IELTS Writing | How to Write an Introduction

everyone Chris here from miles advantage and in this lesson what I'm going to do is talk about task two introductions recently we work with a student who jump from about six to eight and what she did was not really add anything new to her introductions but all of the things so we're gonna talk about seven things that you never ever in your introduction but before that what I'm gonna do so welcome to my home time I'd like to introduce you to it so not a great introduction is it to some rocks and some Lucia's not a great introduction what if we slowly Potter on then we can see this is a very different introduction very different introductions and that creates a very different impression and they say first impressions last so you could have an amazing thing your essay could be amazing but if you're including some of these seven things in your introduction you are going to be lowering your score so what I'm gonna do now is go on back there jump behind my computer and show you some introductions and show you these seven things so that you can remove them from your introductions 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 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 gonna do now is I'm gonna set you a little test what I'm going to show you is two introductions introduction an introduction B both of these introductions were produced by the same student one of them when they first started working with us and on the previous attempt they got about six and one of them after they had finished working with us and we removed all of these common mistakes and we showed them how to write an effective introduction and they actually moved from about six to about 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 bond age 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 adolescents in educational institution before coming to a reasoned conclusion so I would like you to just read that I would think about it and you think this is about six essay or about eight essay so remember one of them the student was getting about six and the other the student was getting about eight so let's have a look at the second introduction introduction be 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 am anyway web based schools are not reliable so do you think a is better what do you think B is better in the comments just let me know but a or B and maybe if you want to say why you think this is so so what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to take introduction a and I'm going to break it down into its constituent parts alright 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 alright 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 and this is a terrible idea for IELTS writing cos - for a couple of reasons number one the examiner is being paid to check your essay you don't need 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 is a hook they are a complete and utter waste of time ok so the next thing that you do not want to put in your introduction is something like this hotly debated topic nowadays know you'll see this in the vast majority of essays and you'll often also see teachers teaching this and this is a cliche so let's have a look 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 examiner is looking at this and number one they're looking at it and go up another hotly debated topic all right I've seen this hundreds of times this week under the examiners are human beings and if you they say the same thing over and over and over again there you're not putting them in a great mood to be honest and most importantly you're just basically copying something that you've seen elsewhere there is no originality in here 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 I'll 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 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's 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 plethora of people an educational institution spelt incorrectly and the spelling is not the actual problem here this problem here is memorizing impressive vocabulary or high level vocabulary or benign vocabulary the examiners see this over and over and over and over again especially words like plethora why does plethora come up because someone on YouTube made a video called use these five words and you will get a high score so what happens is millions of people have seen that video though included and some of those words in their introduction I've even seen introductions with all five words put in there and what again that indicates to the examiner is that you believe this is a memorization test and also that you are not focusing on actually answering the question and you are also not focusing on using the English language effectively to convey meaning why do people write anything in any language it is to clearly convey meaning to tell people what you think but instead of doing that you are just trying to shove in big words people would never use a plethora people that is just an inappropriate way to use it so often when people memorize these big words they will use them inappropriately and incorrectly the collocations will be wrong it's not suitable to use that in a sentence that grammar could be wrong or like here the spelling is wrong there you do not get any extra marks for using big words incorrectly or inappropriately educational institution it would be better just to put school all right so you might be repeating the word school but which is better to repeat a simple word that actually is effective and accurate unappropriate or try and put in a big word that is actually inaccurate because you spelt it wrong or the collocation is wrong with a grammar is wrong or here you would just never use that word why not just say many people or a lot of people again much simpler but actually correct so the fourth thing that you do not want to include is a background statement and so I've highlighted both of these teaching children at home is a hotly debated topic nowadays and a plethora of people believe that children can study better online this person has watched a few too many YouTube channels and some of them say you need to include a hook some of them say that you need to include a background statement and some of them say just paraphrase the question and what this causes is huge confusion in the students mind so they're like well this YouTube channel says hook this says background statement and they get totally confused about the difference between a hook a background statement and simply paraphrasing the question and some teachers also get confused about that not all most teachers are great but there are some teachers especially online and on YouTube that get confused because how they produce their lessons is they actually go and look at other YouTube channels and if you are looking at other YouTube channels that don't know what they're doing you're not going to know what you're doing either so this is going to cause a huge amount of confusion and this is what has happened to this student so forget about hooks forget about background statements and just simply paraphrase the question instead your first sentence just look at the question statement paraphrase that stated in your own words and that's you done for your first sentence you're not going to be confused and most importantly the examiner is not going to be confused because they're like well is this a paraphrase what are they doing here I don't really understand the examiner has a headache already before they've even got to the end of the introduction so forget about background statements okay so the next thing we're going to talk about is this this essay will discuss why it is better to teach adolescence an educational institution before coming to a reasoned conclusion so this is a very poor thesis statement for two different reasons and there's two different things that you do not want to include in your introduction and the key here is adolescence so did the question talk about adolescence so adolescents are a specific subset of children adolescents are teenagers there are people who are in high school the question was not abide high school it was not about teenagers it was not about adolescence it was actually about children in general and school in general and so by misunderstanding the question I'm putting things in there that are not actually accurate are not related to the question you're indicating to the examiner that you haven't understood the question and also what the student was doing was trying to again add in big words so they didn't think that children or school children or boys and girls or whatever was fancy enough or impressive enough because their former teacher had told them that you need to use big impressive bad nine words so they've tried to put that in there and this is not accurate it's not what the question is about so not only have you messed up your introduction and you've messed up your whole essay because your focus is now going to be on adolescents so be very very careful about understanding the question and just putting things in the introduction that relate to you answering the question because at the end of the day the most important thing is that you actually answer the question the second reason why this thesis statement is not appropriate is because it has a lot of memorized language in it you will see a huge number of introductions that say this essay will and then they talk about the topic before coming to a reasoned conclusion so it is very very obviously memorized by the student and again this comes from the internet especially YouTube where you will get certain videos that have millions and millions of views on them obviously students are watching them they trust the person talking to them they think that they're an expert so they copy what they say and then after a few months examiner's start to see the same thing over and over and over and over and over again and that is not a good thing for your bond level and your von score is going to suffer because again you are basically telling the examiner I do not know how to think for myself and I do not know how to write in English without memorizing things it is not a memorization test it is an English writing test you will not be able to go into the real world and use these fixed phrases they are testing your ability to communicate effectively in the real world not memorize stuff that is totally useless in the real world and the last thing that you want to avoid the thing that you never want to do is to use a memorized formula to treat writing in the same way that someone would treat a mathematical equation and it is very very tempting and it is very attractive to think that all you have to do is just memorize a formula and then use it I know that you're very stressed out and I know that you want to get high score but this is the last thing that you want to do to memorize a formula and then place it on any different type of question that's bad for a few reasons so this is what a lot of these memorize formulas look like X so take the topic is a hotly hotly debated topic nowadays wow you're really impressing people with those cliches like insert general background statement so take the background of the topic and then put that in even though you've already really talked about it in the hook there this essay will discuss y&z well the examiner really isn't interested in you telling them what the essay is going to discuss you better discuss that that is what they've just asked you to do and so it's you know it's like walking into a store and saying I am going to open the door no I am going to walk to the country like you're supposed to and why are you telling people about that and then before coming to a reasoned conclusion just another memorized to fix phrase and other major problem with this is that people tell you that you can take this formula take this format and apply it to any question type doesn't matter if it is advantages disadvantages problem solution a double question or discussion question an opinion question you can just memorize this and do that you can't at each of those questions is asking you to do a very different thing therefore you need to have a different approach for each different introduction and each different question I know that's going to require a little bit of extra work and but if you want to go to our website alton vantage comm we cover a lot of that on there for free so go and check that out if at the end of this video of course if you want to so let's look at the seven things not to put in your introduction do not put a hook do not put cliches do not put memorized high-level vocabulary don't put a background statement especially if you don't understand the difference between a hook a background statement I'm paraphrasing this essay we'll discuss and then put something in there that is not related to the question or this essay will discuss plus all those memorized phrases and finally don't make every introduction exactly the same or apply the same format but the same strategy to every single introduction alright the good news is that once we took all of those things out from our students they were able to massively improve their si and I say Si not introduction because let's look at what a good introduction can do for your entire essay so let's have a break it down again so many people believe that homeschooling is preferable to traditional education because learning can be done online so what they've done is they've just taken the question and they have paraphrased it so they've taken the words and they have stated it in their own words so that it means the same but with different words so this introduces the topic it tells the examiner this person understands the question and they know how to paraphrase so that vocabulary is good that grammar is good so you are making the examiner very very happy because they know you know what you're doing and just from the very first sentence they know that this essay is going to be easy to read now let's have a look at the rest of it I do not agree with this so the reason why this is a good way to start your second sentence is it clearly demonstrates that you have a position that you have an opinion on this question in other words you have just answered the question all right so it's going to be different from question type to question type but this question type basically said do you agree or disagree I do not agree okay so they're saying I disagree so they could say I disagree or do not agree but they have clearly stated what they think immediately so again the examiner has already understood what you think about the question let's continue because okay here's the reasons students require face-to-face guidance clear main idea and many web based skills are not reliable clear second idea so instead of this essay we'll discuss why homeschooling is preferable to not schools A+ reason that doesn't you're just wasting your time and state your position and your two main ideas all right how is this going to help the student write the rest of their essay because what is going to be their first main body paragraph they're going to talk about students require face-to-face guidance they're going to explain why that is they're going to put examples in there and then there's second main body paragraph many web-based skills are not reliable they're going to put that in there second main body paragraph they're going to explain why that is they're going to use examples and the examiner will know exactly what is going on what this also does is it provides like a mini plan for the rest of the essay the examiner will also be looking at your main body paragraphs they'll be looking at your conclusion and seeing if all this much is up is it cohesive is it coherent so this introduction does many many things but the two things that it does really really well is it makes it easy for the student and most importantly it makes it easy for the examiner to understand that they are actually a band-aid student and they are going to get a good score because they are helping the reader with their job if you do that you're going to do very very well if you just memorize a bunch of stuff copy other people use formulas you're going to fail over and over and over again no matter who tells you that they have some secret method or magic formula they don't exist hopefully this was helpful guys and if you need any more help go to IELTS advantage com we've got a bunch of free courses free videos free articles on basically anything that you will ever need and head over there and feel free to get in touch with us if you need any help thanks very much guys and I look forward to reading your comments as well and give it a like if you liked it if you didn't like it feel free enough to do that thanks very much and see you in another video bye bye [Music]

Channel: IELTS Advantage

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Keywords: IELTS, IELTS Advantage, Chris Pell, www.ieltsadvantage.com, IELTS Writing, Writing, Introduction, IELTS Writing Introductions | DON'T make these mistakes!, IELTS Mistakes, Don't make these mistakes, IELTS Writing Introductions, IELTS test, IELTS exam, IELTS Preparation, Online IELTS, IELTS Class, IELTS Lesson, VIP Course, Band 8, How to write an introduction, IELTS essay, Essay introduction, Writing Task 1, Writing Task 2, Task 2, How to

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Length: 21min 51sec (1311 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2020