safe working target is sentences of eight to thirty words with a deliberate short sentence every fourth or fifth.

The three ways to join clauses

A comma splice is the joining of two independent clauses with only a comma, and it is the most frequent punctuation error in Band 6 and 6.5 scripts.

The sentence Rents have risen sharply, however wages have remained flat is a comma splice; however is an adverb, not a conjunction, and cannot hold two clauses together. A run-on sentence commits the same fault with no punctuation at all.

The rule is mechanical and therefore easy to eliminate: if you can put a full stop where the comma is and both halves still stand alone, the comma is wrong. The punctuation guide sets out the remaining cases.

From choppy to varied

The following paragraph contains nine accurate but uniformly short sentences. Accuracy alone caps it at Band 6 for range.

Online learning is popular. It is cheap. Students can study at home. They do not need to travel. This saves time. However, it has problems. Students feel isolated. They lose motivation. Teachers cannot monitor them easily.

The same content, rewritten with subordination, a participle clause, a colon and one deliberate short sentence, demonstrates range without adding new ideas.

Online learning has grown popular largely because it is inexpensive: students can study from home, and the time they would otherwise spend travelling is returned to them. The model is not without difficulties, however. Isolated from their peers and only loosely monitored by tutors, many learners lose motivation within a matter of weeks, and completion rates suffer accordingly. The obstacle is not the technology itself but the absence of the social structure that a physical classroom supplies.

The rewrite is four sentences of 34, 8, 32 and 24 words. That alternation is what the descriptors mean by variety, and it is a more reliable route to Band 7 than any individual rare structure. Extended practice on clause-joining is set out in the complex sentences guide.

How do you sound careful rather than absolute?

Hedging is the use of modal verbs, adverbs and quantifiers to state a claim with an accurate degree of confidence. Absolute claims such as all, never and always are almost always false and are easy for an examiner to falsify, which weakens Task Response. Hedging costs about three words per sentence and protects the argument.

Hedging must not tip into vagueness. Three hedges in one sentence, as in It may perhaps possibly be the case that, reads as evasion and costs marks under both Task Response and Lexical Resource. One hedge per claim is the working limit.

How does cohesion really work?

Cohesion is the set of grammatical and lexical links that hold text together, and connectors are only one of five mechanisms. The descriptors explicitly penalise mechanical or over-use of cohesive devices at Band 6, so the higher bands are reached through referencing, substitution, ellipsis and lexical chains, not through more linking words.

The four mechanisms beyond connectors

Referencing is the use of pronouns and determiners to point back to something already mentioned, using this, these, such, the former and the latter. Write This shift has three consequences rather than This has three consequences: adding the summary noun after this removes ambiguity and demonstrates control.

Substitution replaces a repeated element with a shorter proxy, as in Private schools achieve higher grades, but state schools increasingly do so as well. Ellipsis omits a recoverable element entirely, as in Some countries have banned the practice; others have not.

A lexical chain is a sequence of related words threaded through a paragraph, so that a paragraph on transport moves through congestion, commuters, road capacity, journey times and modal shift without ever repeating a single noun mechanically.

The fifth mechanism is information order. Given-to-new flow means each sentence begins with information the reader already holds and ends with the new element, which the next sentence can then pick up. Compare Emissions fell by 12 per cent.

A congestion charge was the cause of this reduction with Emissions fell by 12 per cent. That reduction was driven by a congestion charge introduced in 2018. The second version reaches Band 8 cohesion with no connector at all.

Connectors grouped by function

A useful diagnostic: count the connectors in one body paragraph of your own writing. More than three in a paragraph of five sentences is usually mechanical use, and mechanical use is a Band 6 marker regardless of how accurate the connectors are.

The full inventory, with the register level of each item, is set out in the guide to linking words and cohesive devices.

Punctuation, articles and the errors that cap your grammar band

Grammatical Range and Accuracy has two halves, and accuracy is where most candidates lose the half band. Band 7 requires frequent error-free sentences; Band 8 requires the majority of sentences to be error free. The thirty-four errors below account for the large majority of what appears in real scripts.

Two points about mechanics under computer-delivered conditions. From mid-2026 the IELTS partners have withdrawn paper-based testing worldwide, with final paper sittings around 27 June 2026, so all of these errors will be produced by typing rather than handwriting; confirm your own format with your test centre.

Typing changes the error profile. Autocorrect is disabled, the spellchecker does not run, and the most common new failures are duplicated words left behind by editing, missing capitals after a full stop, and a sentence half-rewritten so that the subject and verb no longer agree.

Reserve three minutes at the end of Task 2 and two at the end of Task 1 to read the screen for exactly these four categories: articles, verb endings, sentence boundaries and leftover fragments.

Article errors deserve separate drilling because they are the most frequent single fault in Band 6.5 scripts and the easiest to eliminate mechanically; the rules are set out with decision trees in the guide to articles a, an and the.

For everything else, error frequency is the metric that matters: count your errors per hundred words across three timed essays, and treat anything above five per hundred as the ceiling on your Grammatical Range and Accuracy score until it comes down.

What actually changes between Band 6, 7, 8 and 9?

The jump from Band 6 to Band 9 is not about harder words. Across all four criteria - each worth 25 per cent of the task score - the change is from covering the task to controlling it.

Band 6 answers are understood despite errors; Band 8 answers are understood because of precision, with errors rare and slips only occasional.

The official descriptors are written for examiners, not candidates, which is why most self-diagnosis fails. What follows translates each band into observable behaviour on the page - the things you can actually count in your own script.

For the descriptor wording itself, see our breakdown of how IELTS Writing is scored against the band descriptors.

Why so many candidates stall at 6.5

The single most common cause of a 6.5 plateau is development failure: the writer produces enough ideas but stops each one after a single sentence.

A body paragraph that reads claim, linker, second claim, linker, third claim has three underdeveloped points where two extended points would score higher.

Band 7 under Task Response requires ideas to be extended and supported - which means each main point needs roughly three to four sentences of causal reasoning, not a list.

The second cause is error density: a script with an article, tense or agreement slip in every second sentence cannot reach the Band 7 requirement that most sentences be error-free, no matter how good the ideas are.

If you are sitting on 6.5, count your error-free sentences before you buy another vocabulary book, and work through our route from Band 6 to Band 7.

The same essay at Band 6.5 and at Band 8.5

The distance between 6.5 and 8.5 is roughly twenty words of extra precision per paragraph, not a different intellect. Below, the identical argument is written twice: a 6.5 version of around 120 words and an 8.5 rewrite of around 140. The ideas are the same. Only development, cohesion and grammatical control change.

Practice prompt written for this guide. Some people believe that governments should make public transport free of charge in order to reduce traffic congestion. Others argue that the money would be better spent improving road infrastructure. Discuss both views and give your own opinion.

Version A - Band 6.5 (two body paragraphs, 121 words)

Firstly, free public transport has many advantages. It is cheaper for people and so many people will use bus and train instead of car. Moreover, this reduce the traffic in the city centre. For example, in my country the government reduce ticket price and it was very good.

On the other hand, improving roads is also important. Moreover, many roads are old and they have a lot of holes, so the cars go slowly and this makes traffic. In addition, building new road can help the transport of goods.

However, some people say new roads only bring more cars. In conclusion, I think free transport is better because it is cheaper for the government and also good for the environment.

Version B - Band 8.5 rewrite (two body paragraphs, 143 words)

The case for free public transport rests on price elasticity. When the marginal cost of a bus journey falls to zero, the private car loses the one advantage it reliably holds for short urban trips, and commuters who previously drove out of habit begin to switch.

Tallinn, which abolished fares for registered residents in 2013, is frequently cited in transport research precisely because the shift it produced was measurable rather than theoretical.

The opposing argument is that fare subsidies treat a symptom while the network itself decays.

Resurfacing arterial roads, redesigning junctions and separating freight routes from commuter corridors all raise the throughput of the existing network, which benefits every road user rather than only those living near a bus route.

The weakness of this position is that added capacity is historically absorbed within a few years by induced demand.

Word count: 143 words.

Notice what did not change: the argument, the structure, and the number of paragraphs. This is why rewriting an existing essay is the fastest form of practice, and why our Task 2 structure guide insists that structure is the cheap part of the score.

How do you assess your own writing honestly?

Self-assessment works only if it is binary. Ask twenty-four yes or no diagnostic questions - six per criterion - score one point per yes, then convert each criterion total into a band using the conversion table below, and average the four bands. Vague self-grading (this feels like a 7) is worthless; a checklist is not.

The 24-question self-assessment rubric

Converting the score into a band

Average the four criterion bands and round to the nearest half band - that is your task band.

Then combine your two tasks with the official weighting: Writing band equals Task 1 band times one third plus Task 2 band times two thirds, rounded to the nearest half band. Our band score calculator will do that arithmetic for you.

Self-assessment has one known failure mode: you cannot see the errors you do not know are errors. That is why a second opinion matters.

Our AI writing checker marks a submitted essay against all four criteria and returns the same criterion-level breakdown you have just produced by hand, so you can compare your honest self-score against an independent one.

We published the validation data - agreement rates against certified examiners, and where the model disagrees - in our study comparing AI and human IELTS grading.

Where the two scores differ by more than half a band, the disagreement itself is the most useful thing on the page: it shows you which criterion you are blind to.

What loses marks fastest?

Score damage is not evenly distributed. Going fully off topic can cost three or more bands in a single stroke, while repetitive vocabulary costs perhaps half a band.

Fix the top of this list first: the four highest-cost errors are all structural decisions made in the first five minutes, before a single body sentence is written.

The last five minutes: the proofreading protocol

Reserve five minutes and check in a fixed order of descending value: task coverage, then position consistency, then paragraphing, then the four highest-yield grammar checks, then spelling and punctuation.

The order matters because a missing overview costs up to two bands and a misspelt word costs almost nothing - and you will not reach item twenty if you start there.

Why the sequence is fixed

Random rereading finds surface errors first because they are visually loud. Structural errors are silent: nothing on the page flags a missing second part of the question.

Checking top-down guarantees that if the invigilator calls time at minute 58, you have already spent your attention on the expensive problems. A single fixed overview added at minute 57 is worth more than fifteen commas corrected.

The 20-item checklist

• Task coverage: every part of the prompt is answered, including the second question if there was one.
• Task 1: the overview paragraph exists, is separate, and contains no specific data.
• Task 1: the units, dates and axis labels in my figures match the source exactly.
• Task 2: my position appears in the introduction in one unambiguous sentence.
• Task 2: the conclusion states the same position, not a softened or reversed one.
• No sentence copied verbatim from the rubric.
• Both word counts are above the minimum and inside the target range on the on-screen counter.
• Four or more paragraphs per task, each separated by a blank line on screen.
• Each paragraph has one topic; no paragraph contains two competing ideas.
• Every singular countable noun has an article or determiner.
• Every verb agrees with its true subject, especially after a long noun phrase.
• Tense is consistent and correct - past for completed periods, present for general truths, future for projections.
• Every sentence has a finite main verb; no fragments.
• No comma splices: two independent clauses are joined by a conjunction, semicolon or full stop.
• Plural and singular forms of the topic nouns are consistent.
• Prepositions after the trend verbs are correct (increase to, increase by, a rise in).
• No contractions anywhere in either task.
• No word repeated more than three times outside the topic noun.
• Capital letters at the start of every sentence and on all proper nouns.
• Spelling of the ten words you personally get wrong most often, checked deliberately.

On-screen equivalents now the test is computer-delivered

The IELTS partners announced in March 2026 that paper-based IELTS is withdrawn worldwide from mid-2026, with final paper sittings around 27 June 2026; confirm the position with your own test centre. In practice this changes the mechanics of proofreading, not the priorities.

Use the built-in word counter rather than estimating, and check it once at minute 18 and once at minute 55.

Use copy, cut and paste to move a misplaced sentence instead of rewriting it, and use the cut-and-reinsert move to fix a paragraph that started in the wrong place. Insert a blank line between paragraphs rather than indenting, since indentation is not reliably visible in the answer box.

Remember that there is no spell-checker and no autocorrect, so the last item on the checklist genuinely needs doing.

Finally, scroll to the top and read the whole script once in the box itself, because errors hide in the part of the text that is off-screen while you type.

Practising in the same conditions matters more than it used to - use our on-screen writing test and the full test simulator rather than a notebook.

An eight-week IELTS Writing study plan

Eight weeks at five to six hours per week is enough to move a stable Band 6.0 to a Band 7.0 or 7.5, provided the output is scored rather than merely produced.

The plan below front-loads criteria understanding in week one, spends weeks two and three on Task 1, weeks four to six on Task 2, and reserves the final two weeks for timed and full mock conditions.

If you have four weeks rather than eight, run weeks 1, 3, 5 and 7 and accept a narrower Task 1 coverage. If you have twelve, repeat weeks 5 and 6 twice - development and accuracy are where returns are highest.

Broaden your topic vocabulary in parallel with Word Coach and the 30-day vocabulary plan rather than as a separate project.

How do you practise so that you actually improve?

Deliberate practice is a six-step loop, not a volume exercise: write under time, obtain a criterion-level diagnosis, extract exactly two recurring error patterns, drill those two patterns in isolation, rewrite the same essay applying the fixes, then move to a new prompt. Twelve essays through this loop beat forty unmarked ones.

The loop, step by step

1. Write under exam time. Forty minutes for Task 2, twenty for Task 1, on screen, no dictionary. Untimed writing trains a skill you will not be allowed to use.
2. Get a criterion-level diagnosis. A single overall number tells you nothing actionable. You need four numbers and the reason for each - from a teacher, from the 24-question rubric above, or from the writing checker.
3. Extract exactly two error patterns. Not twenty corrections - two patterns that explain the largest number of corrections. Typically one grammar pattern (say, missing articles before abstract singular nouns) and one higher-order pattern (say, paragraphs that list rather than develop).
4. Drill the two patterns in isolation. Twenty sentences targeting the article rule; five body paragraphs targeting development. Isolation drilling is faster than hoping the pattern fixes itself inside the next full essay.
5. Rewrite the same essay. Same prompt, same plan, applying the two fixes.
6. Only then take a new prompt. Pull fresh ones from our Task 2 samples or the topic bank with Band 9 answers.

Why rewriting beats writing something new

Writing a new essay every time practises the thing you already do; rewriting practises the thing you cannot yet do.

On a fresh prompt, roughly seventy per cent of your effort goes into idea generation and planning - work you have already proven you can do - leaving little attention for the specific weakness.

On a rewrite, the ideas and structure are fixed, so one hundred per cent of your attention goes to the two target patterns.

Rewriting is also the only way to prove a fix has taken: if the same essay comes back with the same error, the drill did not work and repeating it is cheaper than discovering the same thing eight essays later.

A reasonable ratio is one rewrite for every new essay, at least until your error log stops repeating itself.

The error log

Keep one table, not a pile of marked scripts. Log only recurring errors - anything appearing twice or more - and stop logging a pattern once it has been absent from three consecutive essays. A log longer than twelve live rows means you are collecting rather than fixing.

Review the log for two minutes immediately before every practice session and for two minutes immediately before you start proofreading in the exam. Common patterns and their fixes are catalogued in our list of common IELTS grammar mistakes.

Writing on test day: the 60-minute protocol

You have sixty minutes and no extra reading time. Spend the first two minutes reading both prompts and deciding the order, twenty minutes on Task 1, forty on Task 2 minus your proofreading reserve.

The single most damaging test-day error is overrunning Task 1, because the time comes directly out of the task worth twice as much.

The first two minutes

Read both prompts before writing anything. Identify the Task 1 chart type and, for Task 2, the essay type and the exact instruction (discuss both views and give your opinion is a different task from to what extent do you agree).

Underline the qualifier - only, main, in developing countries, young people - because that qualifier is what off-topic essays ignore. Then write a four-line plan for Task 2: position, body one topic, body two topic, and the one example you will use.

Two minutes of planning routinely saves five minutes of mid-essay hesitation.

Which task first?

Either order is permitted and neither is penalised. What is penalised is an unfinished Task 2, so if you are unsure, protect the forty-mark task by writing it first. Whichever order you choose, decide it before test day and rehearse it - the exam is not the place to experiment.

If you run out of ideas

Do not stare at the prompt. Run three prompts against it in sequence: who is affected (individuals, employers, government, the environment), what happens if nothing changes, and what the strongest objection to your own position would be. Any one of these produces a paragraph.

If an example will not come, use a category rather than a fabricated statistic - urban commuters in large European capitals is safer and scores the same as an invented figure, because examiners assess how the example supports the argument, not whether it is verifiable.

Never leave a paragraph half-written while you think; write the weaker version and improve it in the proofreading pass.

If you are behind at minute 45

At minute 45 you should have Task 1 complete and at least the introduction and first body paragraph of Task 2 done.

If you do not, triage in this order: write the second body paragraph shorter than planned, keep it developed rather than listing; then write a two-sentence conclusion, because an essay without a conclusion loses more under Coherence and Cohesion than a short final paragraph does; then, only if time remains, extend.

Never abandon Task 2 mid-paragraph to polish Task 1. A complete 260-word Task 2 outscores a beautiful 200-word fragment.

If you finish early

Do not add a fifth body paragraph - length beyond about 320 words buys nothing and adds error surface. Run the twenty-item proofreading checklist in order instead.

If the checklist is clean and time remains, do one targeted pass for your top two error-log patterns, then a final pass converting any weak general verb (do, make, get, have) into a precise one. Then stop.

Late-stage rewriting of sentences that were already correct is the most common way candidates introduce new errors.

IELTS Writing myths that cost people marks

Most persistent IELTS Writing advice is either outdated or invented. The ten myths below appear in the descriptors nowhere, and acting on several of them - particularly using long words for their own sake and memorising idioms - actively lowers Lexical Resource, because inaccuracy is penalised more heavily than modesty.

Where advice conflicts, check the descriptors themselves rather than a forum. The band descriptors and official task instructions are published by the test partners at ielts.org and takeielts.britishcouncil.org, and everything in this guide is built on them.

The whole guide in one page

If you remember nothing else from this guide, remember these nine things. Answer the exact question that was asked, not the topic it sits in. Put an overview in every Task 1 answer.

Cover every bullet in every General Training letter. State a clear position in Task 2 and hold it to the last sentence. Develop each idea with an explanation and a specific example rather than a second idea.

Prefer the word you control to the word that sounds impressive. Vary your sentence structure but never at the cost of accuracy. Write about 170-190 words for Task 1 and 270-320 for Task 2.

Keep the last five minutes for a structured proofread, not a nervous reread.

Those nine rules are not a shortcut around the work. They are what the work produces. The examiner is not looking for a candidate who has memorised a template; the descriptors explicitly penalise that.

They are looking for someone who can address a task fully, organise a response logically, use precise language, and control grammar under time pressure. Every table, model answer and drill on this page exists to build one of those four abilities.

The fastest way to convert reading into a band is to write one timed answer, get it diagnosed against all four criteria, fix the two error patterns it exposes, and rewrite it.

Our AI writing checker is built for exactly that loop, and we published the alignment study comparing it with certified examiners so you can judge how much weight to put on its verdict.

When you want the pressure of the real clock, the full exam simulation runs the whole sitting end to end.

Start with one essay today. Not a perfect one - a finished one, written inside 40 minutes, with the last five spent checking. That single habit, repeated, is what moves a Writing band.