 Hey Chris here from IELTS Advantage and here are five things that you can do to instantly improve your IELTS essays. So normally it takes a very long time to help someone go from say a band six to a band seven but these are five things that I've helped students with that instantly will improve the level of your essays. So let's start. Okay so number one is improve your grammar by identifying your main weaknesses or your common errors. So grammar is 25% of your total mark. It's really really really important. If you are making lots and lots of grammar mistakes it's impossible for you to really get a seven or above. You need to produce something called error-free sentences and if you're hoping to get a seven or above more than 50% of your sentences need to be error-free. So what I see when I'm working with my students is normally they'll have one or two areas of grammar where they consistently make mistakes in those areas. So that could be something like punctuation or articles or verb-subject agreement or tenses or one of the many many other areas of grammar. So let's say that you have a problem with prepositions and articles. They're in every single sentence. So if you are making mistakes in every single sentence you're going to get a six or below for grammar and that's going to make it pretty much impossible for you to get a seven or above. So what you need to do is you need to identify what your common grammar errors are and then work to improve those areas of grammar and you can do that by showing your work to a teacher, by showing it to someone who is a high level user of English or you might have a friend who is really good at English or is a native English speaker. Show them your essay and say can you tell me the area of grammar that I need to work on the most. Fix that area and you will eliminate sort of 70 to 90% of your mistakes. So the second way to instantly improve your essays is simplify your vocabulary. So this might sound counterintuitive because what most people think is it's an English test they're testing my vocabulary so the more advanced vocabulary that I use the higher my score is going to be and that is true to a certain extent. They are testing your range of vocabulary but at the same time they are testing the accuracy of your vocabulary. So what happens if you try and use lots of words that you don't know how to use you're going to make mistakes that is going to lower the accuracy of your vocabulary and again if you're making lots and lots of mistakes similar to grammar it's impossible for you to get a seven or above. So a really good analogy is weightlifting. If I go to the gym I can lift 50 kilograms no problem but if I try and lift 150 kilograms I'm going to fail. My muscles are going to fail. Same way with vocabulary. I would love for you to be using the most amazing high level band nine words and get a really high score but you're incapable of doing that at the moment. You should be improving your vocabulary all the time and trying to improve the range but when you are in that test you should use the vocabulary that you currently have and focus on accuracy. The alternative is to try and use lots of words that you don't really know how to use yet. You are guaranteed to get a low score because you're going to make lots and lots of mistakes. So improve your vocabulary long term work on it every single day but for now simplify your vocabulary only use the words you're a hundred percent sure about reduce the number of mistakes and you are going to improve your score for vocabulary. The third thing you can do to instantly improve your essays is to plan. So the thing that students always say to me when I suggest planning is what am I going to do? How am I going to do this? I don't have time timing is a big issue for them but the number one thing that I see when I am talking to a successful IELTS student and when I say to them what was the number one thing that changed everything for you in terms of improving your IELTS writing task to performance they will always say planning and again it sounds counterintuitive if you spend time on planning that means less time writing you're going to run out of time you won't get everything done and you will fail but it actually saves you a huge amount of time. Let me again give you an analogy so imagine you are going on holiday and you are in a strange city would it be a waste of time if you were going from your hotel to a museum to type the name of the hotel into google maps and then just follow google maps to the museum or would it be better just to start walking around and try and find it yourself which is going to take you more time of course it's going to take you more time if you just run around and you don't really know where you're going planning is like a google map for your essay by thinking about the question planning out your answer using a structure trying to think of ideas and planning everything out before you start writing you are investing that time in the same way that investing time into typing the address into google maps is saving you time that means that you are totally focused on your writing at the writing stage you don't have to think of ideas or structure or explanations or examples because you've done all of that thinking and it's there in plan form so that you won't get lost when you're writing your essay how many times have you completely messed up your essay because you start writing because you haven't planned it and then you get lost and then you have to go back and you just lose track of time and you lose track you lose your your coherent thought and you just can't get everything done in 40 minutes plan everything first and then write and you'll be able to get everything done on time so the fourth thing you can do to instantly improve your essays and this is a big one which is focus just on clearly answering the question put yourself in the examiner shoes he or she is looking at your script which thing that do you think that they want to see do you think that they want to see that you've used a lot of high level vocabulary incorrectly use some tips and tricks or memorized essays or fancy structures or fancy grammar and fixed phrases that you've memorized or do you think that they want to see whether you have understood the question and clearly answered the question using clear English you might again not believe me because it sounds counterintuitive because you think the examiners are looking for fancy things and therefore you're going to show off and you're going to go online and find some video that says learn these five top tricks to get a high score if those worked then everybody would get a high score the average score worldwide is banned 5.5 those things simply do not work we have I think 12 examiners or x examiners working for IELTS Advantage and we talk about this all the time if all students did was just have this mindset shift from stop showing off and using tricks to just clearly answer the question then they would be able to eliminate 95% of the things that lead to a low score so put yourself in the examiner's shoes give have some sympathy for the examiner all they want to know is did you understand the question and can you write clearly in English so help them do that by focusing on those things so the fifth thing is focus on what's important and ignore everything else so there are lots of important things that you need to focus on but what students do mostly is focus on things that really do not matter you wouldn't believe the number of emails that we get from students who say should I use a pen in the test or should I use a pencil it's like it doesn't matter 90% of the questions we get about writing tasks too are types of questions like that like should I use a pen or a pencil it doesn't matter if you don't know how to write an introduction or a main body paragraph or conclusion or understand the question or generate ideas it doesn't matter if you have the fanciest pen in the world or you know write with your finger it really really really doesn't matter so now you know these five things that will instantly improve your IELTS writing but I want to give you a bonus tip recently I made a video showing you how to transform a band six essay into a band eight essay so go and watch this video now and you will see these five things in practice you will see the effect of changing these five things and improving these five things the effect that this has on your band score so go and check that video out and I'll see you in the next video