Page 49 - IELTS Academic Writing Task 1: The Ultimate Guide with Practice to Get a Target Band Score of 8.0+ In 10 Minutes a Day

TASK 1 WRITING RULES

1. You must write 150 words minimum, 220 words maximum. If you write more than

220 words, you will face a penalty. You won’t have enough time to complete your
task 2 writing.
2. You must skip lines between paragraphs. This allows you to do a couple of
important things here. Skipping lines is going to make your writing neater. That is

important. Remember that the writing test, we are dealing with the human being. Who
is the human being? The examiner, and we need to make this guy happy. Right away, I
want the examiner when they have a pile of writings in front of them, and they might
not feel well, they might be hungry, they might have had an argument with their

boyfriend or girlfriend; they might just be sick of a pile of writings. When they turn to
look at your writing, and I want the first thing they think about when they see your
writing is that you are a neat organized student. I want you to give them the first
positive impression. They often have to choose between a 5.5 or 6.0; 6.5 or 7.0; I

want them to have all reasons to give you a 7.0, not 5.5 or 6.0, so you should make
your examiner happy and be neat.
3. Keep it simple: you should use exactly the list of task 1 vocabulary, sentence
structures that I have given you in this book. Do not get creativity. Trust me, you are

probably wrong if you are creative. My experience of over four years of teaching
IELTS for many different levels of students. They do not do well with creativity when
it comes to IELTS writing task 1. Please do what I tell you to do. It’s simple, but it
will give you a high score.

4. Corrections: it’s great that some of you do your writing, and then you look at it, you
think about it and you fix things/mistakes in your writing. That’s awesome! If you
catch your mistakes before your teacher catch them, you are doing a learning. Who
need to do a learning? You or your teacher? You. I very highly encourage you to write

these kinds of reports using your knowledge, taking your time, being careful and then
walking away from the reports. Go and take a nap, watch TV, have some coffee,
whatever, just forget about your homework, and then come back with your fresh eyes
and fresh mind, then read your writing out loud. I promise to you that your ears will

catch grammar mistakes because you hear a lot more English than you ever read.
Don’t you? Yes, same thing with the native speakers.