 If you're worried about Task 1 writing, this video is for you. We're going to show you how a few simple changes can transform your report from Band 6 to Band 8. I'll start by showing you exactly why this report is Band 6 so that you can avoid those key mistakes and then I'll show you step by step how we can transform each sentence into a Band 8 report very, very simply and easily. So get a pen, some paper and I'll show you how easy Task 1 really is. So the first thing we're going to do is look at the Band 6 report and show you why it is a Band 6. You cannot learn how to run before you learn how to walk and crawl before that. We're going to look at why this is wrong so you can avoid these things and then we're going to transform the report into a Band 8 report. You'll also see that we have the question here and we have the marking criteria. Don't worry if some of this isn't clear right now, we will zoom in and show you exactly what we're talking about when we're talking about it. I've also included both of these in the download section in the description below. So let's look at the difference for Task Achievement for Band 6 and Band 8. So for Band 6, it states Presents Overview with information appropriately selected. So it is directly mentioning the overview. The overview is the most important paragraph in the entire report. It's the only paragraph that they specifically mention in the marking criteria. So that should be an indication just how important it is. Before you do anything else, master writing your overviews first. And within an overview, you're going to have key features, the most important things from the data. And it says key features may be irrelevant, inappropriate or inaccurate. So what it's saying there for a Band 6 overview, you do include some of the right things, but they're not either clear or they might be inaccurate, they might be confusing or they might be irrelevant. So we need to focus in on the data. When you're writing an overview, you need to think about what is the purpose of the data? Why did the person who created this chart, why did they do that? What is the purpose of it? And this is real data that was featured in the Financial Times. So when we look at this, we can see that it is doing two things. When we see a line graph over time, it is showing the general trends over that time period. So we're looking for generally what is happening between 2008 and 2022, because that is the purpose of this chart. Other charts might differ, but that's the purpose of this chart. The second reason why they made this chart was to compare the countries. So are there any key differences or major differences between these countries? So for a line graph over time, you should really be focusing in on those two key things. There might be other things in there as well, but if you just focus on the purpose, normally you're going to be right. So let's see if this person in the overview did those things. So overall, all kingdoms in the EU. So straight away, the student has made two mistakes. Number one, they are trying to use too many synonyms for the word country, and they've included the word kingdom. Kingdom and country are synonyms, but they are not close synonyms that mean exactly the same thing. So we often see this with students who have been told incorrectly by former teachers or YouTube videos that you cannot repeat any words. You should try to vary your language as much as possible. That is correct, but you shouldn't change it to something that is wrong. And then the second mistake they have made is they've assumed, using their own knowledge, that all of these are in the EU. The European Union, they are not. For a task one report, you should never bring in any previous knowledge. Even if you are an expert in this field, but you're probably not, because you are going to insert things that are not correct. And one of the things that the examiner will be looking at is, did you report the data accurately? Bringing in things like all countries are in the EU, that is just not true. And it means that your data is inaccurate. Remember, it said key features might be irrelevant or inaccurate. So even though you are mentioning the key features, you are talking about kingdoms, which is inaccurate, and the EU, and it says nothing about the EU here in the data. The second thing they say here is in 2022, with the UK rising the most. All right, did all countries increase in 2022? No, again, this is wrong. If we look at Estonia, we can see that Estonia decreased in 2022. And this often comes from students just getting lost in the data, spending way too much time looking at the data. They're under pressure. I understand that this is a stressful situation. But you need, especially in your overview, to think about what you're writing. Is what you are writing actually true? And the easy way to check that is, look at what you wrote and then look at the data. Do they match? Does it mean the same thing? And then the UK rising the most? Well, it's unclear if that is actually true. The UK does rise the most between 2018 and 2022. But this person is talking about the biggest increase in 2022. Sweden has a very similar, if not exactly the same percentage, increase in 2022. So again, you're mentioning key features, but they're not accurate. This often comes from students being taught that just look for the biggest and the smallest and the most dramatic things in the data. That doesn't necessarily get you to the right answer. Again, always think of the purpose. Next sentence. It is also clear that all countries fluctuated significantly through the given period. Is that actually true? No. So three countries did fluctuate significantly, Latvia, Estonia and Sweden. You can see that they are very, very large swings in their data. But if we look at Ireland, if we look at the United Kingdom and we look at France, particularly France and Ireland, there's not a huge amount of variation. It's actually pretty steady. So again, it's nearly correct. They are mentioning key features, but they're just off by a little bit. And then they've added in at the end there, Ireland was the lowest. That's a little bit too general. Like what are you talking about? Lowest when? Lowest overall? What are you actually talking about? And then Estonia was the highest. Was it the highest? I think they're just looking generally at the data. And again, this often comes from students being taught just say the biggest, the largest, throw that in there, throw some stuff against the wall and hopefully some of it will stick. That's not what we're doing here with the overview. But don't worry with a few small changes, we can change that to a very, very good overview. I also want you to look down at the bottom here at the conclusion. So remember when they talked about the overview, they talked about whether the overview is inappropriate or not. What is a conclusion? Well, a conclusion is a summary of your main ideas or your opinion, what you think about something. Opinions are good in task two. Original ideas are good in task two. Task one, all they want you to do is report exactly what you see. There are no ideas. There are no summary of your opinion or anything like that. So it is inappropriate to include a conclusion at all. The reason why a lot of students include a conclusion is because they have been told that you must include conclusions in task two and a lot of them get confused between task one and task two. They are very, very different and they are scored very, very differently. So here in conclusion, I believe that all of these countries were impacted by the global pandemic and this led to the large increases in 2022. A very common mistake is looking at the data and interpreting the information and giving your interpretation of the information. Now, this might be true, but you should never include your opinion or your interpretation of the data in your task one report. They're not asking you to do that. They are asking you to report exactly what you see. No opinion required. So again, they cannot really get over a six for their overview because there's a lot of inaccurate and inappropriate information in there. The next thing that the examiner will be thinking about for task achievement is whether your data is accurate or inaccurate. So there's two main ways that you can be inaccurate. Number one is simply reporting something that is completely wrong. Like it says 18% and you wrote 8%. For example, that is just wrong. That is inaccurate. Again, they are testing your ability to look at something and then put it on paper accurately. The second way that students can be inaccurate and this is actually a lot more common is not being able to see exactly what is happening in the chart and just guessing what those values are. So for example, this one here, what percentage is that? So here in green, the green dot here, is it 3%? Is it 3.5%? Is it 4%? We don't really know. But what a lot of students do is they will write just a guess and put it on paper and the examiner will look at that and assume that that's what you believe is accurate, not a guess. So here in the first sentence of the details paragraph here, to begin with the Scandinavian countries, Latvia began the period with 17%. So if we look at Latvia here, it's not very clear that this is 17%. It's kind of halfway between 15% and 20%. So if you write 17%, it's wrong. So what could you do instead? Well, you could write around 17%, approximately 17%. That is way more accurate. Again, the examiner can't talk to you after the test. They can't send you a WhatsApp text and say, what did you really mean? Did you mean exactly 17%? Or did you mean around it? Oh yeah, of course I meant around it. They cannot do that. They're going to judge you based on exactly what you put on the paper. And if you look throughout this report, you will see lots of mistakes like that, guessing what the values are, but putting them on paper as if they are exact. Now you might think that that's very strict, but imagine a doctor or a nurse or a pharmacist who had that sloppy attention to detail. They might kill somebody. That is really what they're testing. It's not just people in the medical field, but if you're an engineer or a lawyer or anything, attention to detail is very, very, very important. So they're testing your ability to convey accurately information. And part of that is writing things accurately. So that's why they're going to get a six for task achievement. Basically, their overview is full of inappropriate and irrelevant things and they have lots of inaccurate data. If we move on to coherence and cohesion, it talks a lot here about how you present the data, how you organize the data. So for band six, it states arranges information and ideas coherently, and there is a clear overall progression. If we compare that with what it says for band seven, logically organizes information and ideas. Now, there's a big difference between arranging something and logically organizing something. And again, if we move up to band eight, sequences, information and ideas logically. So I don't think the word logic or logically is actually helpful for students. The best way to think about this is think about the reader. What is going to help the reader? How can you organize the information in a way that helps the reader understand what you are writing about? Don't think of it from your perspective. What is the easiest way to write about it? Think about it from the reader's perspective. What way can you organize the information to make it easy for the reader to understand? So the first big mistake that we can see in this report is they have just wrote about everything. That's not actually what the question asks you to do. The question asks you to select key features and to write about them. It doesn't ask you to write about everything. And this not only will lower your score for task one, it will also lower your score for task two. That might sound a bit weird, but if you think about it, this person has wrote way, way too much. That takes time. Most students start with task one and they spend way too much time writing everything that they see, just hoping that they'll get a good score if they write everything. And then that bleeds into their task two time. So they don't have enough time to do task two. And that's where students get very, very low scores like 5.5 or 6. My recommendation would be to actually do task two first. Spend 40 minutes on task two or below 40 minutes if you can. And then move on to task one. Because what that does is it forces your brain to only pick out and select the things that you have time to write about. The way our brain works, I'll not get into too much detail about it, but if you give it too much time, then it will write about everything. But if you constrain the amount of time that you have, your brain will be forced to only write about the most important things. So they've not only described every single country here, but they've described nearly every point, every data point in here. That is not coherent. That is not logical. And just strategically, it's going to take way too much time. The next thing you need to think about is arranging those ideas logically. So how are you going to do that? So you need to look at the data and think, how can I group countries together in a way that makes sense? So let's have a look at what not to do, how not to do that, and then we can show you a much, much better way. So what this student has done is they have grouped the countries into Scandinavian countries and Western European countries. So there's two problems with this. Number one, the data is not comparing Scandinavian countries to Western European countries. If the data was doing that, then there might be an argument that that's a logical thing to do. But the data simply isn't doing that. The second problem is some of them are not Scandinavian countries. Latvia is not in Scandinavia, and Sweden is in Scandinavia, but it's also in Western Europe. Again, this is one of these problems where students take knowledge, often incorrect knowledge, and put it into their Task 1 report. I think it's because many of you come from education systems where you get points for correct information, and a lot of your education systems prioritize memorization of facts. And you think if you put lots of facts into your IELTS rating, you're going to get a high score. It's not a memorization test. It's not a fax test. And a lot of you, your knowledge of the Western world is extremely limited. Believe me, I have at least one or two people a day that tell me that my own country is in a different country, and that I'm a different nationality than I really am, even though they've never been here. Also, the way that they have grouped these is they've just looked at what are the first three that they see at the top, and then what are the bottom three? That, again, is not logical. There's no reason to do that. Another way to think about the word logical is why are you doing that? What is the reasoning? And if we look at the data later, we'll be able to see that there is a very, very clear reason to group these together. The next thing that the examiners will be thinking about is your use of cohesive devices. Some people call these linking words. They are words like, to begin with, overall, in conclusion, therefore, however, words like that. So for a band six, it talks about faulty or mechanical use. Faulty means you're using them incorrectly. So maybe the meaning is wrong or the spelling is wrong. And mechanical refers to inserting them everywhere, overusing them. This comes from a lot of students being taught by teachers that the more you use, the higher your score or the more complicated cohesive devices you use, the higher your score or you must include at least one cohesive device in every sentence. All of those three things are completely untrue. You should only use cohesive devices when it's appropriate to do so and you should only use the simple ones that you know how to use, you know how to spell, you know the meaning of. So for example, this one, contrastingly, so the student here is trying to use a very long, complex word because they think that will boost their score. But what actually happens is they've spelt it incorrectly and it would be much easier just to write in contrast, for example. That's simpler, easier to remember. And if they did that, everything would be fine. The next thing they will look at is your paragraphing. This student did a fine job with paragraphing because they have clear space between each paragraph. It's very easy to see where one paragraph ends and the next begins. But when I asked all of you to submit your ideas and your reports, I think only one person actually put paragraphing in. These are the easiest points to gain and the easiest points to lose. All you have to do is just skip a line. Why do we do this? Well, it's not to help you get a high score, it's to help the reader. All right, we use paragraphing as a tool to help people understand what we're writing. So make sure you do it. So now let's move on to lexical resource. Lexical resource is just a fancy way of saying vocabulary. And to put it very simply, did you use the words correctly? Was the meaning correct and the spelling correct? They'll also look at things like collocations, for example, but focus in on does the word mean what you think it means and is it spelled correctly? So for example, we've already talked about kingdoms. Kingdoms is not the same as countries. If they change this to maybe states, for example, that would be fine. Kingdoms is not correct. They've spelled the word adequate here incorrectly. Here they've tried to use another synonym, province. These countries are not provinces. Province and country are synonyms, but they don't mean exactly the same thing. And you'll find little spelling mistakes and little meaning mistakes like that scattered throughout a band six response. Then we move on to grammar. So if we look at the student, their grammar is not bad. The problem is not that they're making huge, huge big grammatical errors that stop the reader understanding what they're saying. It's that they're making small mistakes and they're making them frequently. So for example, the line chart illustrate that should be illustrates. Overall, all kingdoms in the EU increase. That's a tense mistake. It should be increased. We're talking about the past. Again here, witness should be past tense, witnessed. And you'll notice that nearly every sentence, more than 50% of the sentences have small grammatical errors in them. And that's really the hallmark of a band six. Task two essay or a task one report. Most sentences have small grammatical errors. If you contrast that with band eight, the majority of sentences are error free. More than 50% of your sentences have no mistakes at all. So when you add all of those things up, that makes it a band six. Very close to being a band seven or even a band eight. But all it needs is just a few small changes. So that's what we're going to do now. Okay, so this is actually a pretty good introduction. It just has those small spelling and grammatical errors. So all we're going to do is just fix those. Okay, so we've changed that to the line chart illustrates the proportion of adults who did not receive adequate health treatment between 2008 and 2022 in six countries in Europe. If we look down at the question statement, we can see that the student has repeated the word adults. They could put something like, you know, people over the age of 18 or something like that. But I don't want to give you guys the impression that you have to change every single word. When we speak to students, often they will waste a huge amount of time thinking about and trying to change every single word when they're paraphrasing. And again, this eats into their time. It is much better to just repeat a word than to spend five minutes thinking about how do I change this? Okay, so before we write the overview, I just want to look at the data again and think about what is actually happening. So we're looking for key features or the most important things or the most significant things. But one way to think about it is imagine you are writing a report for your boss. Imagine it's your job to tell your boss what is happening in this chart or imagine you are a journalist. You are writing for the Financial Times and you have to write a headline. What headline would you put for this report? Well, I think one of the most significant things is in 2022, with the exception of one country, with the exception of Estonia, all countries increase. I think that is very significant. That was probably the headline of this article. So we definitely should include that. And if we zoom out a little bit, what can we also notice about the data? So if we look at Latvia, Estonia and Sweden, we can see very large fluctuations happening throughout the period. They have quite dramatic swings and fluctuations. So we probably should include that as well. And then if we look at France, United Kingdom and Ireland, remember we're comparing countries and showing trends over time. So the trend for Estonia, Latvia and Sweden is over time, they really fluctuated. But if we contrast that, remember we're comparing countries, we contrast that with France, United Kingdom and Ireland from 2008 to 2018, they were pretty steady, much more steady than or steadier than the other three countries. But then in 2018, we've seen that big divergence from the United Kingdom. So we should probably include those things. Another way of thinking about overviews is if a gun was put to your head and someone said to you, you can only write three or four things about this data. You've got 10 seconds to tell me what it is. Again, that sounds pretty extreme, but what that is doing is it's forcing your brain to really focus on what is important and what is not. When we give our brains too much time, students get lost in the data and they spend of the 20 minutes, like a lot of students spend 10 of the 20 minutes just looking at the data and going, I don't know anything about this, this is complicated, this is difficult to understand. Change your mindset from that to I need to understand this in one minute or two minutes and then write. So we've changed it from overall all kingdoms in the EU increase in 2022, which is just simplifying it and making it accurate. Overall, except for Estonia, all states increased in 2022. And that is accurate. We're not going to put that the UK rises the most because it actually doesn't. It has an equal rise with Sweden. So if we look at the trends over time, three countries had massive fluctuations. So let's put that in. So Latvia, Sweden and Estonia witnessed the largest fluctuations whilst the remaining countries, United Kingdom, Ireland and France, were relatively stable up to 2018. Not exactly stable, relatively stable. Relatively means in relation to compared to the other three countries. Again, we're always going back to purpose. What is the purpose of the data? Then finally, I think the most significant thing is the UK's divergence from 2018. Something happened in 2018. We're not going to speculate or interpret that. We're just going to report it. The UK saw the most dramatic increase from the lowest in 2012. So they had the best health care system of these six countries. In 2012 to the worst. That is very, very significant, especially if you're like me, you're sitting in the UK right now. And you'll notice that we haven't included any data in here. You should not include specific data. Dates are okay, but you shouldn't include any percentage or values or anything like that. So another way to think about overviews, I'm giving you lots of different tools for overviews and giving you many different ways of thinking about them because different students prefer different methods and strategies. Another way of thinking about it is if you cut this out, if you cut out just the overview and you handed it to someone, would they be able to draw or visualize the actual chart? One thing that I used to get my students to do when I worked for the British Council would be to give one student the data, get them to write out an overview. The other student wouldn't have the data, they would have different data and then they would swap overviews and try and draw generally what was happening. Not the exact values, but just generally what was happening. And if the other student was able to generally write this or draw this chart, then that's an excellent overview. The next thing that we need to do is think about how to logically organize our details paragraphs. So we have our introduction, we have our overview, now we're going to write two details paragraphs here. So that's good news because what it does is it forces you to think about which two groups are there. There's normally two groups of countries or whatever it is that is in the chart. Now as I said before, an incorrect way is to group them by some kind of previous knowledge about the countries or to add your own interpretation. It is solely based on the data. Forget everything that you know about these countries. Just look at the data. So if we just look at the data, Latvia, Sweden and Estonia, we can group those countries together because they have these wild fluctuations. So we can group those into a details paragraph and talk about those or write about those fluctuations. Then if we look at France, United Kingdom and Ireland, those were the stable countries up until 2018 and then they all increased but by different amounts. So that is a more logical way to present the information. Here are the ones that fluctuated. Here are the ones that were steadier. Now you won't be able to do that with every single line chart over time. You have to look at the data and think about what is the most logical way, the easiest way for the reader to understand this data. So let's start off with Latvia, Sweden and Estonia. So we started off with Latvia had the highest number in 2010 with just over 20%. Contrast that with the Band 6 student. Latvia began the period with 17% of people unable to receive the required care and this increased to 21%. So the two main differences there are the Band 8 student is selecting the key features. The Band 6 student is writing about everything. The Band 6 student starts in 2008, then talks about what happened in 2010 and then every single value nearly. What the Band 8 student is doing is they are selecting the most important data. 2008 for Latvia is not the most important thing. It is the fact that out of the whole chart it had the largest number. So you can see the difference between a shotgun approach just writing everything and a sniper approach selecting. The next thing is the difference between the accuracy of the data. 21%. Is this 21%? It might be like 20.4 or something like that. We don't really know. 21% is not really accurate. But just over 20% nobody can say that is not just over 20%. That is a fact that nobody can argue with. But lots of people would say it's not really 21. So write things that no one can dispute. That the examiner cannot say well that's not just over 21% or 20%. So we're writing about fluctuations so we need to continue and write about that fluctuation that Latvia had. So what happened in 2010? Well it steadily went down. So we want to describe that. However this steadily decreased to below 10% in 2020. 2020 it gets to below 10%. So again this student is selecting things to write about rather than writing about everything and it's more accurate. Next let's look at Estonia. What is noticeable? What is the most striking thing about Estonia? It has the biggest fluctuations. So we wanted to simply describe that. So Estonia had the wildest fluctuations. You don't have to use the word wildest. It could be the biggest or the largest fluctuations with around 6% in 2010. A massive jump to 20% in 2012. So we can be precise because it's right on the line here at 20% so we can just say 20%. Before falling again to 10% in 2014. Again it's right on the 10% line so we can say that. Now you'll see that in the BAN6 report they then go on to say and then steadying out to between 15% and 13% between 2016 and 2022. This student has chosen not to continue on because they don't think that the rest of that data is significant or key. The key thing was to describe the biggest fluctuations. They've done that. You do not have time nor are you required to write about every single little point. So we're going to finish with Estonia. Continue on with the detail for Sweden. So what we can do with Sweden here is kind of divide it into chunks. This will help you describe not every single point but the most significant points within the data. Let me show you what I mean. So we can divide Sweden into from 2008 to 2020. So instead of talking about every single point here we can just say in 2008 it was high and then it steadily decreased to a low point here. So that's one chunk. And then the next chunk is this window here. But in 2020 it really increased. It was a dramatic increase. So instead of writing about here, then here, then here, then here, then here, then here what we're doing to do is write about here and then here if that makes sense. So we didn't change much from the Band 6 student. Just made the data a little bit more accurate by using approximations rather than exact numbers. And that really shows you the difference between Band 6 and Band 8 is not huge but it is quite easy to transform something with just a little bit more knowledge a little bit more practice a little bit more feedback. Now let's look at the data we're going to write about for the remaining three countries. So United Kingdom, Ireland and France. And if we divide it into two kind of windows or two chunks so this time period is quite boring. Nothing's really happening. There's just slight variations. It's quite steady. But this period things start to happen. So that's exactly what we want to write about. So France, the UK and Ireland all started below 5%. So what we're not going to do is say France started at 5% and then write lots of stuff about France and then the UK started at 5% and then Ireland started at 5%. So we don't have time to do that. And because they're all grouped in and it's quite boring we can just say this is what happened group them together. And then nothing really happened between 2008 and 2018. So we're not going to include that. We're not going to write about it. We don't have time and it's not significant. It's not key. We need to use our time and use our word count to focus in on this second more exciting period. But don't write it's exciting or it's boring. All right. That's opinion. Just using that as a teaching tool. So the UK diverged from the other two in 2020. So there's a they were all kind of doing the same thing and then one diverged did something different. And we can use referencing here the other two because we've made it clear to the examiner that this paragraph is about France the UK and Ireland. So it's okay to use referencing like that the other two because it's clear who the other two are. So increasing dramatically to just under 10% in 2020 then about 15% in 2022 the highest of any country in that year. So the lowest percentage in 2022 was in Ireland which only rose from around 3% in 2020 to just below 5%. There's nothing really interesting about Ireland apart from at the end of the period it has the lowest value. And the important thing to remember here is you can see that there's not a huge difference between the band six paragraph and the band eight paragraph. All we're doing here is just selecting the appropriate data not making it shorter just to make it shorter but selecting the most appropriate data. The most significant the most key data. Reporting it accurately and using accurate grammar and accurate vocabulary to do so. But there's no dramatic changes as such the difference between band six reports and band eight reports is nothing to do with intelligence or English level. It's just doing what they want you to do to get a band eight and they tell you exactly what they want for a band eight in the marking criteria. And to sum that up it's just selecting the most important data and presenting it clearly using accurate vocabulary and accurate grammar. And if you do that you're going to be much much much better off and give yourself a much better chance of getting a band seven, eight or even nine. So that's how to transform a band six task one report into a band eight report but you need to do task two as well. Here's the same video but for task two click on this and I'll show you how to transform a task two band six essay into a band eight essay.