 What's the worst thing you can do in the IELTS speaking test? Well, this bad thing will lower your pronunciation score. It will lead to lots of grammar mistakes and lots of vocabulary mistakes and will lead to you sounding less fluent and less coherent. And this is the most popular strategy that you will find online and is taught in schools around the world every day. And it is killing your IELTS speaking score. And that strategy is making everything as complex as possible. If you make everything complex, you will make more grammar mistakes. You will make more vocabulary mistakes. There will be lots of pauses and hesitations so it will lower your fluency and your coherent score will also suffer because you're focusing on making everything more complex instead of just clearly answering the question. It can even affect your pronunciation if you're focusing on higher level pronunciation features instead of just focusing on speaking as clearly as possible. Don't make things complex. Focus on clearly answering the question. Keep things simple.