This article provides some important advice for IELTS Writing Task 1.

Task Achievement

IELTS Writing Task 1 is assessed using the criterion Task Achievement. This basically means the extent to which the writer fulfilled the task (i.e. did you manage to adequately describe the main features of the visual provided?). There is one major requirement under this criterion that IELTS candidates often miss or misunderstand – the overview. The box below shows the relevant parts of the public band descriptors for the Task Achievement criterion for bands 5, 6 and 7:

So, no overview equals maximum of band 5 for this criterion, but what is this overview and why is it so often neglected? Well, there are three important points to understand. These are:

1. An overview is NOT a paraphrase of the written part of the question prompt (although it should include the important information such as what kind of visual data is being described, where and when the data was collected, etc.).

2. An overview is, as it says in the band descriptors for band 7, a statement about the “main trends, differences or stages”. So, the overview can be thought of as a one or two sentence summary of the main point (or points) of the visual.

3. It is strategically advisable to put your overview first at the start of your writing. This is for the simple reason that if you do it well, from the start of your work the examiner will be looking at the >6 band descriptors rather than the <5 descriptors.

Lexical Resource

When describing visual data, it is difficult to demonstrate a wide range of vocabulary. Sure, you need to know synonyms for increase and decrease, and you need to know how to use comparing and compared to correctly, but beyond that, how do you increase your LR score?

My suggestion is to look for opportunities to ‘inject’ higher level vocabulary. By this I mean adding possible interpretations or explanations of the data. For example, if the data showed a trend towards houses being built on higher land, you could add a sentence like:

This may be caused by concerns over climate change and a greater risk of local flooding due to more frequent rainfall in the river’s catchment area.

Such speculation is not part of the task requirement so you must keep it short (I’d recommend no longer than one sentence for any point) but it clearly provides an opportunity for you to ‘inject’ vocabulary and collocations to help nudge your LR score up into the >6 bands. Remember not to do this too often or you will be marked down for being off-task. Be very judicial and wise when ‘injecting’ vocabulary 🙂

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