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Hi

The key to making fewer mistakes in your IELTS writing is to know what mistakes you make, what kind of mistakes they are, and how to correct them.

One way to do this is to make an error correction log, a list of your common mistakes and their corrections.

Have a look at these corrected sentences from an IELTS candidate’s essay on the importance of maintaining old buildings, and then check out the error correction log below.

In conclusion, some buildings would could be knocked down to make way for progress and development. However, that those old buildings that have important history to human beings should be maintain maintained.

If the candidate had received this feedback from their teacher, he/she could have logged each error like this:

• Type of error: Verb form
• Error: should be maintain
• Correction: should be maintained
• Reason: the passive  (be + verb-ed)

If you create an error correction log for your most common mistakes, you can then use it to check and correct your writing in the future.

By the way, the candidate’s writing above is from the Official IELTS Practice Materials 2009; it was given a band score of 6.0 and the examiner’s comment was “errors in grammar and tense are noticeable [but] these do not usually cause problems for the reader”.

Have a good weekend.

Pete

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Tags: Grammar for IELTS, IELTS band scores, IELTS writing