Step 1 – understand the rules of the game (the band score criteria)

The first step must be to understand how the writing is marked. If you don’t do that, your chances are much reduced. Let me explain. Native speakers sometimes have to take IELTS too. They don’t always do so well and occasionally embarrass themselves by not getting a band 8 score. Why? Are they not:

Band 8 Very Good User
Has fully operational command of the language with only occasional unsystematic inaccuracies and inappropriacies. Misunderstandings may occur in unfamiliar situations. Handles complex detailed argumentation well.

Of course they are. They simply haven’t understood the rules of the game. The rules are like this.

• Writing is marked according to 4 criteria (lexical resource/grammatical range and accuracy/coherence and cohesion/task response)
• You get a score out of 9 for each of these and then the marks are averaged to give you your final score

The reality is that if you get much less than 8.0 in any one of those criteria, it becomes much harder to get a final 8.0. Your aim has to be to get 8.0 in each criteria. If you don’t, you probably need to improve your score in the other criteria – tough.

Grammar – it’s about range and accuracy

This is what it says about grammar.

uses a wide range of structures
• the majority of sentences are error-free
• makes only very occasional errors or inappropriacies

One point to note is that it is not just about how many mistakes you make. You also need a wide range of structures too. I will explain more about that in a later lesson.

The majority of the sentences are error-free

This means that if your essay has around 15 sentences (a good number), then you probably need to write about 10 entirely correct sentences. That means no mistakes.

Makes only very occasional errors or inappropriacies

In a way, this is another way of saying the same thing. You need to write in such a way as the examiner is surprised when you get something wrong.