 let me tell you a little secret about IELTS examiners. When you get a job as an IELTS examiner, whether it's with IDP or the British Council, they make you sign an agreement, a contract with them, which states that you're not allowed to tell anybody that you are an examiner. And this can become extremely frustrating for examiners because they see the same mistakes over and over and over again. And what they would really like to do is just to tell students, stop doing this really simple thing that is lowering your score and do this simple thing that will improve your score. So the good news is, is that I am no longer an examiner and I can reveal to you that the most annoying thing that examiners experience is one thing. And I don't mean annoying that the students annoy them. That's not what I'm saying. It's annoying because they see the same mistake again and again and again and again. And it's very easy for the students to fix it. But because of this agreement, this contract they have, they're not allowed to tell students and they're not allowed to say, hey, I'm an examiner, you're making this mistake, stop doing it, do this really easy thing. The good news is, is that I can tell you what this thing is and I'm going to tell you in this video. And how do I know this? So at IELTS Advantage, we have hired many, many, many examiners. And I've interviewed hundreds of IELTS examiners who want to work for IELTS Advantage correcting essays, doing speaking tests, running classes, things like that. And one of the interview questions I always ask is, what is the most annoying thing about it being an examiner? And the answer 95% of the time is always this one thing that we're going to reveal to you in this video. So we're going to tell you what that is. We're going to show you how you can fix this immediately today. We're also going to look at a real Band 8 essay that was produced by examiners produced by Cambridge and show you how simple it can really be. And why doing more complex things is actually not the right way to go and just changing this one simple thing is really going to help you. And then I'm also going to give you a free course that is going to help you improve this thing even more. I don't want your email address or anything like that. I'll just give you a link at the end of the video and it's a free course on YouTube that you can get if you watch until the end of the video. So without further ado, let's look at that really annoying thing. So what is the most annoying thing about marking IELTS exams? This is what I was asking IELTS teachers and IELTS examiners recently. And the number one thing was this, students thinking they have to use very complex words and phrases, not knowing them properly and using them incorrectly. If you talk to any IELTS examiner or any IELTS teacher that marks IELTS writing papers, normally this is the number one or the number two thing that they'll say is the most annoying thing about it. Students trying to use vocabulary that they don't really know 100% and trying to insert complex, complicated words into their writing and not really knowing what they mean and making lots of mistakes and this really lowers your mark. I also was talking to a very famous blogger IELTS Simon as one of the best IELTS websites in the world and I asked him what's the one piece of advice you would give to IELTS students and he said you don't need to use difficult vocabulary to do well in the writing test. So this is just more proof that you don't need to use complex words, complicated words to get a high score in the IELTS test. You just need to use what we're going to look at later as topic specific words and words and phrases that are not really that difficult. So the most effective way to improve your vocabulary score is very easy. It's just to use words that you know properly, that you know 100% and not to use any words that are unnatural to you, that you don't know very well. What I mean when I say you know them 100% is you don't just have a vague idea of the meaning. You know the meaning 100%, you know the synonyms of that word, you know the antonyms, the opposite words, you know the collocations of those words, so words that go together, you know the pronunciation of those words and you know the grammar surrounding those words, so you know them 100%. You haven't just read a list of complicated words and tried to use them without really knowing how to properly. So it's a lot of not knowing how to walk before you can run. You have to know how to walk before you can use very complex words before you can run in the IELTS test. So let's look at a band eight example. Something with most people to get a band eight is very very high. Most people don't need a band nine band, most people need a band seven, six point five, so band eight is a very good example of very high level vocabulary. So this comes directly from Cambridge. It comes from Cambridge IELTS 10 book and it is a general task one example. So we're going to look at the vocabulary in this. So let's look at some of the words that are in this and these are examples of band eight vocabulary. So excellent service, party of 12, great deal of choice, service with paramount, your establishment, local and international winds. Some of these words might be complicated or complex for you but most of them if you're trying to get a seven or an eight and you're wanting to go to university in the UK or the United States or wherever you want to go. These words shouldn't be that difficult for you and I don't think these words are very complex. I don't think they're very complicated. If you have a decent level of English, you might be able to use all of them but you should be able to use most of them. So why am I showing you this? This is just to show you that to get a band eight you don't need to use the most complicated words in the world. You just need to use normal, natural words. The best way to think about that is to use topic-specific words. So what do I mean by topic-specific vocabulary? So say we were talking about smartphones or we're writing an essay about smartphones. We might talk about the screen resolution. We might talk describe it as cutting-edge technology. We might talk about megapixels for the camera or we might say that this can connect to Wi-Fi. So this is very topic-specific vocabulary. You wouldn't use these kinds of words to describe any other topic but smartphones. Let's look at another example, global warming, another very common speaking and writing topic. So you could talk about renewable energy, the greenhouse effect, carbon emissions and fossil fuels. Again, very, very specific to global warming and the environment. Again, not very complex. So the last one we're going to look at is say we've got an essay on free health care or in the speaking test the examiner asked you about free health care. You might use words or phrases like health insurance. You are entitled to something. Prescriptions or hospitals. Again, not really, really difficult vocabulary, not very, very high level but topic-specific and this is exactly what the examiner will be looking at because unless you can use this topic-specific vocabulary then it tells the examiner that your vocabulary is not very high level. So now you know how to instantly improve your vocabulary by just simplifying your vocabulary and focusing on the vocabulary that you already know and focus on topic-specific vocabulary but we also want to be improving our vocabulary at the same time. So what I've done is put together a free mini course and I've put it on YouTube for free. All you have to do is just click on this video and it will take you to this free vocabulary course that's going to help you improve your vocabulary and expand your vocabulary and use it effectively on test day to improve your score. So click on the link and it will help you improve your vocabulary.