We get this a lot. Someone walks in and says they have almost aced the IELTS. They got an overall band of 8, and they are happy in general. But..
If you ask a writer where stories hide, they would say the stories hid in the most familiar place of all – right after that tentative, italicised but. What is the story here? It is a familiar story. A story as old as… well… IELTS. (or PTE, or <insert name of English exam here>).
What is it about writing that makes it so difficult? Apart from that fact that we are all a little too comfortable in the certainty that there are these much faster than we are machines that are always at the ready to correct our errors and slips, there is the issue of not paying enough attention to features that make our writing good. And I mean really, really, good.
One such feature is sentence variety. Writing grammatically correct sentences is all great and swimming. But what about keeping the reader entertained? What needs to be done to make sure that the readers do not feel they are reading the same sentences over and over again with only a few word replacements here and there?
The answer is simple. Ensure that each sentence, even if it conveys the same information conveys it in a different manner. It is the same as making an awesome cake. The ingredients are the same, the baking temperature is the same. The recipe is the same. However each cake made by a different cook is ever so slightly different.
And what accounts for the difference? Style. Making sure that your IELTS writing has the style it need for it to get past a 7 band or better, reach an 8 Band. Do you have the variety in you to get an 8 in IELTS writing? Take the test here, and see what you score!
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