How to start (and not to start) an IELTS Task 2 writing
We see a lot of people use a phrase similar to this when they write an introduction
“In this essay I will explore the cause of the problem and offer some solutions”
or
“This essay will show the advantages and disadvantages of ……..”
Stop! Don’t do it! Why not you ask? Well, one of the IELTS examiners answers this question.
I see this a lot in IELTS candidates’ introductions. I don’t know where it comes from or who is teaching it but it is a waste of time. When you use this phrase, you are saying “I am going to answer the question”. But what else are you going to do? The examiner knows you are going to answer the question because you are sitting the exam.
The inclusion of this phrase seems to come from people thinking that IELTS is an academic exam. It isn’t. It is FOR academic purposes, but it isn’t an evaluation of your academic English. It is a test of your English, nothing more. If you include a sentence like this, the examiner just skips over it as it
1) is memorised and
2) states the obvious point that you are going to answer the question.
Stop wasting time in the IELTS writing exam. You need to write efficiently and including phrases like this slows you down. You could spend these vital seconds checking your work for mistakes after you have finished writing.
So, what should you include in your introduction?
Well, keep it very concise. Introduce the debate (There is nearly always a debate that is mentioned in the question) then state your opinion (You are nearly always asked for your opinion). And that is it. Nothing more. The introduction is not mentioned in the writing criteria so don’t waste time on it.
Good advice there. If you want to see what you will get in the IELTS writing, you can do a full IELTS writing test with us and IELTS examiners will show you what you need to do to get higher marks.
Comments (2)
This is very confusing as everybody seems to give different advise. Yesterday I checked out an IELTS podcast done by an IELTS tutor and a band 9 example was shown. In the introduction it said(after the sentence paraphrasing the topic) :
“This essay will show that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and proof this with arguments and examples”. So are you saying that this is actually the opposite of what I should do and I should rather word it as “I believe..”, “As I see it…” or “in my opinion….”? So confusing 🙁
Hello Helen.
Thank you for the comment. The examiner is making a couple of points here.
1) Don’t waste time in the exam. Writing “This essay will show that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and proof this with arguments and examples” takes time, time you don’t have in the exam. You would be better off using this time to check your writing once you have finished writing.
2) It is a memorized phrase. IELTS examiners ignore them so this gets you no marks.
3) It means nothing. Are you going to do something else other than ““show that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and prove this with arguments and examples”. If so, then there are other issues affecting your writing.
This advice is about writing efficiently. We see a lot of essays that use these sentences impeccably, yet they can’t use the article ‘the’ correctly, for example. So imagine you are reading someone’s Task 2 that has a lot of grammatical mistakes in it but then you get the sentence “This essay will show that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and prove this with arguments and examples”. The candidate has wasted time writing a correct sentence but cannot control grammar for the rest of the essay. This is why the examiner here (and us at upmyielts) advise against using these phrases.
Is this clearer?