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This is a common problem for a lot of people.  A member in our private Facebook page “IELTS Writing and Speaking support” got in touch and left this question.

“Sometimes we are given to much information in the task 1 and this makes it very hard to include all the data to the writing, just as it is very difficult to fill 150 words when there is very little to write about. However, I think the hardest part of the writing is the time limit. It is not so difficult to finish task one in twenty minutes and task two in forty minutes, but it is quite hard to finish both in solid 60 minutes.”

One of the IELTS examiners that works for us answered this

First, let’s look at Task 1

Writing 150+ words on a process sometimes can be a challenge as there isn’t much to say sometimes. However, as long as you cover the main steps and show how they relate to each other, you can get very high marks. Also, the examiner that is marking your Task also knows this so when you are faced with a Task 1 that doesn’t have much data, as long as you cover all the points, you should score well.

When there is a lot of data to cover you need to mention all the categories and their main trend (upwards/downwards etc) and support each with some data.  Don’t make the mistake of thinking you don’t need to mention every category; you do as they are key parts of the data.

As for timing, this is all about writing efficiently. IELTS writing, both Ac and GT, is pretty much the same every time. If it wasn’t then it wouldn’t be an accurate reading of your written English. If you are struggling to finish a Task 2 in 40 minutes then you need to approach the Task in a different way. Don’t write more than 260 words, learn how to plan your body paragraphs, get a set introduction that you can use for most Task 2s that is concise and to the point to name but a few ideas. There are a lot of things you can do here and we find that the problem with timing is that candidates write too much, they don’t plan, or they aren’t sure what they actually need to do to get into the higher bands and so misunderstand what they have to do.

If you are struggling with IELTS writing, get in touch with us.  Do a Task 2 with us and an IELTS examiner will evaluate your writing, give you a Band score and show you what you need to do to get higher marks in each of the criteria.  You can see an example of our work on our homepage.  Just scroll down bit.