12 Years of IELTS Writing Task 2 Knowledge in 6 Hours

0:00 you just find The Ultimate Guide to I reading Tas two this is the longest most detailed guide to I reading Tas two you'll find anywhere in the world it's going to show you step by step how to answer any Tas two question gives you more than 100 real band 78 and9 samples and give you the same strategies thousands of my students have used to get a band eight and nine we're also going to give you the same grammar and vocabulary tools that I've only ever shared with my VIP members and then at the end of the video I'm going to share you something that has never been seen before I'm going to take all the lessons in this video and write a band n essay live so you can see how I personally would put all of these lessons into practice I've put everything I've learned about task two writing into this one video but the most important part

0:46 comes first this first video will show you the fastest way to improve so that you get the highest return on the time you invest into learning with us today and this video also contains the one Golden Rule for I writing I'm going to show you the simple step-by-step strategy that my most successful students use to improve your scores and dramatically cut your preparation time so let's start off by telling you how I improve the average score of a whole school from 5.5 to 7.5 by getting them to work less not more so more than 10 years ago I worked for one of the best a schools in the world I can't tell you specifically what the name is of the school but it contained the letter b and c in the name this school despite being the best school in the country at the time had a huge problem most of the I

1:33 students there were professionals they were people like doctors Engineers nurses teachers software developers and they hoped of moving to countries like Canada the US the UK to get a better life the key problem was that they were all failing because of one thing their writing score in fact the average writing score for the whole school for these very very intelligent people was just 5.5 compared to 7.5 for listening and seven for reading and speaking this was not only harming the reputation of this very prestigious expensive school but it was ruining many many lives because they couldn't move to the country of their dreams and many of them had to give up on jobs they had already accepted and I knew there had to be a better way because these were all very very intelligent successful people who

2:20 spoke English very very well they all had a high level of English but what was their key problem so here are all the things you need to learn to get a high is score can you guess what they taught on this course yes they taught absolutely everything problem number one was we were trying to cram in too much information in a very short period of time this is called overwhelm and can completely destroy an ult students chances of getting a high score but even worse than that we as teachers were wasting the students time you see the vast majority of students don't need help with vocabulary with grammar speaking writing listening reading but we were overwhelming their brains with new information about all of these different topics that they didn't need

3:07 help with and this left us with just a few days at the end of the course to really focus in on the things that they did need help with and at that point the students were exhausted and many had just given up and stopped coming to class so we needed to completely rip up this course and start from scratch so what we did was we gave students two simple tests and these two simple tests guaranteed that the students would only spend time on the things that they needed to improve and this skyrocketed results results went from an average of 5.5 to 7.5 pretty much overnight and the students were studying less not more and don't worry I will show you exactly how we did this step by step towards the end of the video I'll show you how you can

3:52 implement this at home today and study less while increasing your scores so so far in this video I've told do you need to work on your writing thanks Chris for telling me something I already know but how does this knowledge actually improve your writing score and get you to study less so let me show you how to improve your score using this water bottle and a drill each of these bottles represents the four marking criteria for I tring task two to get the score that you want you must get at least that band score for all of the marketing criteria and this is a big problem for you because Childs don't tell you which areas you need to work on students will say things like I need to work on my vocabulary or

4:37 I need to work on my grammar but in my experience all of these guesses are completely wrong and to make matters worse most local is Teachers or people saying that they're an is expert online don't really know what they're doing either so what happens when you have a problem you know nothing about this is what happens you see most students don't have a problem with everything they have a problem with one specific area this not only lowers their grammar score but actually makes their writing less coherent which lowers their coherence and cohesion score as well so you probably have one key weakness that you're unaware of and this is going to stop you moving to the country of your dreams and according to our data the

5:23 average student fails three times or more than three times and wastes more than ,000 repe repeting the test over and over again watch the rest of this video we're going to show you how to do that much much faster and much much cheaper so step number one of our system is to clarify your goal this first step is super important your only goal is to get the I score that you need as quickly as possible Nothing Else Matters why is this important well students focus on many many other goals your goal is not to keep your family happy or your friends Happy by just doing the test over and over and over again because your mother or your father tells you to your goal is not to keep your local teacher Happy by sitting in their

6:08 classroom listening to stuff that is wrong your goal is not to save money by doing everything as cheaply as possible and your goal is not to reduce the amount of hard work you have to do you will have to do a certain amount of hard work and finally your goal is not to show off to the examiner how many big words you memorized or how many essays you've memorized it's not a memorization test only thing that you are trying to do is get the score that you need as quickly as possible forget everything else now that we've clarified our goal we can move on to step two elimination we want to eliminate the modules that we don't need to work on so there are four modules writing speaking reading and listening and if you have got half a

6:55 band more in any of these modules in past tests then you don't need to study that module let's say for example you need a band seven and you've got these scores in past tests that means that you don't need to study this this or this congratulations you just cut down your preparation Time by 75% step three is optimize now that we know which module or modules to focus on we need to identify the key weaknesses within that module and turn each key weakness into a strength optimize remember you will not get a band seven unless everything is at a bond seven level you will not get a bond n unless everything is at a bond n level for speaking and writing you need a real expert who has been an examiner

7:42 for many many years to listen to your speaking or look at your writing and give you feedback on that and before you say I can't afford that your goal is not to save money your goal is to get the I score that you need as quickly as possible which is more money failing the test over and over and over again or spending $ 20 to $50 getting an actual expert to give you feedback and tell you what your weaknesses are so that you can improve them so if you're in the business of keeping everyone happy and saving a huge amount of money then go and do that stop watching this video but if you want to improve your ey out score as quickly as possible keep watching now you have got real accurate feed back you

8:30 know what your key weaknesses are the next step number four is slow down you need to step back slow down and focus on improving each of those key weaknesses your goal is not to do lots and lots of practice tests and hope that you will get lucky on test day you will not so don't write any essays don't do any practice tests until you have actually improved each of those key weaknesses and then get more feedback have you you actually improved if you are weak in that area you probably can't give yourself feedback you don't know what you don't know so you need to go back to that teacher and say have I actually improved am I at that score yet and once you are once you've turned each of those

9:17 weaknesses into strengths you can move on to step five which is accelerate only now can you start practicing essays again but don't worry if you're not up to much speed you're not getting your task two essays done in 40 minutes you're still in the learning process so if it's taking you one hour to do a task two essay try and do it in 1 hour and then the next one in 55 minutes and then the next one in 50 minutes and then the next one in 45 minutes you're accelerating every time until you can comfortably get the score that you need in under 40 minutes do not book The Test until you get to that stage you are not ready until in practice you are consistently getting above the score

10:03 that you need within the time limits set by the test now that you understand the Golden Rule you must remove all the things that you've been taught that lower your score one of the most frustrating things about I preparation is that there's so much confusing information out there your writing is a reflection of your thinking if your thinking is confused your writing will be confused luckily the next video takes you through all the most common tips and shows you which ones will lower your score and which ones will improve your score let's start off with one of the most popular tips and tricks use lots of high level vocabulary and that will improve your score is this tip correct so the most popular I video over the

10:50 last year with 6.5 million views so a lot of people are following this tip this video tells you exactly that use lots of high level words and you will improve your score here's exactly what they say about that in the video If you use most of the words which are C1 C2 definitely you will get higher bands all words in the English language are divided into A1 A2 which is the simplest words B1 B2 kind of intermediate words and C1 C2 Advanced words so what this very very popular video is telling you the more C1 C2 Advanced words you use the higher your score is that actually

11:35 correct so if we look at the marking criteria for vocabulary for a band nine it says uses a wide range of vocabulary with very natural and sophisticated control of lexical features that does not say for a band n use as many C1 and C2 words as possible what it talks about there in the keyword is natural another way of saying this is if you were a native English speaker what type of vocabulary would you use to discuss the topics and the questions that are asked on test day and if we look down at band Six in the markting criteria what it says is attempts to use less common vocabulary but with some inaccuracy so

12:22 this is probably the most common band that examiners give for vocabulary because what that is saying is students attempt to use highlevel c1c2 words but they do so inaccurately what the markting criteria says is there is a balance between range using high level vocabulary and accuracy so what it is saying is yes if you can use words accurately use them but if you use them inaccurately you're going to get a low score you're probably only going to get a six Let's Help look at what IDP say about this writing is a means of communicating your thoughts to the reader that is extremely important

13:09 because what they are saying is it is not a vocabulary test it is a writing test it is testing your ability to clearly communicate with the reader therefore make use of vocabulary that is easy to understand easy to understand do easy to understand and lots of big words go together no also only use words you can spell in other words only use words that you know how to spell because if you memorize lots of big words you probably won't be able to spell them correctly and if you spell them incorrectly that is an indication to The Examiner and we go back to Band six that you are using these words inaccurately

13:56 if we go and analyze the thousands of b s eight and N success stories that we have on our VIP course not a single one of these students ever said that they got a high score because they used lots of high level words most of them when we interview them what they say is they simplified their vocabulary and their vocabulary score improved and many many of them hundreds of them talk about how they were taught this tip this trick of memorizing lots of C1 see two words and that's the reason why they failed 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 times now am I being too harsh on these YouTubers well not really if we look at two other of the most

14:42 popular videos related to vocabulary tips and tricks one of them is use these five words to score high and the other one is I writing vocabulary 25 band n words and you'll hear a lot of teachers giving you this type of information use these words these are high level words well what I did was I took the words from those popular videos and I wrote a paragraph using those popular words that these videos suggest that if you use them you'll get a high score so what I've done here is wrote a paragraph about how to solve the problem of global warming using electric cars there are a plethora of reasons why the Breakthrough of electric cars helps prevent the

15:29 imminent global warming Dilemma to elucidate their immense acceleration breakthrough is mesmerizing which exacerbates the deterioration of fossil fuel powered internal combustion engines compare that with a student who just focuses on what IDP suggests that they should do which is clearly communicate with the examiner electric cars help reduce the impact of global warming because they produce less Co two there aren't any fancy words in this second paragraph but they are all correct and they every word in that paragraph helps the reader that is what they are testing do you know how to communicate with the

16:14 reader they are not testing did you go on to YouTube and watch a video called five amazing words to include in your essay to guarantee a nine it is not a memorization test it is a written communication Test in English so is this popular tip correct no it is totally wrong so the next I writing tip and trick that you'll see is use lots of linking words and you will get a high score and the more complex linking words you use the more advanced linking words you use the higher your score is this actually true well what I did was I went and looked at Google so I Googled ielt linking words and I looked at the most

17:00 popular article and this is what that article said they need more connecting words from ielt higher band descriptors very very clear they they're talking about students so they're saying students need more linking words more connecting words to get one of the higher bands pretty clear what this teacher is suggesting I also looked at the most popular video on YouTube teaching you about linking words and this is what they said to get a high score in ielt writing you must use some more formal linking words so what this teacher is suggesting is you use more formal linking words now this teacher

17:46 who has more than a million subscribers is making a very common error that a lot of teachers make and a lot of students make because their teachers pass it on to them which is confusing the word formal with Advanced what this teacher is teaching you is use lots of formal linking words which they mean Advanced because they go on to explain that in the video so again the most popular blog and the most popular video are teaching you this tip which is use lots of highlevel linking words so if we look at the official marketing criteria what it says for band nine for coherence and cohesion is very very interesting uses cohesion in such a way that attracts no

18:33 attention in other words if a native English speaker was reading your writing was reading your essay would they notice that there are too many linking words in there and would they notice that the linking words just look weird that they are overly formal they're overly complex and the British Council go into more detail on their website on this and what they say is don't overuse linking words pretty clear what the British Council think about that which is the direct opposite to what the most popular teachers are teaching you It also says or use them inappropriately so inappropriate is different from inaccurate inaccurate refers to the

19:20 spelling is wrong or the meaning is wrong inappropriate means that you're using too many of them you don't need to use a linking word in that scenario so the British Council who developed the test Mark the test they are being very very explicit on what you should and shouldn't do also don't always use linking words at the beginning of sentences again from the British Council don't always use linking words at the beginning of sentences the reason why they're telling you that is because they know that many many teachers around the world teach you that you should start every sentence or include a linking word in every sentence the British counil says it's wrong on the IDP website when

20:06 they give advice on linking words they only show the simplest linking words why would IDP suggest that you only use the simplest linking words maybe that's what they want you to do to get a higher score and if we go back to the marketing criteria what does it say for a band six for cerence and cohesion uses cohesive devices effectively but cohesion within Andor between sentences may be faulty or mechanical faulty means you're using them inappropriately or inaccurately mechanical means that you're adding them in like a robot so if you programmed a robot and told the robot use lots of

20:52 linking words and make those words really high level that is what a robot would do and that is what a lot of band Six essays look like it's like that programmed robot that has been told add in lots of linking words that's what those essays look like quickly to talk about our VIP students not a single VIP student has ever said I improved my score by including lots of linking words so the evidence is quite clear but let's have a look at an essay compare this paragraph with a student who knows what they're doing to begin with electric cars help reduce the impact of global warming as a result they produce less CO2 consequently less carbon dioxide is

21:39 released into the atmosphere therefore higher levels of greenhouse gases are not present in the atmosphere consequently global warming is reduced this student is more focused on including lots of linking words than they are answering the question in fact the linking words are actually leading to a lot of repetition they basically just saying the same thing again and again compare that with this student electric cars help reduce the impact of global warming because they produce less CO2 the only linking word in that paragraph is because because is one of the most common words in the whole English language just because a word is common doesn't mean that it is a bad word it's probably common because it is

22:26 extremely useful for clear communication this student uses cohesion in a way that you don't even notice you probably didn't even notice it didn't draw any attention to the fact that they used a linking word this student on the other hand if you look at there you're like wow that's a lot of linking words what does it say for band nine uses cohesion in such a way that attracts no attention which one attracts no attention so is this right tip and trick that so many teachers are teaching you online are they correct no they are totally wrong that brings us on to one of the most common things that we get asked uh the

23:11 writing tip and trick which is is range is grammatical range using lots of structures is it more important than accuracy using words sentences grammar structures accurately which one is more important range or accuracy if you go on to YouTube and you type in ielt task 2 tips the number one video the one right at the top gives you advice on this very very clear advice what they say in there is variety is more important than accuracy very very clear is this actually correct well the band descriptors make it very clear that both are important it's not either or for

23:58 band nine for grammatical range and accuracy it says uses a wide range of structures with full flexibility and accuracy so it's saying a band n student has both range and accuracy a band seven and this is the most important part for grammatical range and accuracy produces frequent error free sentences what is an error free sentence an error free sentence is a sentence without any grammatical errors in it no punctuation errors or article errors or tense errors nothing it is grammatically perfect it is an error-free sentence what does frequently produces error-free sentences what does that mean well what that means is it's frequent

24:44 more than 50% in other words more than 50% of your sentences must have zero grammatical errors in them if you hope to get a seven or above and this is very important because if you are a teacher who is actually working with students on a day-to-day basis what you will always notice is when you try to get students to increase their range of grammar when you advise them to use more grammatical structures generally accuracy goes done so what you are telling a student if you are telling them increase the range decrease the accuracy and if more than 50% % of your sentences of errors in

25:30 them it is impossible to get more than a six for grammar IDP are also very clear about this on their website what they say about this is uses a range of grammatical structures correctly so they don't just say uses a range of structures they don't say that the key word there is correctly but I think the most important evidence comes from our examiners who have worked for I advantage over the last 10 years and our success stories what do they say we have had probably close to 50 Ex examiners working at I's Advantage not a single one of them has ever said that they ever gave one student in their entire career

26:18 a low score for grammar because of range only reason why any examiner I've ever worked with at I advantage and at the British counil the only reason they've ever given a student a lower score for grammar is because of accuracy it is never a problem with range it is always accuracy and you get to know that if you're working on a day-to-day basis with real students and correcting their essays and correcting the grammar mistakes in those essays and Counting the number of mistakes in each sentence so should you just use really simple sentences and play it safe no that's not what we're saying in fact that very popular video does have very good advice

27:05 on how to improve your range but just telling students blindly range is more important than accuracy is not actually correct so let's have a look at a few example paragraphs so electric cars help reduce the impact of global warming this is because they produce less CO2 this paragraph is made up of two simple sentences compare that with the second paragraph electric cars help reduce the impact of global warming because they produce less CO2 so this is for the purposes of IELTS marking criteria this is a complex sentence these are two simple sentences this is a complex sentence for the purposes of IELTS a complex sentence is a sentence

27:51 with more than one clause or more than one idea what we teach our students is yes use a range of different structures but only use them safely and appropriately if you know how to use that structure and it's appropriate to do so and it's accurate then use it and as you can see here it is actually quite easy to produce error-free sentences and use a range of vocabulary at the same time now if you wanted to push that even further you could use this if electric cars hope to reduce the impact of global warming they will have to produce less CO2 now this student is using a complex sentence but they're also using conditionals and they're also using future structures but you don't have to use this for the purposes of the is

28:39 marking criteria if the examiner was looking at the purple sentence and the red sentence they would be happy with both of them there are no mistakes in either of them so is this tip and trick correct well it's not as simple as the other ones all right if your teacher just tells you use as many different tenses and structures as possible and that will improve your score that is completely wrong because as we've seen it is not just about range it is about accuracy and the more complex you make your language the more mistakes that you're going to make so that is completely wrong also if someone just tells you range doesn't matter and make every single sentence simple and play it as safe as possible and you will get a high score that is also quite wrong it

29:28 is about balance use appropriate structures appropriate tenses appropriate complexity to write your essay but really focus on reducing the number of mistakes that you are making the advice that we give our VIP students is range will take care of itself if you focus on answering the question you will naturally use a range of simple and complex sentences and a range of different appropriate structures CU it is impossible to write an effect Ive essay that answers the question without naturally using a range of structures so just focus on answering the question and range will take care of itself but really focus in on how many mistakes am I making and if you have systematic

30:13 errors if you're making mistakes with articles or punctuation for example in every sentence you need to address that it doesn't matter how complex your grammar is until you address that fact you will never get more than a six the next I writing tip and trick is don't repeat words if you repeat a word you will get a lower score is this true so again I put this into YouTube search and I looked at the most popular video discussing this topic and what that video said was stop repeating vocabulary in I speaking and writing very clear what they think about this so what does the official marking criteria say well it doesn't actually talk about repetition and repeating words until you

30:58 get down to band four so for vocabulary at band four it says uses only basic vocabulary which may be used repetitively or which may be inappropriate for the task now does that mean if you repeat a word you will get a band four no if that was the case every single one of my students and every single student in the world would get a band four because there are always going to be Words which we will show you in a minute that there will always be words that you have to repeat what ban four for lexical resource is saying here is you just keep repeating the same basic basic words you have basically no range at all and you just keep saying the same basic things over and over and over

31:44 again that's not what you want to do but is the advice that these teachers are teaching you which is if you repeat a word you will automatically get a low score is that actually true let's look at some facts and some data so what we did was take 100 of our VIP students essays these are students that got either about seven eight or nine in the real test and we put these 100 essays into some software what this software does is it shows you how many words are repeated the frequency of those words and the results are that the top 20 words the most common words the words that are repeated the most make up 33.5% around a third of all the words in

32:33 those 100 essays in other words those basic words are repeated all the time now is this just our students because we teach them this on our course well what you can do is take any book in the world any English book that is Well written put it into the same software and you'll see the same pattern the most common words make up around a third of the English language why is this well this is how languages work most of the words that you say in English and your native language are not big complicated unusual words you were repeating the same words over and over and over again now do we teach our students to just don't don't care about variety don't care about

33:19 range when it comes to vocabulary don't worry about repeating words no what we teach them is this when you see a word and you think that you need to repeat that word you have three choices number one repeat the word number two change it to something that you're not really sure about or number three change it to something you're 100% sure about now if your teacher has taught you this tip which is don't repeat any words you're always going to go with option two you're going to continually change words to things that you're not really sure about what does the marking criteria say about that well it talks about inaccuracy talks about spelling mistakes meaning mistakes collocation mistakes if

34:04 you're making lots of mistakes you get a lower vocabulary score what we teach our students is choose option one or option three if you can change it to something that you know is 100% correct you know the spelling collocations meaning especially change it but if you don't repeat the word that is going to produce an essay that has a wide enough range to get a high score but most importantly it will be accurate but even more importantly the shouldn't is not going to be stressed out because if you teach a student that you can never repeat a word the I writing exam is going to be one of the most stressful experiences that they ever encounter they're going to see lots and lots and lots of these

34:50 words that are constantly repeated and they know that you've told them if you repeat a word you'll fail your test you'll get a score so they're forced to change into stuff that they know is wrong if you are stressed out and if you're wasting time do you think that you're going to get a high score again there's a huge difference between making videos on YouTube and working on a day-to-day basis with real students and seeing what tips and tricks what actually works on the ground on test day this tip is completely wrong the next tip and trick is that you need to include a hook in your introduction when I searched Google and YouTube for this I found a teacher that has taken this to a

35:36 whole new level what they have done is they have given their students templates that include hooks in the introductions and thesis statements and outline statements and background statements and what they are teaching their students is memorize these templates insert some of your ideas in there and you're going to wow the examiner and get a high score and this is becoming more and more and more common among students real examiners are starting to see the same templates which include hooks in them every single time and one of the things that examiners find quite funny is what is a hook well a hook is designed to hook the reader in to get their

36:21 attention the only thing hooking The Examiner to the only reason why they're looking at your essay is because they're being paid to do so they would rather do anything in this world but look at your essay no matter how amazing your hook is they're only doing it because they're doing their job it would be like teaching someone that you need to have an interesting introduction to ordering a burger in McDonald's the person doesn't care how you greet them in McDonald's you're just another customer so what does the markting criteria say about this well some very interesting stuff ban zero how can you get a ban zero well number one you could not attend you could stay at home in your bed if you did that you would get a ban

37:08 zero or you can get a ban zero if you go to the test center and you fall asleep and you don't write anything you will get a ban zero does not attempt the task in any way or if you write a totally memorized response what they are telling you is memorizing these templates is the same as a student that falls asleep for the entirity of the ielt writing test IDP on their website says don't use any memorized language phrases or examples throughout your essay they are easy for examiners to spot and don't demonstrate your ability to write fluently pretty

37:54 clear from IDP IDP also says don't tell The Examiner what you are going to say in your essay in other words don't include outline thesis statements like this essay will discuss blah blah blah blah blah so what I've done is I've taken the most popular template online and I've answered a question with it it has been universally accepted that the problem so an article mistake straight away the problem of climate change is escalating at an alarming rate the problem is bringing a state of depression among the masses and in the economy too they have another article mistake so this teacher who wrote this doesn't know how to use articles or use grammarly there are a

38:43 plethora so another grammatical mistake I didn't make this up this is exactly what you will find on the internet this is the most popular template there are plethora of reasons of the same and it's possible solutions can be suggested to which are discussed below outlining what you're going to say exactly what the examiners and IDP say that you should not do also just ask yourself does this make sense climate change is causing a state of depression among the masses literally most people have a clinical mental disorder because of climate change are you going to write about that in your essay and also the Eon omy is affected so are you going to

39:30 talk about clinical depression and the effect on the economy because you put it in your introduction you better discuss that in the rest of your essay now compare that with a student that is using no memorization what they are doing instead is just clearly answering the question climate change is one of the gravest dangers Humanity faces instead of memorizing a hook what they're doing is they are paraphrasing the question this is demonstrating to The Examiner that you've understood the question you know what you're doing you know how to paraphrase your vocabulary is good and your grammar is good those are five very good things this is caused by an increase in the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere you've just

40:16 answered question one straight away in your introduction and the most viable solution is the introduction of electric cars you've answered question two so you're not telling the examiner what you are going to discuss you're telling them straight away this is the answer to these questions and then in your main body you can go into detail and also if you think about it what you are saying to The Examiner if you write this is you are dumb you are saying to The Examiner I think that you are so stupid that I'm going to use the most popular template online that tens of thousands maybe even a 100 thousand students have used before and I don't think that you're going to notice because you're dumb do you think

41:03 that's creating a great impression for you know what you're trying to do here so do you think this is right or wrong this tip is absolutely wrong the next I writing tip and trick is use statistics and surveys and research in your examples and that is going to improve the strength of your examples in your essay so I went on to YouTube and I found the most pop video on how to use examples and the video includes statistics now this video was made a very long time ago and let me make a confession I used to do exactly the same thing with my students we all did it was actually standard practice 5 to S years ago to tell students that if

41:51 you include statistics it's absolutely fine and it's just an easy way to create examples cuz a lot of students were having problems at thinking of examples so what I and a lot of other teachers taught them was look at your main idea and create a survey or a study 47% of people did this for example add that in and you'll get a high score the problem is students used this incorrectly so what we were teaching our students was match your main idea to your example and make sure that your example makes sense if your example doesn't make any sense it is not a good example and you're wasting your time but High a lot of teachers and students interpreted that

42:37 advice was just include lots of data and surveys and don't worry about whether they make sense so IDP noticed this noticed that a lot of students were using this technique put out on their website recently I think last year and they said don't present Recent research or statistics related to the topic so what IDP are saying is stop using this we stopped advising students to do this by two or three years ago because again we're working day-to-day with students and we just noticed that students would mess this up um you would get students writing statistics such as 98% of people in the UK died from smoking doesn't make any sense so let's

43:23 look at the example from the most popular YouTube video on how to do this an increasing number of people are eating unhealthy food regardless of the health warnings for example about 70% of people working in the UK resort to buying ready-made meals for convenience rather than doing home cooking so this is actually fine it makes sense it sounds correct but now since IDP have said this we can't do this so what we do instead is take out the research take out the example of the statistics and just replace 70% with something more vague like many many people working in the UK resort to buying ready-made meals for convenience rather than doing home

44:08 cooking so we're keeping IDP happy we're not using statistics and this makes sense and it is a real example do many people in the UK buy ready-made meals absolutely that's a fact and this example is good because it's connected to the main idea and it makes sense so instead of thinking about should I use statistics just what is an example of the thing that I'm talking about what is an example of the main idea of this topic and if you do that you'll be fine so is this common tip and trick correct no don't use statistics so the next I writing tip and trick is idioms if you use lots of idioms in your I writing

44:54 will this improve your I score so if you go and type in idioms I writing into YouTube you'll find lots of videos the most popular one is one called 40 awesome idioms for ielt writing with a title like that this teacher is definitely suggesting that idioms are awesome and you should use them in your ielt writing is this actually true well what does the markting criteria say well the writing criteria says nothing about idioms it is silent on idioms but the speak markting criteria talks about them what does the speaking marking criteria say well the speaking markting criteria talks about idiomatic language and this reveals to you a lot about the tips and

45:41 tricks that you will see on YouTube especially the reason why teachers are teaching you use lots of idioms to improve your score is number one they have confused the speaking test with the writing test and number two they don't know what idiomatic language means idiomatic language does not mean idioms idiomatic language means natural language that native English speakers would use that includes idioms but that is just a small part of idiomatic language if you know native English speakers listen to them for 5 minutes count how many idioms they use probably zero IDP has a video on their website called where can I use idioms in my ielt test and they only mention speaking and

46:30 task one General training informal letters why because speaking and task one General training informal letters are informal idioms are informal that means that you should not use them in writing task 2 or task one academic or general training task one formal letters IDP on their website also says on their guide to ielt writing don't use idioms pretty clear I've also never met a real ex examiner or a real successful student who used this tactic who tried to include lots of idioms and eventually got a high score using that tactic just doesn't work so is it correct no it's

47:17 not correct the next tips and tricks are about word length so for TAS two you will often hear teachers teaching their students that you must write more than 250 words this is absolutely correct I'm not going to go into detail on this cuz it's very very simple you must if you want a high score you must write more than 250 words but what is more worrying is there's lots of tips and tricks out there that teach you that the more you write the higher your score this is absolutely false for two reasons number one if you think about it if this were true all you would have to do is just write lots of words and you would get a high score score that's not actually testing your ability to clearly communicate in English secondly from a

48:02 tactical point of view from working with real students what you will notice if you are a real teacher working with real students is once students start to write more than 300 words two things happen number one they generally go off topic and number two they don't have enough time to check their work proofread their work and move on and do task one and get everything done on time so more than 250 absolutely this tip is correct but once you start going over 300 if you write 301 305 don't worry too much about it but if you're writing is starting to get to 350 400 450 you probably have a major

48:48 problem the next lesson is the most important in this whole video it's going to give you laser focus and help you understand task two right in a much shorter period of time you'll learn the four key rules that guarantee you'll improve your score no matter what question you get navjot failed her ISS writing test three times in a row she lost all hope and was about to give up on her dream of moving to Canada but after I shared this simple strategy with her that allows anyone to answer any I's question she was able to jump from a b 6.5 to 7.5 in just a few days so one day I get this email from her Chris I need your help if I don't get seven in writing soon I'll lose my Express entry

49:33 Visa for Canada help so I replied send me a few of your essays and she was right it was very obvious from looking at her writing that she was completely confused you see your writing is a reflection of your thinking if on test day your thinking is confused your writing is going to be confused but I knew that if she learned this simple stratey she was definitely going to get a b seven on her next test but when I told her this she got even more worried Chris there are so many different question types how is one strategy going to answer all of them don't worry and what if I get a topic I know nothing about how is this strategy going to help with that don't worry and I can't even finish an essay in 40 minutes so how is

50:20 learning a new strategy going to help don't worry this strategy will guarantee that you get a high score and finish everything on time no matter what topic you get to remove all this confusion I tried to make everything as simple as possible and I did that by asking her one simple question why do we write anything think about the different things that you've written in the past few days this could be a text message a note to your family or an email to a colleague at work you wrote all of those things to take information from your brain and transfer that information into their brain in other words the main purpose of writing is to help the reader understand what you are thinking let's apply that to an essay why do we write

51:06 an essay to get a high score to show The Examiner how many big words we know and how many fancy structures we've memorized no we simply write an essay to tell the reader The Examiner what we think about the questions otherwise known as answer the question the number one thing the examiner will be thinking about when they look at your essay is did you clearly answer the question but there are so many different question types how will I know which structure to use let's apply what we've learned about writing to structuring an essay why do we write an introduction we write an introduction to introduce to the reader what we think about the question so let's apply that to some real questions

51:51 some people believe that University students should volunteer to benefit the community do you agree or disagree many think that those in third level education should do unpaid work to improve their local community so all I've done there is just taking the question statement and paraphrased it put it in my own words but now let's do what the examiners are looking for which is clearly answering the question do you agree or disagree we are immediately saying very very clearly what we think about the question so the examiner can just look at this very easily and know exactly what we think about the question but then why because then we're going to write the first reason why we disagree because students need time to focus on

52:37 their studies a simple idea that directly answers the question and then let's give them another idea and some also have to get paid jobs to survive so if we Analyze This a bit further we have answered the question here and we've given our first main idea and then we've given our second idea so all we're doing here is taking our ideas out of our head I disagree for this reason and this reason and putting it on paper but you now you might be thinking well what about if we get a different type of question won't the structure be different so it is widely believed that transportation is the main source of pollution while some believe governments should address this others believe this is the responsibility of individuals

53:24 discuss both views and give your opinion so this is a completely different question because it's asking you to do three things it's asking you why do some people believe this why do some people believe this other View and what do you think individually so let's start off by just paraphrasing again many think that transport causes the most pollution so I've just taken the question statement paraphrased it so governments can ban internal combustion engines to solve this problem so again what am I thinking communication taking ideas out of my head while some people believe government should address this so I'm thinking why would someone believe this why would someone think this well governments have the power to ban to

54:11 make a legal internal combustion engines and that could go some way to solving this issue so that's one of the reasons why someone might advocate for that position so I'm going to state that but then why would other people think well it's nothing to do with governments this is the responsibility of individuals why would someone think that but I think a better option is for people to choose Greener Transportation voluntarily this Choice gives people more freedom so why would people think that it's the responsibility of the individual well you know governments can be a little bit overbearing some people really believe in the rights and the freedoms of the individual to make their own choice

54:57 voluntarily so that's why they would believe that side and I agree with them so what do I think I think a better option is people to voluntarily choose their own method of transportation because this gives them more freedom but I also understand that governments can ban petrol and diesel engines and they may have a role in it too and that's why some people believe this so these are two very very different questions and I have used slightly different structures but you don't really need to be thinking about structures all you need to be thinking about is how do I clearly tell the examiner what I think about the question there is no one structure that's going to magically get you about

55:42 nine but how you guarantee you don't get a high score is you don't tell The Examiner clearly what you think about the question so all you have to do really is think about this you look at the question and you start to think about the answer to the question in your brain all the introduction is doing is introducing your main ideas your answers to the question to the examiner's brain you do not need structures for doing that you just need to think clearly okay but won't that take a lot of time that's where the essay acceleration system comes in let's look at our introductions what do they all have in common they are all introducing to the reader what we are going to write about all we have to do then is take the main points from the

56:30 introduction and put them into our main body paragraphs you see by understanding the main purpose of an introduction you've not only created a brilliant introduction but you've also created a plan for your entire essay when people run out of time on test day it's not because they are slow writers or slow thinkers it's because they are confused about what to write and then they get lost and have to start all over again this sa acceleration system means that your thinking is crystal clear and you have a road map for the rest of your essay great but won't I need a different main body structure for all the different types of essays let's make it simple again if the purpose of an introduction is to introduce to the

57:16 reader how you're going to answer the question what is the purpose of the main body answer the question yes and the simplest way to do that is to use this structure main point explain example and then we simply do the same thing with our next main body paragraph by this point I could see that she was really starting to understand how powerful this simple strategy really was but she needed to avoid a huge mistake that most students make many students write a great introduction in mainbody paragraphs and then throw away a high score by failing to write a good conclusion to write a great conclusion you need my law professor's secret hack when I was 18 many many years ago I

58:01 started studying law at Queens University and at the start of the first semester we were given a huge reading list and it seemed impossible that anyone would be able to read this number of books in such a short period of time but I stayed up night after night and arrived at my first tutorial having read them all you read all the books nobody reads them all and this is when he shared his secret hack with me take any academic textbook and open any chapter read the introduction and then read the conclusion what do you see remember what I said at the start about introductions introductions tell the reader what you're going to write about and conclusions tell the reader what you just wrote about in other words you

58:47 should be able to just read the introduction and conclusion and fully understand all of the main points of the whole chapter and to make it even easier for you all you have to do is just look at your introduction note the key points and then repeat them in the conclusion it really is that simple take the main points paraphrase them put them into conclusion and that's you done so at this point I thought that she would be very very happy she now I understood how to structure any I question but I could see that she was more stressed than ever it doesn't matter if I know how to structure these essays if I get a topic I don't understand I'll panic and just run out of time don't worry I'm going to give you a system that will ensure you can

59:32 answer any question no matter what topic you get but first we need to understand why you have this problem you see if you had a health problem you wouldn't just go to the doctor and expect them to give you medicine without them trying to find out why you have the health problem by understanding the root cause of the problem the doctor will be able to treat you more effectively so what is the root cause of this fear of unknown topics so first I asked her this question when you get an unfamiliar topic is it ever in the real test no have you ever seen a topic in any of the Cambridge books you didn't understand no then where are you seeing these terrible unknown topics my old teachers gave me some and here I

1:00:19 think we find the first root cause of the problem if you look at real questions from real ielt Cambridge books the questions and the topics are designed in a way so that anyone in the world can answer them but when websites run by people who don't really know what they're doing create these questions they often make them way more complicated than they actually need to be but I'm a mathematician what do I know about advertising or newspapers and here we find the second root cause of the problem and the more intelligent someone is the more they have this problem you see people like mathematicians doctors lawyers Engineers they've all been trained that the solution to complex problems is to have lots of expert knowledge and let me tell you a

1:01:04 little secret the opposite is true for is if you get a question don't try and think of the most complex idea try and think of the simplest most obvious most straightforward idea instead of thinking which idea will impress The Examiner think about if I asked a 100 people this question question what would be the most common answer but what about brainstorming how do you feel when you're brainstorming stress confused worried and does brainstorming result in good ideas no so why would you do something that makes you feel terrible that doesn't get you the result you're looking for all of my teachers told me to do it and most of the big ILS experts on YouTube teach brainstorming and this

1:01:52 was her final challenge what she going to follow my advice that was different from all the other advice that she was getting or was she just going to be a sheep and follow the herd it didn't work the other three times you tried it what makes you think it will work now and here's what she did on test day got the question she read it and asked herself one question what are the two simplest ideas she then wrote them down and planned out her answer after she planned out her answer using the structure we gave her she had a complete road map showing her exactly what's right this investment of time into her plan meant that her thinking was crystal clear and she finished everything on time and because she followed the universal

1:02:37 structure she completely shocked the examiners you see every examiner sees the same confusing difficult to understand essays all day long when you choose simple ideas answer the question and write your answer in a clear organized way using language you know instead of fancy words you memorize the night before your test the examiner has no choice but to give you a high score an navjot is now a mathematics professor in Canada after getting an amazing 7.5 in her I writing if you want a more detailed look at what we discussed here today my free course ielt essay Builder will show you everything you need to know for free all you have to do is just click the link in the description if you

1:03:24 want to join the same course as nav Joo our VIP course is available for 10% off you need a special link to get the discount it's also in the description now let's get into the detail of writing your essay the introduction is the most important part of your entire essay if you write a good introduction it not only improves your overall score but it will also make writing the rest of your essay so much easier let's show you step by step how to write a great introduction and then after that we will work on idea generation Okay so let's start off with the question it's really really important that we fully understand the question before we can write our introduction and this is one of the key mistakes that we see students making all the time and it's related to the things you want to avoid in your

1:04:10 introduction so let's have a look at it and fully understand it many argue that schools are no longer necessary because children can learn so much from the internet and be educated at home do you agree or disagree so pause the video if you like and just have a read of that again to make sure that you fully understand this so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to set you a little test what I'm going to show you is two introductions introduction a and introduction B both of these introductions were produced by the same student one of them when they first started working with us and on their previous attempt they got a band six and one of them after they had finished working with us and we removed removed

1:04:56 all of these common mistakes and we showed them how to write an effective introduction and they actually moved from a band six to a band eight so I'm not going to tell you which one it is I want you in the comments to tell me do you think the band 8 student is or the band 8 introduction is a or b okay so let's start off with a teaching children at home is a hotly debated topic nowadays a plethora of people believe that children can study better online this essay will discuss why it is better to teach Adolescence in educational institution before coming to a reasoned conclusion so I would like you to just read that have a think about it and do

1:05:41 you think this is a band Six essay or a bond 8 essay so remember one of them the student was getting a bond six and the other the student was getting a band eight so let's have a look at the second introduction introduction B many people believe that homeschooling is preferable to traditional education because learning can be done online I do not agree with this because students require face-to-face guidance and many way web-based schools are not reliable so do you think a is better or do you think B is better in the comments just let me know put a or b um and maybe if you want to say why you think this is so so what I'm

1:06:28 going to do now is I'm going to take introduction a and I'm going to break it down into its constituent Parts all right so we're going to look at each part of this essay introduction and tell you exactly what the student is doing to give you an insight into how the examiner is thinking about this all right so let's start so this bit here is what an examiner would consider a hook a hook is something that you'll often see in essays where the person writing the essay is trying to make the reader interested in what they're trying to say they're trying to hook the reader in and get them to read the rest of the essay uh this is a terrible idea uh for I

1:07:17 writing task 2 for a couple of reasons number one The Examiner is being paid to check your essay you don't need to to hook them in at all the money that they're getting paid is hooking them in so you don't need to do that number two there is no or there are no extra marks for it being interesting or it being exciting or anything like that you're not being judged on how interesting or exciting your essay is so if you are trying to do something that doesn't get you any marks you've just wasted your time completely so you're doing something that is not necessary and you are wasting your time completely so the first thing that we do not want to see

1:08:03 is a hook they are a complete and utter waste of time okay so the next thing that you do not want to put in your introduction is something like this hotly debated topic nowadays now you'll see this in the vast majority of essays and you'll often also see teachers teaching this um and this is a cliche so let's have a look at what a cliche is cliche a phrase or opinion that is overused and most importantly betrays a lack of original thought so it is an overused phrase and the reason why people use these phrases is they don't have original thoughts they don't want to think for themselves so a examiner is looking at this and number one they're looking at it and going another hotly

1:08:49 debated topic all right I've seen this hundreds of times this week um and the the examin ERS are human beings and if you they say the same thing over and over and over again they you're not putting them in a great mood to be honest and most importantly you're just basically copying something that You' seen elsewhere there is no originality in here um and you want to at all times avoid things that the examiner is looking at that and thinking this person is just memorize something because the IELTS test is not a memorization test it is not a repeat a memorization test it is a test where they're testing your ability to clearly communicate in English when have you ever heard someone

1:09:34 a native English speaker say oh this is a hotly debated topic never in your entire life have you heard someone say that naturally so it is completely unnatural to put this into your essay shows that you're not really thinking and shows that you believe that the test is just a memorization test so don't include cliches Okay the third thing a

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