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
See our IELTS tutoring options to find out more about how we can help you improve your English for the IELTS test.
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Hi, was just wondering how important the correct use of spelling and grammar is towards the final outcome of your writing band score? I have already done the writing test and scored an overall band score of 7.5. However I need to score at least an 8 so need to take the test again. I’m confident with all the other criteria needed in the writing and can only think my spelling and grammar let me down. If for example their was a total of 5-6 spelling mistakes in both task 1 and 2 combined, how would this affect the score? Many thanks.
I’m sorry to hear you didn’t get the writing band score you need, Chris. In answer to your question, your spelling and grammar are very important because they both need to meet certain requirements for you to get a band score 8.0.
Here’s what it says about the number of spelling mistakes allowed for a band score 8.0 in the public version of the officlal IELTS band score descriptors for both Writing Task 1 and 2:
And here’s what it says about the number of grammar mistakes:
When the examiner looked at your writing, he/she may have decided that you had more than ‘rare’ spelling mistakes and/or more than ‘very occasional’ grammar mistakes. To see what other aspects of your writing may have affected your score for Task 2, check out the video in our blog post ‘How to get a band score 8.0 in IELTS Writing Task 2‘.
If you’d like some individual feedback on your writing, have a look at our ‘Get started – IELTS Writing’ option on the IELTS tutoring page of our website.
Pete