Hey Chris here from IELTS Advantage and
welcome to quite a unique lesson on IELTS writing task 2. So this lesson is
going to show you how I helped one of our students move from a 6.5 to a band
8 in quite a short period of time. So I was working with a student and she had
consistently got 6.5 over and over and over again before she started working
with us. Then she started working with us and she said I really need to get this
done very, very quickly because she had been offered a job in London and there
was a time limit. She had a deadline and what we did with
her was take quite a unique approach because we didn't really have time to
dive into all of the things in detail that we needed to help her with. We
normally don't do it this with students, but with this student instead of looking
at everything in a lot of detail we just taught her some core principles and
all of these core principles about how to write an essay were linked to the
official marking criteria, the document that the examiner is going to be looking
at when they are marking your essay so we taught her these key principles these
key fundamentals and it had a radical impact on her scores and she moved from
a 6.5 to a band 8 in quite a short period of time.
So what I decided to do was as always ask her to come on and do one of our
success story videos and she's quite shy and she said that she didn't want to do
that so I asked her could I take your work. This stuff that we worked on with
you show everybody your essays from where they were like a 6.5 level to a
band 8 level and also share those key principles that we taught you and she
said absolutely and that's what we're gonna do in this lesson. We're going to
divide the lesson into three, we're going to show you how to think about the
question first. So how to analyze the question, think about it, generate ideas,
plan everything right. In the second stage we're going to show you how to
write your essay so what are the examiners looking for in a good
introduction and a good main body paragraph. How to develop your main ideas
and then finish it off with an effective conclusion and then
finally we're going to look at how to check
work and talk a lot about grammar and vocabulary, 50% of your total mark and
we're going to take you through all of that in this lesson and at the end of
this video I'm going to do two things number one I'm going to give you a free
five-part course that's going to look at everything in a lot more detail and
secondly I'm going to look at the tasks that we're gonna set you in this video
so at the end of this video we're going to ask you to write an essay and we will
randomly pick a few of those essays and give you detailed feedback on that and
then we'll make a separate video later in the week looking at all the common
mistakes the things that you did well the things you didn't do so well I'm
looking at those detailed feedback sessions that we will use from your work
that you'll submit at the end of this lesson.
So let's jump in to my computer we can start off with the first part of the
lesson. Okay guys welcome let's get straight into it, so what do I mean by a
principled approach? So the examiner will be using the official marking criteria
to judge your work, so on test day you're going to write an essay later that day
the examiner is going to look at it and they're going to be using this official
marking criteria to judge your work and this allows all tests to be objectively
assessed by any examiner in the world our approach with this student
was to teach them principles that were directly linked to the marking criteria,
so teaching them what the examiners were looking for and how to give the
examiners what they are looking for and we'll look at these principles in this
lesson so this does not guarantee that you will see the same improvement but
will be a very very good start to improving your scores. Obviously I worked
very, very closely with the student and gave them individual feedback and all of
those great things which I won't be able to give to most of you, but it will be a
great opportunity for you to kind of get inside the mind of an examiner,
understand what they will be looking for and apply this approach to your own
essay so that you can give the examiners what they're looking for on test day. So
when they came to me they failed the test I think three or four times
they got 6.5 at least three times in a row and what I said to them was the very
first thing was please tell me the the last test that you did can you remember
the question? This was the question she could remember it as best that she could
and I said go away and write an essay under exam conditions because the first
point was to understand the exact reasons why she was getting 6.5 and
understand the principles that she was unaware of and understand some of the
things that she thought would work, but wouldn't really work. So this
was the first step and what we're gonna do in this lesson is show you the essay
that she produced that time and then the essay that she produced after we helped
her understand all of these principles so we'll show you a lot of the common
mistakes that people are making and on one of the ways that can help you
on test day. So after she did that we looked at her writing and we said you
need to stop thinking about essay writing as just looking at the question
and immediately starting to write because it's obvious that you're a bit
confused about what to do and your writing reflects that, because your
writing is a reflection of your thinking. So there are three stages to IELTS writing and the
stage one is the planning and thinking stage and the first thing that she said
to us was you're crazy I don't have time to plan I don't have time to write never
mind plan and we will look at that in more detail about high planning as an
investment of your time not a waste of your time. Then stage two the writing
stage obviously and stage three checking she was making a lot of careless mistakes
her grammar and vocabulary were actually quite good, but she was making a lot of
grammar and vocabulary mistakes, not because her grammar and vocabulary was
bad per se, but she just wasn't spending the time to check her essay but also
wasn't aware of what to look for and when she was checking her essay and what
we're gonna do in this lesson is show you each stage and a lot more detail.
So planning we're going to look at question analysis, idea generation,
structure planning and a little bit about vocabulary. Stage 2 we're going to
look at how to write an introduction, a main body paragraph, conclusion and
obviously grammar and vocabulary as well. On stage 3 the checking stage we're
going to give you a checklist of things to look for in your essays and also how
to strategically think about grammar and vocabulary, how to minimize mistakes and
improve your band scores for grammar and vocabulary. So let's get straight in to
the thinking stage, as I already mentioned the first thing that she said
was I just don't have time, you know I really struggled to get an essay done in
the 40 minutes allowed how am I going to have time for planning? So we changed her
mindset a little bit from planning as a waste of time, to planning is actually an
investment of your time, because the more you plan you're actually freeing up a
lot of time because instead of writing and then thinking and then writing and
thinking and then getting you know lost in the essay and having to go back and
panicking. You do all of your thinking in the thinking stage and then you do all
of your writing in the writing stage it's the analogy I always use is if you
were going on holiday of course you're going to plan the hotel you're going to,
book your flights and get a map of the city and all of those things to save you
time. So think about the planning stage as that, you know, planning everything
right to save you a lot of time and make everything much easier for yourself. So
your first job is to think about what the question is actually asking you to
do looking at her essay which I'll show you in a second it was very obvious that
she immediately just started writing and didn't really think about the question
and there was a major mistake in it and we're gonna show you that later on. So
just to remind you about the question, so I will read of this so instead of
immediately reading this as quickly as possible which she did and she made a
major mistake because of that. I told her just to calm down put the put the pen
on the table or the pencil or whatever it is and just think about the question
first, you might think this is really, really obvious but I'll show you
the major mistake that she made later on that will hopefully convince you that
this is a worthwhile use of your time. What she also did was she wrote about
the general topic but didn't really focus on the specifics of the question
so what we taught her first was take a minute or two just to read the question
and think about it but then divide it into the general topic. So the general topic
is sleep but the specific topic what they really are talking about is
comparing sleep now today and in the past and that will help you really hone
in on the correct answer I'm writing a very clear coherent, cohesive essay if
you split it up between the general topic and the specific topic. How to do
that, to get better at that, just look at lots of questions and you know get 5, 6, 7,
8 questions and have a look at them and try and divide them into the general
topic and the specific topics and it will start to dawn on you how important
that is because a lot of students what they do is they just write generally
about everything that they see rather than answering the specific question. But
that's just the first stage, the second stage of the thinking part of doing
your essay is what do they actually want you to do? Again this might sound really
obvious and you're like I know what they want me to do I've read it. Well you'll
see and most students actually get this question completely wrong, so number one
why is this? So what do you think is the reason behind this? Why is this? Keep it
very simple and secondly what effects does this have on them? It's really
important that you understand that its effects most people when they do this
question I'm like you'll see later on with this student what they write about
are the causes, it doesn't ask you about the causes of it. It asks you about the
effects of it. So if you talk about the causes like this student didn't, like
most students who do this and you're wrong. But if you write about the effects
you're correct, so again taking that time you'll see that it is an investment of
your time. You know the specific thing you're supposed to be writing about and
the specific things they want you to do and it just makes everything
much, much, much, much easier and then we can head onto the next stage of the
thinking part which is idea generation. Many, many times a day we'll get emails
from students saying I really, really struggle with idea generation I have no
idea what to do. So the first question we asked her when she told us that she had
this problem is what did you do in the real test? How did you generate ideas?
Because she was one of those people that was just like I'm really bad at thinking
of ideas, I was like okay you're probably not bad at thinking of ideas you're
probably just using the wrong technique or going about it the wrong way and her
answer was she started writing and then she started brainstorming I
said okay two major problems there first you cannot write and then brainstorm at
the same time. It's impossible to do that, if you think about it, you can't be
writing your essay and brainstorming at the same time but many, many students do
and the student did that as well and the result of that is normally having
multiple main ideas in each paragraph like a lot of students like this student
will have five or six main ideas in in their main body paragraphs
and no explanations really no examples are not developing the main ideas and
this is mentioned in the official marking criteria you need to develop
your main ideas and if you don't do that then you're not satisfying that marking
criteria. So even just this stage of idea generation can be tweaked to allow you
to satisfy the marking criteria and think of ideas quickly and effectively
also brainstorming is not the best way to think of ideas it's a great way to
think of ideas if you're trying to think of just random ideas and just free
thinking but you don't have time really to do that and brainstorming normally
generates just lots and lots of random irrelevant ideas and it takes a lot of
time. Instead with this question what you could do is just ask yourself direct
questions and think about what is the most obvious answer what is the most
obvious main idea if I asked a hundred people this question what would they say
so instead of brainstorming you could just think why is this why do people
sleep less than they did do in the past? They work more, that's one very, very, very
obvious idea that is easy for you to think about. You can do it quickly and
it's also easy for the examiner to recognize that idea and for you to
develop that idea what effects does it have on them what happens if you don't
sleep? Fatigue, and this person who we were working with was a doctor and they
were trying to think of all these crazy ideas and effects and I just like what
happens when you don't sleep? You feel tired. Why don't you use that oh it's too
simple there's nothing in the marking criteria that says your ideas need to be
sophisticated there's nothing in the marking criteria which says your ideas
need to be high-level or you know it's not an intelligence test, it's not a
knowledge test it is just a writing test and you can satisfy the marking criteria
by thinking of the most obvious answer that's relevant and specific answers the
question and like most students when I showed he this is I can't believe how
overcomplicated I made everything. Doesn't need to be that complicated
now that you've got two answers, two ideas, you can use structure planning. So
structure planning there's no magic structure, there's no structure that you
can use that is going to guarantee that you get a high score. There are lots of
structures that are that are good and there are lots of structures that are
not so good. A structure just helps you think helps you plan and helps you write
your essay and they're not a substitute for good grammar and good vocabulary and
you know good writing skills but they are very very helpful to organize your
ideas and then put those ideas onto paper so we gave her just a very basic
structure to help her with this so for this type of essay, this type of question.
Introduction, is you're gonna introduce the topic you're gonna paraphrase the
question by doing that answer both questions so tell the examiner exactly
what's coming up in the rest of the essay to help them but
your position needs to be clear throughout the essay that's what it says
in the marking criteria you also need to write a coherent and cohesive essay
again that's what it says in the marking criteria so teaching them just basic
principles that will help them satisfy the marking criteria and keep the
examiners happy main body 1 so it's your you've two questions, so your first
answer, your explanation on your example doesn't need to be any more complicated
than that. We'll look at how she made it more
complicated but it doesn't need to be Main body two the second answer,
explanation, an example and then conclusion is just a summary of answer
to both questions and she looked at this and started arguing with me and said
well my other teacher says to do it a different way and another IELTS expert
says to do it another way and my book says it I think so what are you trying
to achieve here are you just do you just want an argument do you want to just
debate which structure is better or would you rather just follow one way all
of them are probably going to help you and that is going to help you actually
write a decent answer so it took you know a couple of days for her to come
around but one of the key principles that she understood was there are many
correct ways of doing things and especially when it comes to structures
but if you try and do four different things you're going to write a very
confusing essay because as I've said a few times already your writing is a
reflection of your thinking if your thinking is clear your writing will be
clear if your thinking is confused your writing is going to be incoherent so
this is what we did we got her to take her ideas and just put them into this
structure so she's gonna paraphrase the question answer both questions so work
more and fatigue main body one work more than an explanation but why that is and
then an example a recent study plus something to support our main idea and
we'll look at what she said in a second when we look at her essay main body -
fatigue less sleep means the body a mine of less time to recover sleep
rejuvenates our body and mind very very obvious
and then she had a great example that she came up with herself and from a
basketball team that she read in a book she read a study and she's going to use
that and you'll see how good this was compared to what she did in the real
test. So let's look at some key principles from the thinking stage and
you can use these principles too to help you write your essays. So number one
take the time to understand the question and what it is asking you to do if you
don't do that you know you don't understand the
question you won't be able to answer it number two planning is an investment of
your time not a waste number three think of the most obvious
ideas they are obvious to the examiner and easy for you to develop there are no
extra marks for good ideas there are no extra marks for sophisticated ideas just
use ideas that are easy to use and easy to understand use a proven structure to
help you organize your ideas just make sure that it is a reliable structure and
it actually works but and don't try and memorize like five different structures
do most of your thinking before you start writing it's very difficult to
think and write at the same time and help yourself and help the reader so
help yourself write a good essay and help the reader understand what you have
done and understand that you have the ability to write a good essay these five
principles just help you and they help the reader and if you do those things
then you're well on your way to writing a very very effective essay so let's
have a look at our first introduction where she didn't follow any of these
principles and let's have a look at what she did
noise a days due to busy lifestyle it is common phenomena for people to slumber
less this essay will discuss both views and finish with a reasonable opinion so
I said to her what are you doing here what are you doing enough first sentence
and she had no answer and I said what are you doing in that second sentence
she had no answer I said well if you don't know why you wrote those sentences
if you don't know the purpose of those sentences do you think that the person
reading it is going to really follow it or understand it and I kept pushing her
and pushing her why did you do this and she said I looked at other essays
and most of them started with niya days and they talked about busy lifestyle and
I also looked at some YouTube videos that told me that if I used the words
phenomenon and you know high level vocabulary like this then I was going to
get a really high score I also looked at some blog posts and they started their
essays with this essay we'll discuss both fuse and finish with a reasonable
opinion my answer to that was this is not a memorization test this is a
writing test you're not trying to demonstrate to the examiner that you
watched some YouTube videos and memorize some vocabulary you're not trying to
demonstrate to the to the examiner that you read a few blog posts and memorized
how they write an introduction you need to demonstrate that you know how to
write an introduction it's pretty obvious what is the purpose of an
introduction why do we write an introduction we write an introduction to
introduce the reader to what the topic is and introduce the reader to what is
going to be in the rest of the essay those are the purposes of an
introduction and if you don't do those things then you've just wasted your time
and you've more importantly you've wasted the readers time because the
introduction is just there to help the reader understand what is coming up in
the essay so we applied those principles and we look let's have a look at our new
introduction so the first thing we got her to do was look at the question when
you're writing your introduction if you don't look at the question when you're
writing your introduction you're not going to write a good introduction
pretty simple and again all of these things that seem really obvious but you
would not believe the number of students who we actually teach this to who say
yeah that's really obvious and then don't do it
all right learn how to walk before you can run do the basic principles the
fundamentals before you start thinking about anything fancy because you're not
being judged on what you want the fancy things you can do you're being judged on
the fundamentals people sleep fewer hours than they did many years ago this
is because we tend to work longer hours compared to the past and this results in
fatigue so let's analyze this a little bit people sleep fewer hours and
did many years ago paraphrasing the question
introducing the topic this is because we tend to work longer hours compared to
the past answer one on this results in fatigue answer two
so again student fought me on this and said it's far too short and I said to
them here's the official marking criteria where does it say anywhere that
your introduction needs to be long and she said yeah but my other teacher told
me that it needs to be long it's like what score did you get last time six
point five what score did you get the time before six point five what score
did you get the time before six point five do you think that doing the same
thing that you used to do is going to increase your score or you're going to
stay the same and then she started going okay let's try and learn a different way
of doing things um and this is not the most perfect introduction in the world
there's mistakes in it you know there's mistakes in the rest of her essay but it
is way way way better than noisy days due to busy lifestyle that is common
phenomenon for people to slumber less just a hundred times better so let's
have a look and think about what the examiner would be thinking when they are
looking at this introduction so the first question they're going to ask
themselves is how they understood the question and by looking at this yes they
have do they know how to paraphrase yes they do
is there grammar and vocabulary appropriate and accurate for the most
part yes it is do they know how to write an introduction yes they do all the
essential elements are there does the introduction make the rest of the essay
clear and easy to understand absolutely if I gave you this on a piece of paper
and said what is this essay about I'm water what is the rest of the essay
going to discuss what is it going to be about you would know exactly what is
going to happen so key principles again demonstrate ability not memorization
keep it simple paraphrasing is a skill you must master many of you are thinking
No how do I learn how to paraphrase get
lots of questions and paraphrase them and get feedback on them help the reader
understand what your essay is about by clearly telling
them help yourself and help the reader well let's move on to her first main
body paragraph and let's look at why this would not get high score firstly
people not bless is because of hectic lifestyle lifestyle people have a more
busier life than in the past so she started off with a main idea which is
hectic lifestyle and then said people have a more busy or life than in past
let's ignore the grammar and vocabulary mistakes for now but basically this
isn't an explanation it's basically just repeating the same thing again secondly
is the fast-paced life which many adherents are subject to causing a
myriad problems so this seems like it's a second idea because she's put secondly
in here but it's really the same idea as the last one fast-paced lifestyle and
this causes problems thirdly for example my mother used to sleep 9 hours at night
and she was a housewife I snooze only 6 hours and I am a busy doctor so thirdly
that's showing that like there's a third idea but this is an example so it's it's
difficult to understand what she is doing and where she's going because the
discourse markers don't really help and then in conclusion I have no idea why
you would put a conclusion at the end of a main body paragraph you put your
conclusion at the end of the essay not at the end of the main body paragraph so
when I asked her about this first of all I said why are you adding in so much
strange vocabulary so myriad and adherents and stuff I got she said well
I'm humongous and she said well I looked at a YouTube video and this girl told me
that if I memorize these five or 10 words and put them into my essay I would
get a high score it's like okay can you see the problem with that because you're
not actually answering the question you're just focusing on putting in some
big words and you're not even using those words effectively
some of them are spelled incorrectly some of them are used incorrectly some
of them the grammar is wrong that's a big problem then I said why are you
putting firstly secondly thirdly in conclusion
she said my old teacher told me to do that that's you know a very famous
teacher told me to do that and he's really good and you should do that it's
like no because that's encouraging you to put in at least three to four main
ideas not develop any of them and she was like yeah I got confused I tried to
put an explanation in here and then an example in here but I got confused
between the structure that you taught and the structure that my tall teacher
taught is that okay that's fine but let's just focus on one way of doing
things and I'm not saying that you have to follow my way but follow one way if
you try and use two to three different structures in a paragraph then it's
going you're going to be confused and it's very very confusing to read so we
help the right and let's have a look at her new main body paragraph again not
perfect there's some little mistakes in here but we're not looking for
perfection you don't need perfection to get a high score should be minimizing
mistakes but don't look at this and be like oh she made a mistake but comment
below and tell me any mistakes that you can spot and that will help you as well
so people tend to sleep less compared to the past because they they are expected
to work more okay clear topic sentence you're telling the examiner this is what
this paragraph is about this is because the job market is more competitive than
ever before and workers have to get more done or they may fall behind or be
replaced by someone else explanation anatec actually explains that main idea
so it's nice and coherent and cohesive this means that people have to get up
earlier and do not return home until late in the evening thus cutting into
their sleep further explanation of the same point furthermore they do not have
time to relax and this disrupts their sleep pattern again they could have
connected this a little bit better they seemed a little desperate to put in
another discourse marker and we helped her fix that but again fine can't fix it
a little bit but overall very very good and a dramatic improvement
the last time for example she missed out an article their recent study showed
that the average employee works 2.4 hours more than my son another article
and the average worker little mistake there in the 1970s so example provides
evidence to help support her main view this is much better than my mom sleeps
my mom used to sleep more than I did a personal example you can use personal
examples but most people and especially this person continued to mess them up
because they don't really help you provide evidence for the general point
so if an examiner was looking at this again let's we're going to talk about
grammar at the end they wouldn't notice that you know the little grammar
mistakes but overall the grammar is signed the vocabulary is signed not
perfect but it signs but let's look at the structure and coherence and cohesion
and task achievement they would read this first sentence and think I know
what the sentence is about and it links to the main idea in the introduction
they would look at this enter an explanation ok I understand what they
think about the question and then the example ok that provides evidence
compare that with that it's like night and day
and it doesn't take much to convert a mess like this into something like this
she didn't really need to study that much she just needed to understand the
principles behind this the principle of I need to make my topic sentences clear
I need to actually explain that main idea have one main idea in the paragraph
and then provide evidence and try and make my grammar and vocabulary as
accurate as possible let's have a look at her second main body paragraph there
are a plethora reasons for this predicament again what was she doing
there she was trying to impress the examiner with the word plethora
unpredict like in the previous one myriad and all
of these words like it's not really impressing anybody if you're not
actually doing the most important thing which is answering the question firstly
productivity of the workforce will plummet however this is something that
can being mitigate secondly this could cause
health problems for those affected finally a number of my patient have
complained of this problem and this was caused by a lack of dose to recapitulate
reasons are multi varied and profound which is not surprising considering how
widespread this problem is she just memorized that from another essay and
put it in there which is very very obvious to an examiner and also she's
talking a lot about causes and not about effects so you probably spotted this
when I when I told you about this at the beginning of the lesson the question is
about effects but she's often talking about causes because she didn't spend
the time thinking about the question planning it out if you do your thinking
you're not going to make mistakes like this so we give her a new system to
follow the primary effect of this so not cause effect widespread crop of this is
she missed out the word is widespread chronic fatigue unspell fatigue wrong
that is to say large sections of the population do not get the required eight
hours and this results in a high percentage of them being too tired to
live their lives effectively so she's making a lot of Carles mistakes i'm
gonna look at the end at the end of this lesson hi she fixed those and how she
got got over that problem this could mean that they underperform at work are
more irritable with those around them or could even have health problems for
example the Golden State Warriors basketball team employed a sleep expert
and the study players who sleep for who slept for more than nine hours a night
I'm compared than with those that only got sick so she's getting again making
careless mistakes her grammar is actually quite good but she was when she
was doing this essay she didn't she hadn't mastered all of the techniques
yet and she was a little bit under pressure with time because when you're
learning new systems and new techniques takes you longer amount of time to do
essays and to do anything but she will show you how she fixed this those that
slept less had more injuries and actually perform worse on the court I
said how did you think about example she said oh I read a
book of what sleep it's like why didn't you use this in the real test she said I
was under pressure and I just didn't think about it and I said okay what was
the difference she said well because I divided it into thinking writing and
planning it gave me my just more room to think about this and the ideas came a
lot more freely and flowed a lot better and I was able to think of this great
example so the examiner would look at this and they would obviously see that
there are quite a few small grammar and vocabulary mistakes and they would mark
them down for that but they would look at this and see you know clear topic
sentence clear explanation clear example very very good example that helps the
reader understand their point of view and answers the question effectively so
let's look at some key principles from this you need to fully develop your main
ideas stop putting multiple main ideas and not developing any of them in your
main body paragraphs do not have multiple main ideas and one paragraph
help the reader understand what the paragraph is about by writing clear
topic sentences help the reader understand your main point by explaining
it to them and support your main idea with evidence by giving an example
personal examples do not normally provide sufficient evidence you can't
use them but most of the time they're not that good use vocabulary as a tool
to help you express meaning memorizing high level vocabulary does not help you
do that showing off your vocabulary I'm making lots and lots of mistakes does
not normally end well use vocabulary to help you express meaning that is the
purpose of vocabulary is to help you express your thoughts so use it for that
purpose of a look at our first conclusion to sum it all up we live in
fast-paced hectic world where drowsing is not prioritization it is my future
prediction that this will continue to be problem and will even gather pace in the
coming century ok why are you putting in new ideas and future predictions again I
seen this somewhere else and I just thought I would do this so this person
was a very very intelligent woman she was a doctor but she wasn't thinking
or herself she was just memorizing stuff and looking what other people were doing
rather than actually learning how to write which is what we taught her when
you switch your perspective from I just want to look at a bunch of essays and
copy a bunch of things - I want to learn how to write an essay then your scores
are going to improve dramatically her new conclusion in conclusion people are
more sleep deprived than in previous generations due to longer working hours
and the effect is that many are chronically tired to the point of
exhaustion so summarizing our main points making our position clear on both
questions that's what the examiner will be thinking about do the points link up
with what is discussed in the rest of the essay because what is a conclusion a
conclusion is a summary of the main points they'll also be thinking about is
their position clear throughout the essay your position on each question
what you think about each question should be clear throughout the essay
that's what it states in the marking criteria some key principles for writing
a conclusion a conclusion to summarize your main points and provide a clear
position do number one just do that don't do anything else and you should
not have new ideas in your conclusion you shouldn't be adding in no future
predictions and stuff like that you can't do that but make sure they're
actually related to what you wrote about and just avoid doing it and in fact
because it doesn't actually add anything to your essay just keep it simple
for all the basics follow the fundamentals so third stage is checking
so you might have noticed that she made it a lot of mistakes especially in in
the in the third paragraph the second main body paragraph so we're going to
divide the checking stage into three parts checklist grammar and vocabulary
checklist so we provided her with a checklist of things to think about at
the end of her essay so because we trained her in a certain way five to ten
minutes at the beginning she was doing or thinking and then five minutes at the
end she was doing or checking so these are the things that she would be
thinking about when looking her essay that I demonstrate that I
understood the question so if you have followed the system that we showed you
in this in this video that will come inevitably you will do that inevitably
if you spend the time thinking about it you know dividing it into general topic
on specific topics and thinking about the questions are my 80 is relevant did
I structure my answer appropriately again if you use a proven structure that
happens automatically how is my paragraphing so did I have a
clear introduction clear main body paragraphs and a clear conclusion that I
paraphrase effectively was my introduction effective did I do the
right things in my introduction did I develop my main ideas topic sentences
explanations examples did I summarize my main ideas in the conclusion and was my
position clear throughout the essay you also be thinking about was my grammar
accurate and appropriate and did I display a wide enough range of
vocabulary and was my vocabulary accurate so let's not look at 10 11 and
12 but you can see that if you learn this and you learn how to do all these
things you're not going to be going like check ticking each of these off in your
essay you've learnt them to the point where it's you look at your essay and
you can understand them automatically whether you've done these things or not
so let's move on to grammar so you might have noticed that she had one major
issue which was articles she nearly every sentence had an article mistake in
it and that's that was a big big problem because the examiner will be looking for
error free sentences the more error free sentences you have generally the better
your grammar score is going to be so if you look at a typical essay you'll see
multiple articles so if you are struggling with articles then you're
going to have a major issue but this was her problem you might be great with
articles but you have a problem with prepositions or you might have a problem
with punctuation or a problem with tenses or a problem with verbs or bad
agreement or one of the other areas of grammar but the key thing was we if we
fix this for her we could increase her score
dramatically because 90% of her mistakes were article mistakes so you fixed that
big mistake a big problem then the number of error-free sentences increases
dramatically so we did two things for her we improved her use of articles and
we taught her how to check articles when editing she also made quite a few just
careless mistakes so what do I mean by careless mistakes I mean that she knew
the grammar so she made a little tense mistake she made a mistake with like
countable uncountable nouns but she knew that area of grammar it wasn't a big
problem since she was rushing through everything and she didn't get to check
it so we can fix this we don't need to you know review the whole area of
grammar because she made one mistake we helped her fix this by checking her
writing three times after each sentence read the sentence did you make any
mistakes if he did correct them at the end of each paragraph read that
paragraph any mistakes fix them and then at the end of the essay read the whole
essay any mistakes fix them and this dramatically improved her performance in
grammar she went from you know making a mistake in nearly every sentence to only
making one or two mistakes in the whole essay vocabulary so her vocabulary was
really already a 7 or above the problem was she was using it incorrectly because
she was doing two things she was memorizing lots of high level
words you see not in her original essay and she was showing off so she was just
showing off I know this big word like myriad and plethora and humongous just
didn't didn't really fit in the essay at all it didn't really help her answer the
question and she was using them incorrectly a lot of the times and we
can fix this immediately by changing her mindset changing her mindset from using
and showing off high-level words to use vocabulary you already have as a tool to
express meaning not to show off so we looked at our vocabulary and said your
vocabulary is actually pretty good you're making way too many mistakes but
making mistakes because you're pushing too hard like going to the gym and
lifting a weight that's too heavy for you lift the weights that you're capable
of lifting and you'll get stronger and stronger and perform better but if you
lift the weight that's too heavy you'll drop it on your head and kill yourself
same with your si if you're use vocabulary you don't know how to use you
are going to destroy your chances of getting a high enough mark so let's
check out si again when it comes to vocabulary because we had a little bit
of a debate on you're probably looking at her essay and I'm screaming at the
other and I have to at the screen that there's a big big mistake in it if you
know that mistake put the comments and but tell me what you think of a
vocabulary before we actually look at this big problem that she thought she
had but she didn't really have so this is her essay let me blow it up a little
bit for you so let's see okay so when you look at her original essay she
varied the word sleep over and over and over and over again but incorrectly and
we'll look at that in a second so when I gave her feedback I said I all of most
of the variations the synonyms of sleep incorrect so some of them were informal
some of them just the meaning was wrong some of them the style was wrong and she
had a bit of a debate or an argument with me and she said you can't repeat
any words if you repeat words you'll get a low score everybody knows that all of
my teachers told me that and I said okay well let's have a look at it so we took
her essay so this is her essay and we put it in here which is word counter so
you can just copy and paste anyone any document in here 272 words shows your
mistakes and all those things but let's have a look here keyword density alright
so she used sleep seven times so she said I can't repeat the word sleep seven
times and hope to get a high score so I said okay let's take the word
sleep and put it into a thesaurus so let's have a look at all of these and
she said yeah what I need to do is just use these words that's going to impress
the examiner and we'll be able to get a high score so I said okay let's look at
these coma is coma the same as asleep no dream is dream the same as sleep
not really hibernation no slumber yes but it's not really it's a little bit
informal trance no catnap no dormancy no sirs very very few words here that
you could actually use so she made a big mistake thinking all you have to do is
just put in a synonym these are all synonyms of sleep but you can't actually
use most of them in an essay so we talked about it a little bit more and
she said well if I use sleep many many times I'm gonna get a little score I
said okay well let's have a look at this let's think about it so the first time
you sleep fine the second time you use sleep so you're writing your essay what
happened and she explained that she thought for a very very long time about
how to change the word sleep and she couldn't think of a good way so she
guessed and that was snooze which was wrong so I said okay two things have
happened here number one you've wasted a lot of time just trying to think of one
word and then when you did think of it it was wrong lowering your score which
is better is it better just to use the word sleep again and get on with your
essay vary your language as much as you can if you can change it change it but
if you can't think of a word and if you can't think of a correct word don't use
it because in an essay like this abide sleep you have two choices you can
repeat the word sleep or you can try and use one of these words and most of them
will be wrong you know so it's really up to you it's you have to vary your
language as much as you can and demonstrate to the examiner that you
know how to paraphrase you know how to use synonyms
but there will be some words that you just have to repeat and if you disagree
with me tell me the alternative tell me what you should do instead should you
use a bunch of words that don't mean anything or don't you know don't mean
exactly the same as the word you're trying to replace use the wrong words or
sit there for 20 minutes trying to think of one word you should always be trying
to improve your vocabulary but don't sit there for 20 minutes and then use the
wrong word you're going to be in all sorts of trouble but if we look at there
is the rest of her vocabulary fatigue disrupts their sleep pattern cutting
into their sleep widespread chronic fatigue or some great vocabulary and
great collocations in there and that's my point to her was you've got some
great vocabulary but you're trying too hard to show off and you also are so
afraid of repeating a word that you are covering your chances of actually
improving she did make some little you know she would be marked down for making
those little spelling mistakes but again checking your work at the end
I'm fixing those and then planning and writing and then checking is going to
alleviate that problem and that's one of the main reasons why she improved even
further to a bond date so as promised if you click the link in the video and it
should pop up know that a link or you'll find it in the description below just
click the link that's popping up right now I to get access to our free five day
challenge I threw a lot of stuff at you today and it was kind of vary from this
kind of 30,000 foot view point and we're looking a lot of fundamentals and basic
principles if you want to look at things in a lot more detail and look at a five
day challenge five lessons showing you exactly what to do I'm giving you five
tasks and five feedback sessions click the link is totally free and you can get
it now your turn so what I would like you to do is look at an essay write a
response and I will pick a few of them randomly and give very very
detailed feedback in a new lesson so it's your opportunity to get feedback on
your work normally for one feedback session with me it's about twenty-five
dollars and so you get an opportunity to make twenty five dollars basically or
get a free correction people eat more processed food than they did in the past
why is this what are the effects of this I will randomly select a few essays I
give detailed feedback feel free to comment on other people's essays too so
this will really really help you and understand the the basic principles that
we talked about today and I'm giving other people feedback really helps you
learn the material and really solidify what you have learned today and see you
on Friday for the feedback session so what I'll do is a look at a few of the
essays that that you'll put in the comments and what I'll do is I'll take
some of them randomly and I'll create a feedback lesson or I give detailed
feedback to a few of those so to a few random people I'm not gonna do it like
first-come first-served I'm just gonna pick a few of them randomly and to make
it fair I'll pick about two or three maybe even
four if I have time and I'll make a lesson on Friday and I'll post in the
comments and to let you know that your lesson our essay has been chosen for the
lesson hopefully you found that useful guys if you enjoyed this video give it a
thumbs up or just say thank you it's totally free hopefully you were able to
get some benefit from that student she's a little bit shy she didn't want to do a
success story but hopefully that was even better and if you have any
questions or anything like that feel free to comment below and we'll get back
to you or if you want to get in touch with us my email address is chris@ieltsadvantage.com hopefully you find that useful and look forward to reading
your comments thanks very much guys buh-bye
