 Hi everyone, Chris here from IELTSAdvantage.com and in today's lesson we're going to look at five things you must do to get a band seven or above in writing class two. So we just finished up teaching about 3,300 students last week on our $1 challenge and there were things that we noticed that students were not doing and these were the reasons why they were failing. So we decided today to share these five things that you must do and if you do those things you will be in a very good position to get a seven or above. So let's get into it. So number one, very obvious, do the work. So you're watching this, you're like, that sounds very, very obvious, of course I'm going to do the work. Everybody says that but very few people actually do it. So on our $1 challenge, only about 4%, less than 5% of people actually completed the final challenge which was to write an essay. And it wasn't because the lessons weren't good or they weren't dedicated to what they were doing. The number one reason why people said that they couldn't do it was I don't have time. This kept coming up again and again and again and again and we asked people to do about one hour of work a day and 95% of people could not get one hour of work done. So why is that? Let's have a look. The last time I checked, every single person on planet earth has 24 hours in a day. There are some people who are highly productive and get lots of stuff done and there are obviously people who get nothing done. Why is that? Why do some people get lots done and why do some people just get nothing done? And the vast majority of people that we deal with are those people that are busy but get nothing done. They say they're busy with this, that and the other and they don't have time to do anything. And I actually analysed some students during the week. So some students were emailing me and saying thank you for the lessons, they're great but I just can't look at any, I just don't have time. And some of the students I said send me your timetable from yesterday, tell me exactly what you did yesterday and I'll have a look at it and see if we can help you with finding a little bit more time. So we had one student and she went to bed at about 9.30, 10pm and got up at 5.30. Fair enough. That's a lot of sleep though. Could she have got up 30 minutes earlier or one hour earlier? And then from 5.30 to about 8.30 she looked after her kids. So she was getting her kids ready for school, getting them breakfast, getting them dressed. That time there's no way that she could not do that. She had to do that. Like fair enough. Okay, so he could have got up one hour earlier here but fair enough you're busy in the mornings. Then she said she went to work so she was a pharmacist so she worked from about 9.30 to about 5.30. I said well what about lunch time? How much time do you get for lunch? It turned out that she had an hour and a half for lunch. It's like could you eat your lunch in 30 minutes? Is that possible? And then study for one hour, it's like I'm tired, I like to have lunch, I like to relax. I'm like okay, it's like you have a choice. You can be relaxed or you can do the work to like choose. Then we said what do you do in the evenings? She said oh I play with my kids, I spend time with my kids. It's like well what does your husband do? It's like oh he watches football and you know talks to his friends, he's busy with that. It's like what could your husband not look after the kids for one hour or two hours maybe if he really wants to help you? And it turned out that this person like everybody else who was complaining that they didn't have time actually had three or four hours in a day. Do this yourself, look at your day, where do you spend time on leisure or spending too much time with your family or spending time looking at Facebook or where in the day could you find time? I guarantee that you will find the time to do it and you don't need a lot of time in order to improve writing tasks too. Thirty minutes a day, one hour a day. If you do that consistently in no time at all in a month or two months you're going to be able to get the scores you need. Number two, follow one method. One thing that we noticed was students were sending in their essays or sending in their paragraphs and we were like what are you doing? Why are you not doing what we suggested to do? And it turned out that they were looking at so many different options and so many different methods on YouTube, on Facebook and books and like they had five different teachers before they came to us that they were really really really confused about what to do because there were so many different people saying so many different things. If you follow multiple teachers or multiple people online you are A, wasting time, B you're going to cause a lot of stress and frustration for yourself because everyone's got a different method and C you're going to lower your score because your writing is a reflection of your thinking and if your thinking is confused your writing is going to be confused. Let's look at an example of this. So we asked some students to write an introduction and a main body paragraph and we noticed a lot of people instead of just doing what we suggested they do they were just following their own method and doing their own thing and it wasn't because they disagreed with us it was when we actually asked them it was because they said oh my old teacher said to put in background statements at the beginning of the introduction and the beginning of that like no don't do that that's not something we recommend and then they would have like three main ideas like firstly secondly thirdly in their main body paragraph like why did you do that you'd one idea here now you have three and two of these ideas are not even related to the question like oh I was looking at another YouTube channel and the teacher there said to put three main ideas like no so their whole thing was a complete and utter mess and if they had just followed one method I'm not saying to follow me I don't have time to help everybody but follow one person or one course or just pick one and you'll save yourself time and you'll improve your scores number three learn what your weaknesses are there are very very very specific reasons why you are failing so it's not just you know a vague reason like you're not good at English or you're not good at writing or you did this thing wrong or that thing wrong they're very very very specific things related to grammar vocabulary task achievement coherence and cohesion that you are not doing so well right I can look at your writing and within one minute tell you give you a list of things you're not so good at this you're not so good at that you need to fix this you need to fix that they're very specific things and they the same things come up again and again and again for each student so you need to find out what these are if you don't know where you're going wrong you won't be able to to do well let's think about it let's use an analogy what would you do if your car was broken down so you're not a car expert you're not a mechanic if your car is broken down there's a very specific reason why your car is broken down it could be a certain part of the engine it could be you forgot to put petrol in it could be anything but you don't know what do you do you take it to a mechanic and they tell you the specific thing that is going wrong let's say you feel really sick I'd say you feel tired all the time and you go to the hospital you go to the doctor the doctor is going to run tests and is going to ask you questions to find out the exact reason why because they can't treat you they don't know how to treat you unless they find out that exact reason you do not know how to improve your writing because you don't know where you're going wrong you don't know this your specific weaknesses if you don't find those out you're never going to improve same as like if you feel sick and you don't go to the doctor you're not going to get better if your car is broken down and you don't take it to a mechanic it's not going to fix by itself you know you're not you can't hope and pray your car to start working number four take action on fixing those weaknesses this sounds really really obvious but we worked with multiple students last week and we told them you're not so good at this you need to fix this you need to work on that and then they would do nothing about it it's like imagine going to your car is broken down and you take it to a mechanic and they say there's a problem with your gearbox we need to fix your gearbox and you say no don't do that it's like what's going to happen or imagine going to the doctor and they say you've got anemia you've got an iron deficiency you need to take iron supplements you say no i'm not going to do that so like what's going to happen if you do not do anything to fix your problems you're not going to improve again this sounds really really obvious but i'd say less than one percent of students actually do it and the reason why they do it is they're lying to themselves so i don't have time as we've already shown you yes you do have time if you actually look at your time if you actually look at your day you will find time other people say i don't know how to do this i don't know how to fix anything we'll hire someone there are people called teachers teachers will help you with that other people are saying i don't have any money it's like well you do have money how do you live how do you eat how do you pay your rent i know some people don't have a lot of money um but there are some people who have enough money to solve all of these problems and then don't do anything about it and if you think about it in a very basic way what is my problem how do i fix it then you'll be able to fix those problems but if you're constantly just thinking i have a problem i have a problem i have a problem and they're not doing anything to fix those problems guess what's going to happen number five have a positive mindset i'd say the majority of students more than 50% of the students are not going to fail the test the students we worked with last night or last week they're not going to fail the test because of poor english or poor writing they're going to fail it because of a poor mindset because if you have a poor attitude you're never going to improve if you have a problem for every solution you will constantly have problems we were giving solution after solution after solution and students would come up with another problem another reason why they couldn't do it let's look at an example students say i don't have time actually you do it's going to take me a very long time no it won't it'll take you one month or two months okay and then they do it are not really good at this sure that's why you're learning it and you're not you're learning something new so you're not going to be good at it that's a natural part of learning something new and they would try it again oh i keep making mistakes it's not perfect good you're going to learn from each one of those mistakes and you're going to get better oh i just can't do this so like every time we help them their mindset stop them from improving and until you have a positive mindset like some of the students we worked with i'm going to find time i'm going to get one hour i'm going to get up early or i'm going to you know check facebook you know for one hour less or you know not watch tv or not spend four hours with my family every every night and i'm going to get the time and i'm going to schedule everything and i'm going to timetable everything and i'm going to get it done in a month or six weeks or two months and i know that i'm not good at this but if i learn from my mistakes and i do it and i find out what my weaknesses are and i work on those then i'm going to get the scores that i need and those are the students that we love to work with because those are the students that help themselves um because they're going to do really really really well um have a positive mindset you're going to do really really well so in summary number one do the work number two follow one method number three learn your weaknesses number four take action and number five have a have a positive mindset i actually spoke to one student this morning about this and we were talking about this and they said um i i don't think this will work it's like i don't think this is good i don't think this will work it's like okay do you think not doing the work following multiple people not finding out your weaknesses not doing anything about those weaknesses and having a really negative mindset like you have right now is going to fix the problem it's like yeah so 99 of the problems that you have can be fixed just by fixing this just by having a more positive mindset knowing that you can do it and taking action on it that's all i'm going to say about that and that's what we learned last week and you can learn from that as well thank you very much guys um and if you need anything feel free to get in touch hope that you enjoyed bye