 In this video, I'm going to share with you 100 real band 7, 8, and 9 essays. These essays have been marked by real ex IELTS examiners, and the students that wrote them all went on to get either a band 7, 8, or 9 in the real test. But our goal is not to just give you a bunch of essays. Our goal is to help you improve your writing score. So on top of giving you these essays, what we're going to do is do two more things that are going to help you improve your writing scores using these essays. So we're going to first show you what not to do when using these sample essays. Number two, most students are unaware of great strategies and techniques that they can use. So we're going to share with you 10 strategies that you can use that will help you use these samples to improve your writing skills and improve your writing score. To make sure that we're only helping the students that want help and want to improve, you will only get access to these essays by watching the whole video. There is no special link to click, and we're going to show you in the whole video how to access these sample essays. So let's start off with five don'ts. These are five things that you should not do when using any IELTS sample essays. Number one is the most common one, which is don't use fake sample essays. I'd say that more than 95% of the supposed Band 9 essays that you'll find online are not anywhere near Band 9. And if you are reading and copying people that have never even got close to the score that you're hoping to get, then you're learning lots of bad habits. But don't worry, we've solved that for you by giving you these real sample essays. We'll show you how to get those in the rest of the video. Number two, don't just pick up the essay, read it, and think that you will magically, through osmosis, become better at writing. You cannot read an essay and become better at writing by just passively reading it. I think a lot of people have been convinced that all you have to do is read the essay and some magic thing will happen in your brain and you will improve. That is simply not going to happen. If you don't believe me, think back to last month when the World Cup was on. I think something like more than a billion people watched the World Cup final. Were any of those people better at football after the World Cup final, after watching two of the greatest footballers that have ever lived? No, you would think that that's ridiculous. But thousands of students every single month fail the test because they believe all they have to do is just read lots and lots of sample essays. It is not going to help you, but the good news is we're going to give you these 10 strategies, these 10 techniques that will actually help you in the rest of this video. Another thing that you should not do is look at the essays and try and figure out why you're better than the students in some way or why these students are not good or these students are not high level. Let me tell you a little story about a trick that I used to play on my students in the British Council. So on the first day of a new IELTS class with new students, what I would do is I would give them band six essays, band seven essays, band eight essays, and band nine essays. And I wouldn't tell them which were which. And I would put them around the room and I'd ask the students to go and look at these essays and give them a score. And every single time, and this is like hundreds and hundreds of students, every single time they thought the band six was band nine and they thought the band nine was band six, you are a student, you are not an IELTS examiner. If you had the knowledge of an IELTS examiner, you wouldn't be watching this video. Most students look at a band six essay, which normally has lots of complicated words and complex language and think that it is very, very high level. Most students look at band nine essays and think that they are low level. Band nine essays are actually quite simple and easy to understand and very, very clear. Most students look at band seven essays and think there's lots of grammar mistakes. There's lots of vocabulary mistakes. This must be a really low level student. Band seven essays have mistakes in them. Please do not waste your time and your energy trying to find out why you think these are not good. If you were an expert, you wouldn't be watching this video. The fourth thing that you should not do is look for things that you can copy from these essays. And there's a very simple reason for that. Number one, you are not doing a memorization test. I know many of you come from educational backgrounds where the emphasis in your education system is just on memorizing things and that's how they test intelligence. This is not a memorization test. This is a writing in English test. This is a can you communicate clearly in English test? You cannot memorize words and phrases and chunks of essays and hope to just put those in on test day and get a higher score. That is not how it works. You can use these to improve your grammar and your vocabulary and we'll show you how to do that in the rest of the video. But don't just memorize them. It is not going to help you. And number five, this might sound really silly, but a lot of students do this. Do not copy the entire essay and put it in to your response on test day. A lot of students believe that if they copy a high level essay and then just put it in no matter what the question is that they're magically going to get a high score. I don't know why students do this, but they do. Please do not do this. I don't want to be responsible for students failing the test. So please, please, please do not do those five things. It is a waste of your time and it is a waste of money. These days the IELTS test costs a lot of money. Don't throw it away by using these incorrectly. But there are now 10 ways that we're going to show you that you can use them correctly to improve your writing skills and improve your writing score. So this is how to find the 100 sample essays on our website. I've purposely hidden them so that only students that are serious about getting the scores that they need will find them. First thing you want to do is go to Google and type in IELTS writing task two. It will bring up a list of different websites. And what you want to do is find the IELTS Advantage one. It might be number one, it might be somewhere on this page. Just click on the IELTS Advantage one. That should bring you to this page on our website, IELTS Writing Task Two in 2023. That's step one. Now I continue to watch the video and I'll show you in step two how to find the essays. So I'm going to give you these 10 things that you can do, these 10 techniques. But you don't have to use all 10 of them. What I would recommend doing is watching them all and picking the one that you think is your biggest weakness. That's what you should always start with, not just for writing, but for all areas of the test. Don't work on things that you're already comfortable doing. Don't work on your strengths, work on your weaknesses. I know that's tough and I know as human beings we don't like to do difficult things. But this is the best way for you to pass the test as quickly as possible and then move on with your life and you never have to think about this silly test again. So I'm going to go through these 10 now, watch them all and then pick the ones that you think are most difficult for you or you think that you need to work the most on. So the first thing that we're going to teach you is how to use sample essays for improving your idea generation. A lot of students really struggle with this area and once you start to see what real band 789 ideas look like it removes a lot of the stress because what you will notice is most of them are a lot simpler than you think. You don't get extra marks for coming up with complex ideas. You get extra marks for thinking of ideas that answer the question that are relevant to the question and most of the time these are going to be simple ideas. So the first thing that you can do to improve your idea generation is don't look at the answer to the question. Don't look at the actual essay. Take each one and cover up the actual essay and just look at the question. And what we've done here is we've limited the number of questions. We're giving you like 100 essays but I think there are only like 10 questions so that will mean that you see a wide variety of different ideas. So what you're going to do is you're going to look at the questions and think of ideas yourself. So what I would recommend doing is not brainstorming. What I would recommend doing is simply look at the question and think what is the simplest idea that answers this question? What is the most obvious idea? The most straightforward idea? If I asked 100 people this question what would be the most popular answer? And if you write down a few of them and then look at the answer identify the main ideas. They will normally be in the introduction and they will be in the main body paragraph and they will be normally in the conclusion. Identify those main ideas and then compare with your ideas. If you're getting similar ideas to these students that got Band 7, 8 and 9 then you're probably on the right track. If you have different ideas that doesn't mean that you're wrong doesn't mean that your ideas aren't relevant but think about whether they are relevant or not. Are you getting different ideas because they're just different relevant ideas or think about whether your ideas are relevant or not? If you think about them and you compare them and you're like actually my ideas are completely irrelevant that might mean that you didn't understand the questions so you have to work on that more or it could mean that you're just complicating everything and making your ideas way more complicated than they need to be. So that's technique one. The second thing that you can work on would be idea development. So this is taking ideas and developing them into main body paragraphs. So step one look at the question understand the question and then identify the main ideas. So for this person focus on their careers idea number one and have more time for themselves. Idea number two. So there's two benefits two advantages here and then what you do is you do not look at the main body. So you just identify those two main ideas and then what you could do on this blank piece of paper you could pick one so for example you could write an explanation you could write an example and then you could compare that with what the student has done in this essay. So here focus on the careers this is because they have less responsibility and distractions in their lives compared to the couples that have a child. So if it's the same then you're probably on the right track but you could also make this better you might think well I could maybe explain this a little bit more. Again you're not looking for exact matches what you're doing is thinking about what they have done and what you have done and this is just one essay. You might look at five, six, seven other essays for this question and then look at all of the explanations and compare those with your explanations compare those with your examples and then that's going to help you develop your own. The next thing you can work on is structure. So what you can do is read the question read the whole essay and then think about the structure that they used. So for example this is their introduction this is their main body paragraph one this is their main body paragraph two and this is their conclusion. So what we're going to do here is discuss both views and give your own opinion this is the type of question that we're talking about here so they're using this four paragraph structure but then within each paragraph what are they doing? So here in the first sentence what they have done is they have paraphrased the question they have given their opinion here they've talked about the first point here and they've given the reason for the latter point here So what you could do is look for more discussable views essays for example this one and you could compare them so are they using a similar structure here? Well seems like they actually are they've paraphrased the question in the first sentence here they've given their opinion and they've said why they believe that here they are slightly different but again if you look at 7, 8, 9, 10 of those you'll be able to see similar structures and then that is going to help you write your own structure so what you could do is actually go through them all if you wanted analyze the structures and then look at all of the differences between the different types of essays so you could go and look at for example here we have a causes and solutions essay where do they put the causes where do they put the solutions what do they put in their conclusion are there any similarities between the different students answering this same question and you'll start to learn the different structures and then use them yourself it's a great way to actually learn structures rather than just looking at them as if you give students just a bunch of structures they tend not to be able to use them on test day but if you do it this way it kind of internalizes it a lot better and they're able to use them rather than memorize them okay so when you're on this page what you want to do is scroll down there's a lot of information on this page so keep scrolling keep scrolling until you get to hear sample essays now we have a lot of different options here continue to watch the video and I'm going to show you which one to click in step 3 the next thing you could do is work on your coherence and cohesion by identifying linking words or cohesive devices some people call them cohesive devices some people call them linking words so for example with this one you could identify that there are only really four linking words or cohesive devices here in other words for example for instance and in conclusion if you were to look at another 10 band 789 real essays and you only seen linking words are used very sparingly there are not that many then that would be a clear indication that that's what you should do most of these essays are not going to have lots and lots and lots of linking words in them because lots and lots and lots of linking words actually lower your score they don't increase it another thing that you could do is think about why they used each cohesive device so for example why did they use that well they were giving an example did they use it correctly well in this instance they seem to have that is helping you understand okay if I'm giving an example that's what I should use or you might identify some linking words that they used incorrectly that is going to help you improve because identifying other people's mistakes is helping you improve your knowledge and your use of linking words as well remember these are real essays which means that they have mistakes in them they are not perfect perfect essays are not actually going to help you as much as real students that are at your level and have got the scores that you need and that brings us on to number five which is identify grammar mistakes as I've just said one of the best ways to improve is to identify other people's mistakes so what you would do is you would go through and highlight any mistakes that they have made so for example this one you could write here this is an article mistake here's another article mistake so by identifying these mistakes and correcting them you can think about the rules of articles and your knowledge and your ability to use them correctly will improve not just articles but any mistakes so identify the mistakes and then think about why those mistakes were made or categorize the mistakes into is it a preposition mistake an article mistake a punctuation mistake and then you will improve too the sixth thing you can do is also related to grammar and thinking about the different grammatical structures and tenses that were used in the essay and why they were used so for example if we take this essay obtaining this type of information in most cases means breaking the law why did they use obtaining i and g and breaking i and g rather than furthermore to obtain this information in most cases means to break the law and this will force you to think about whether this is correct or incorrect if you think that it is incorrect what is a better way to use it and why do you think that or if it's correct why did they use that here's another one however not only are paparazzi hired to invade properties belonging to politicians to take photos without their permission but also not only but also what does that not only but also grammatical structure allow their student to do why did they choose this grammatical structure what were they able to do is it correct could you use this grammatical structure in your essay again not copying it not blindly copying this and inserting it into your essay but adding tools to your toolbox the more tools that you have in your toolbox grammatically and for vocabulary then the better able you are able to build your essay on test day yourself number eight is vocabulary and improving the range of your vocabulary and you can do that simply by reading the question reading the essay and identifying any unknown vocabulary or vocabulary or collocations or phrases that you're unsure about you're not 100% sure what they mean or how to use them in a sentence so for example you might see the collocation discover their talents what does that mean to discover their talents here's another one potential talents what's the difference between discovering your talent and a potential talent what does potential mean what does potential talent as a collocation actually mean so you would note down those words or phrases or collocations and then you would guess the meaning from the context so you would read the whole sentence read the whole paragraph and try and guess what that word means that is going to help with your reading skills it's going to help you identify and understand unknown words in the reading test and it will also help you improve vocabulary because you can take those new words or phrases put them into a vocabulary book add all the new information like the meaning the synonyms the example sentences and then after a while if you do this you're going to have a massive bank of new words and new phrases and then if you review those and use those in your own essays then you're improving your ability to write essays another thing you could do with vocabulary number nine is identify any vocabulary errors so for example in this essay if we look at this sentence recently the pictures of a famous politician of Milan while playing football with local children were published in many newspapers and he instantly became famous so there's a problem here because it's saying a famous person became famous well they were already famous so either there is a meaning error here with this word or we need to change this word to something different another thing that you could do is look for repetition are there words that are maybe repeated a few many times and then you could try and change it to a synonym that means the same thing but has a different word that means the same thing and last but not least number 10 what you can do is look at the question write the whole essay and then compare your essays compare everything with what the students have done but I wouldn't recommend doing that right away what I would recommend doing is use one or two of the other nine techniques work on your weaknesses and then once you are more confident then you can write the whole essay and then compare it with what the other students have done and but please please please don't think that if your essay is different that it's wrong there are hundreds of different ways that you can write a band seven or a band eight essay it is not mathematics it is not you know there's only one answer to the question so don't look at these essays and think that you're on the wrong track just because yours are different what you're looking for is are the main things like the ideas are they relevant is the structure similar did you develop your ideas in a similar way if you focus on those big things then your essays will be fine and you will really really improve okay so you should be here the one that you want is this one how to use task two sample essays if you click on that you will get access to 100 band seven eight and nine IELTS writing task two essay samples it will introduce them it will tell you how to use them and then it will give you all of these samples so thank you very much for watching the video and I hope that you enjoy using these samples and they help you improve your score I hope that you enjoyed that lesson if you want more help I would recommend clicking on this video and you can get even more help on our website