Page 51 - IELTS Academic Writing Task 1: The Ultimate Guide with Practice to Get a Target Band Score of 8.0+ In 10 Minutes a Day

MOST COMMON MISTAKES STUDENTS MAKE IN

TASK 1 WRITING

1. Adverb vs adjective

A slight increase/decrease. (NOT a slightly increase/decrease).

2. Copy the summary

This just means you do not paraphrase the summary enough. That’s a big problem. Be
sure you paraphrase the summary as much as you can.

3. Misusing words or phrases.

You might say: Sales levelled off and then decreased (it’s wrong, because we always

use “levelled off” after another trend.)

So, levelled off is misused in this case.

Or, you might say: sales reduced. (We don’t use “reduced” this way)

Instead we say sales decreased/declined

4. Question mark

No question mark in task 1 writing. This means either a confusing word, a phrase, may
be a sentence or may be a whole paragraph. The examiner will not know what you are

talking about. The grammar is so stuffed that they cannot understand what you are trying
to say, and they cannot easily fix your grammar.

So what are you going to do with this kind of sentence?

First, don’t try to fix the mistakes that you have. Don’t look at back your grammar over
and over again. Instead, look at what you are saying and ask yourself what you were
trying to say. You wrote it, so you know what you are trying to describe, then look at

back the task 1 language, words, and phrases I gave you above, and start writing that
sentence, or whole paragraph over. Don’t try to fix what you have, take what you have
and throw away and put something new in there.

5. Wrong verb tense use.

Pay your attention to the verb tense.

6. Don’t use figures in your introduction and overview (no need to give numbers in

your main point)