 Hey Chris here from IELTS Advantage and welcome to quite a unique lesson on IELTS writing task 2. So this lesson is going to show you how I helped one of our students move from a 6.5 to a Band 8 in quite a short period of time. So I was working with a student and she had consistently got 6.5 over and over and over again before she started working with us. And then she started working with us and she said I really need to get this done very very quickly because she had been offered a job in London and there was a time limit she had a deadline and what we did with her was take quite a unique approach because we didn't really have time to dive into all of the things in detail that we needed to help her with. We normally don't do this with students but with this student instead of looking at everything in a lot of detail we just taught her some core principles and all of these core principles about how to write an essay were linked to the official marking criteria the document that the examiner is going to be looking at when they are marking your essay. So we taught her these key principles these key fundamentals and it had a radical impact on her scores and she moved from a 6.5 to a Band 8 in quite a short period of time. So what I decided to do was as always ask her to come on and do one of our success story videos and she's quite shy and she said that she didn't want to do that. So I asked her could I take your work this stuff that we worked on with you show everybody your essays from where they were at like a 6.5 level to a Band 8 level and also share those key principles that we taught you and she said absolutely and that's what we're going to do in this lesson. We're going to divide the lesson into three we're going to show you how to think about the question first so how to analyze the question think about it generate ideas plan everything out in the second stage we're going to show you how to write your essay so what are the examiners looking for in a good introduction in a good main body paragraph how to develop your main ideas and then finish it off with an effective conclusion and then finally we're going to look at how to check your work and talk a lot about grammar and vocabulary 50% of your total mark and we're going to take you through all of that in this lesson and at the end of this video I'm going to do two things number one I'm going to give you a free five part course that's going to look at everything in a lot more detail and secondly I'm going to look at the tasks that we're going to set you in this video so at the end of this video we're going to ask you to write an essay and we will randomly pick a few of those essays and give you detailed feedback on that and then we'll make a separate video later in the week looking at all the common mistakes the things that you did well the things that you didn't do so well and looking at those detailed feedback sessions that we will use from your work that you'll submit at the end of this lesson so let's jump into my computer and we can start off with the first part of the lesson okay guys welcome and let's get straight into it so what do I mean by a principled approach so the examiner will be using the official marking criteria to judge your work so on test day you're going to write an essay later that day the examiner is going to look at it and they're going to be using this official marking criteria to judge your work and this allows all tests to be objectively obsessed assessed by any examiner in the world our approach with this student was to teach them principles that were directly linked to the marking criteria so teaching them what the examiners were looking for and how to give the examiners what they are looking for and we'll look at these principles in this lesson so this does not guarantee that you will see the same improvement but will be a very very good start to improving your scores obviously I worked very very closely with this student and gave them individual feedback and all of those great things which I won't be able to give to most of you but it will be a great opportunity for you to kind of get inside the mind of an examiner understand what they will be looking for and apply this approach to your own essay so that you can give the examiners what they're looking for on test day so when they came to me they failed the test I think three or four times and they got 6.5 at least three times in a row and what I said to them was the very first thing was please tell me the the last test that you did can you remember the question this was the question she could remember it as best that she could and I said go away and write an essay under exam conditions because the first point was to understand the exact reasons why she was getting 6.5 and understand the principles that she was unaware of and understand some of the things that she thought would work but wouldn't really work so this was the first step and what we're going to do in this lesson is show you the essay that she produced that time and then the essay that she produced after we helped her understand all of these principles so it will show you a lot of the common mistakes that people are making and one of the ways that you can help you on test day so after she did that we looked at her writing and we said you need to stop thinking about essay writing as just looking at the question and immediately starting to write because it's obvious that you're a bit confused about what to do and your your writing reflects that because your writing is a reflection of your thinking so three stages to IELTS writing and stage one is the planning and thinking stage and the first thing that she said to us was you're crazy I don't have time to plan I don't have time to write nevermind plan and we will look at that in more detail about how planning is an investment of your time not a waste of your time then stage two the writing stage obviously and stage three checking she was making a lot of careless mistakes her grammar and vocabulary were actually quite good but she was making a lot of grammar and vocabulary mistakes not because her grammar and vocabulary was bad per se but she just wasn't spending the time to check her essay but also wasn't aware of what to look for and when she was checking her essay and what we're going to do in this lesson is show you each stage in a lot more detail so planning we're going to look at question analysis idea generation structure planning and a little bit about vocabulary stage two we're going to look at how to write an introduction a main body paragraph conclusion and obviously grammar and vocabulary as well and stage three the checking stage we're going to give you a checklist of things to look for in your essays and also how to strategically think about grammar and vocabulary how to minimize mistakes and improve your band scores for grammar and vocabulary so let's get straight into the thinking stage as i already mentioned the first thing that she said was i just don't have time you know i really struggle to get an essay done in the 40 minutes allowed how am i going to have time for planning so we changed her mindset a little bit from planning is a waste of time to planning is actually an investment of your time because the more you plan you're actually freeing up a lot of time because instead of writing and then thinking and then writing and thinking and then getting you know lost in the essay and having to go back and panicking you do all of your thinking in the thinking stage and then you do all of your writing in the writing stage it's the analogy i always use is if you were going on holiday of course you're going to plan the hotel you're going to and book your flights and get a map of the city and all of those things to save you time so think about the planning stage as that you know planning everything out to save you a lot of time and make everything much easier for yourself so your first job is to think about what the question is actually asking you to do looking at her essay which i'll show you in a second it was very obvious that she immediately just started writing and didn't really think about the question and there was a major mistake in it and we're going to show you that later on so just remind you about the question so i will read of this so instead of immediately reading this as quickly as possible which she did and she made a major mistake because of that i told her just to calm down put the put the panel on the table or the pencil or whatever it is and just think about the question first you might think this is really really obvious but i'll show you the major mistake that you made later on that will hopefully convince you that this is a worthwhile use of your time what she also did was she wrote about the general topic but didn't really focus on the specifics of the question so what we taught her first was take a minute or two just to read the question and think about it but then divide it into the general topic so the general topic is sleep but the specific topic what they really are talking about is comparing sleep now today and in the past and that will help you really hone in on the correct answer and writing a very clear coherent cohesive essay if you split it up between the general topic and the specific topic and to do that to get better at that just look at lots of questions and you know get five six seven eight questions and have a look at them and try and divide them into the general topic and the specific topics and it will start to dawn on you how important that is because a lot of students what they do is they just write generally about everything that they see rather than answering the specific question but that's just the first stage the second stage of the thinking part of doing your essay is what do they actually want you to do again this might sound really obvious and you're like i know what they want me to do i've read it well you'll see and most students actually get this question completely wrong so number one why is this so what do you think is the reason behind this why is this keep it very simple and secondly what effects does this have on them and it's really important that you understand that its effects most people when they do this question and like you'll see later on with this student what they write about are the causes doesn't ask you about the causes of it it asks you about the effects of it so if you talk about the causes like this student didn't like most students who do this and then you're wrong but if you write about the effects you're correct so again taking that time you'll see that it is an investment of your time you know the specific thing you're supposed to be writing about and the specific things they want you to do and it just makes everything much much much easier and then we can head on to the next stage of the thinking part which is idea generation many many times a day we'll get emails from students saying i really really struggle with idea generation i have no idea what to do so the first question we asked her when she told us that she had this problem is what did you do in the real test how did you generate ideas because she was one of those people that was just like i'm really bad at thinking of ideas i was like okay you're probably not bad at thinking of ideas you're probably just using the wrong technique or going about it the wrong way and her answer was she started writing and then she started brainstorming i said okay two major problems there first you cannot write and then brainstorm at the same time it's impossible to do that if you think about it you can't be writing your essay and brainstorming at the same time but many many students do and the student did that as well and the result of that is normally having multiple main ideas in each paragraph like a lot of students like this student will have five or six main ideas in their in their main body paragraphs and no explanations really no examples are not developing their main ideas and this is mentioned in the official marking criteria you need to develop your main ideas and if you don't do that then you're not satisfying that marking criteria so even just this stage of idea generation can be tweaked to allow you to satisfy the the marking criteria and think of ideas quickly and effectively also brainstorming is not the best way to think of ideas it's a great way to think of ideas if you're trying to think of just random ideas and just free thinking but you don't have time really to do that and brainstorming normally generates just lots and lots of random irrelevant ideas and it takes a lot of time instead with this question what you could do is just ask yourself direct questions and think about what is the most obvious answer what is the most obvious main idea if i asked a hundred people this question what would they say so instead of brainstorming you could just think why is this why do people sleep less than they did do in the past they work more that's one very very very obvious idea that is easy for you to think about you can do it quickly and it's also easy for the examiner to recognize that idea and for you to develop that idea what effects does it have on them what happens if you don't sleep fatigue and and this person who we were working with was a doctor and they were trying to think of all these crazy ideas and and effects and it's just like what what happens when you don't sleep you feel tired why don't you use that oh it's too simple there's nothing in the marking criteria that says your ideas need to be sophisticated there's nothing in the marking criteria which says your ideas need to be high level or you know it's not an intelligence test it's not a knowledge test it is just a writing test and you can satisfy the marking criteria by thinking of the most obvious answer that's relevant and specific answers the question and like most students when i showed her this is like i can't believe how over complicated i made everything doesn't need to be that complicated now that you've got two answers and two ideas you can use structure planning so structure planning there's no magic structure there's no structure that you can use that is going to guarantee that you get a high score there are lots of structures that are that are good and there are lots of structures that are not so good a structure just helps you think helps you plan and helps you write your essay and they're not a substitute for good grammar and good vocabulary and you know good writing skills but they are very very helpful to organize your ideas and then put those ideas onto paper so we gave her just a very basic structure to help her with this so for this type of essay this type of question introduction is you're going to introduce the topic you're going to paraphrase the question by doing that answer both questions so tell the examiner exactly what's coming up in the rest of the essay to help them because your position needs to be clear throughout the essay that's what it says in the marking criteria you also need to write a coherent and cohesive essay again that's what it says in the marking criteria so teaching them just basic principles that will help them satisfy the marking criteria and keep the examiners happy main body one so it's your you've two questions so your first answer your explanation and your example doesn't need to be any more complicated than that we'll look at how she made it more complicated but it doesn't need to be main body two the second answer explanation an example and then a conclusion is just a summary of answer to both questions and she looked at this and started arguing with me and said well my other teacher says to do it a different way and another IELTS expert says to do it another way and my book says it I was like so what are you trying to achieve here are you just do you just want an argument do you want to just debate which structure is better or would you rather just follow one way all of them are probably going to help you and that is going to help you actually write a decent answer so it took you know a couple of days for her to come around but one of the key principles that she understood was there are many correct ways of doing things especially when it comes to structures but if you try and do four different things you're going to write a very confusing essay because as I've said a few times already your writing is a reflection of your thinking if your thinking is clear your writing will be clear if your thinking is confused your writing is going to be incoherent so this is what we did we got her to take her ideas and just put them into this structure so she's going to paraphrase the question answer both questions so work more and fatigue main body one work more than an explanation about why that is and then an example a recent study plus something to support our main idea and we'll look at what she said in a second when we look at her essay main body two fatigue less sleep means the body a mind of less time to recover sleep rejuvenates our body and mind very very obvious and then she had a great example that she came up with herself and from a basketball team that she read in a book she read a study and she's going to use that and you'll see how good this was compared to what she did in the real test so let's look at some key principles from the thinking stage and you can use these these principles too to help you write your essays so number one take the time to understand the question and what it is asking you to do if you don't do that you're not you don't understand the question you won't be able to answer it number two planning is an investment of your time not a waste number three think of the most obvious ideas they are obvious to the examiner and easy for you to develop there are no extra marks for good ideas there are no extra marks for sophisticated ideas just use ideas that are easy to use and easy to understand use a proven structure to help you organize your ideas just make sure that it is a reliable structure and and it actually works and don't try and memorize like five different structures do most of your thinking before you start writing it's very difficult to think and write at the same time and help yourself and help the reader so help yourself write a good essay and help the reader understand what you have done and understand that you have the ability to write a good essay these five principles just help you and they help the reader and if you do those things then you're well on your way to writing a very very effective essay so let's have a look at our first introduction where she didn't follow any of these principles and let's have a look at what she did noise the days due to busy lifestyle it is common phenomenon for people to slumber less this essay will discuss both views and finish with a reasonable opinion so I said to her what are you doing here what are you doing in that first sentence and she had no answer and I said what are you doing in that second sentence she had no answer I said well if you don't know why you wrote those sentences if you don't know the purpose of those sentences do you think that the person reading it is going to really follow it or understand it and I kept pushing her and pushing her why did you do this and she said I looked at other essays and most of them started with nowadays and they talked about busy lifestyle and I also looked at some youtube videos that told me that if I use the words phenomenon and you know high level vocabulary like this then I was going to get a really high score I also looked at some blog posts and they started their essays with this essay will discuss both views and finish with a reasonable opinion and my answer to that was this is not a memorization test this is a writing test you're not trying to demonstrate to the examiner that you watched some youtube videos and memorized some vocabulary you're not trying to demonstrate to the to the examiner that you read a few blog posts and memorized how they write an introduction you need to demonstrate that you know how to write an introduction it's pretty obvious what is the purpose of an introduction why do we write an introduction we write an introduction to introduce the reader to what the topic is and introduce the reader to what is going to be in the rest of the essay those are the purposes of an introduction and if you don't do those things then you've just wasted your time and you've more importantly you've wasted the reader's time because the introduction is just there to help the reader understand what is coming up in the essay so we applied those principles and we look let's have a look at our new introduction so the first thing we got her to do was look at the question when you're writing your introduction if you don't look at the question when you're writing your introduction you're not going to write a good introduction pretty simple and again all of these things seem really obvious but you would not believe the number of students who we actually teach this to who say yeah that's really obvious and then don't do it all right learn how to walk before you can run do the basic principles the fundamentals before you start thinking about anything fancy because you're not being judged on what you what the fancy things you can do you're being judged on the fundamentals so people sleep fewer hours than they did many years ago this is because we tend to work longer hours compared to the past and this results in fatigue so let's analyze this a little bit people sleep fewer hours than they did many years ago paraphrasing the question introducing the topic this is because we tend to work longer hours compared to the past answer one and this results in fatigue answer two so again the student fought me on this and said it's far too short and I said to them here's the official marking criteria where does it say anywhere that your introduction needs to be long and she said yeah but my other teacher told me that it needs to be long it's like what score did you get last time 6.5 what score did you get the time before 6.5 what what score did you get the time before 6.5 do you think that doing the same thing that you used to do is going to increase your score or you're going to stay the same um and then she started okay let's let's try and and learn a different way of doing things um and this is not the most perfect introduction in the world there's mistakes in it you know there's mistakes in the rest of her essay but it is way way way better than noisy days due to busy lifestyle it is common for an aluminum for people to slumber less just a hundred times better so let's have a look and think about what the examiner would be thinking when they are looking at this introduction so the first question they're going to ask themselves is have they understood the question and by looking at this yes they have do they know how to paraphrase yes they do is their grammar and vocabulary appropriate and accurate for the most part yes it is do they know how to write an introduction yes they do all the essential elements are there does the introduction make the rest of the essay clear and easy to understand absolutely if i gave you this on a piece of paper and said what is this essay about and what are what is the rest of the essay going to discuss what is it going to be about you would know exactly what is going to happen so key principles again demonstrate ability not memorization keep it simple paraphrasing is a skill you must master many of you are thinking now how do i learn how to paraphrase get lots of questions and paraphrase them and get feedback on them help the reader understand what your essay is about by clearly telling them and help yourself and help the reader well let's move on to her first main body paragraph and let's look at why this would not get a high score firstly people not bless is because of hectic lifestyle lifestyle people have a more busier life than in the past so she started off with a main idea which is hectic lifestyle and then said people have a more busy or life than in past let's ignore the grammar and vocabulary mistakes for now but basically this isn't an explanation it's basically just repeating the same thing again secondly is the fast-paced life which many adherents are subject to causing a myriad problems so this seems like it's a second idea because she's put secondly in here but it's really the same idea as the last one fast-paced lifestyle and this causes problems thirdly for example my mother used to sleep nine hours a night and she was a housewife ice news only six hours and i am a busy doctor so thirdly that's showing that like there's a third idea but this is an example so it's it's difficult to understand what she is doing and where she's going because the discourse markers don't really help and then in conclusion i have no idea why you would put a conclusion at the end of a main body paragraph you put your conclusion at the end of the essay not at the end of the main body paragraph so when i asked her about this first of all i said why are you adding in so much strange vocabulary so myriad and adherents and stuff like that she said well uh and humongous and she said well i looked at a youtube video and this girl told me that if i memorized these five or ten words and put them into my essay i would get a high score it's like okay can you see the problem with that because you're not actually answering the question you're just focusing on putting in some big words and you're not even using those words effectively um some of them are spelled incorrectly some of them are used incorrectly some of them the grammar's wrong that's a big problem then i said why are you putting firstly secondly thirdly in conclusion she said my old teacher told me to do that that's you know a very famous teacher told me to do that and he's really good and you should do that it's like no because that's encouraging you to put in at least three to four main ideas not develop any of them and she was like yeah i got confused i tried to put an explanation in here and then an example in here but i got confused between the structure that you taught and the structure that my old teacher taught is that okay that's fine but let's just focus on one way of doing things and i'm not saying that you have to follow my way but follow one way if you try and use two to three different structures in a paragraph then it's you're going to be confused and it's very very confusing to read so we helped her out and let's have a look at her new main body paragraph again not perfect there's some little mistakes in here but we're not looking for perfection you don't need perfection to get a high score should be minimizing mistakes but don't look at this and be like she made a mistake but comment below and tell me any mistakes that you can spot and that will help you as well so people tend to sleep less compared to the past because they they are expected to work more okay clear topic sentence you're telling the examiner this is what this paragraph is about this is because the job market is more competitive than ever before and workers have to get more done or they may fall behind or be replaced by someone else explanation and it actually explains that main idea so it's nice and coherent and cohesive this means that people have to get up earlier and do not return home until late in the evening thus cutting into their sleep further explanation of the same point furthermore they do not have time to relax and this disrupts their sleep pattern again they could have connected this a little bit better they seemed a little desperate to put in another discourse marker and we helped her fix that but again fine can't fix it a little bit but overall very very good and a dramatic improvement from the last time for example she missed out an article there recent studies showed that the average employee works 2.4 hours more than missed out another article than the average worker little mistake there in the 1970s so example provides evidence to help support our main view this is much better than my mom sleeps my mom used to sleep more than I did a personal example you can use personal examples but most people and especially this person continued to mess them up because they don't really help you provide evidence for the general point so if an examiner was looking at this again let's we're going to talk about grammar at the end they would notice that you know the little grammar mistakes but overall the grammar is sound the vocabulary is sound not perfect but it sounds but let's look at the structure and coherence and cohesion and task achievement they would read this first sentence and think I know what this sentence is about and it links to the main idea in the introduction they would look at this explanation okay understand what they think about the question and then the example okay that provides evidence compare that with that it's like night and day and it doesn't take much to convert a mess like this into something like this she didn't really need to study that much she just needed to understand the principles behind this the principle of I need to make my topic sentences clear I need to actually explain that main idea have one main idea in the paragraph and then provide evidence and try and make my grammar and vocabulary as accurate as possible let's have a look at our second main body paragraph there are plethora reasons for this predicament again what was she doing there she was trying to impress the examiner with the word plethora and predicament like in the previous one myriad and all of these words like it's not really impressing anybody if you're not actually doing the most important thing which is answering the question firstly productivity of the workforce will plummet however this is something that can be mitigate secondly this could cause health problems for those affected finally a number of my patient have complained of this problem and this was caused by a lack of dose to recapitulate reasons are multivariate and profound which is not surprising considering how widespread this problem is she just memorized that from another essay and put it in there which is very very obvious to an examiner also she's talking a lot about causes and not about effects so you probably spotted this when I when I told you about this at the beginning of the lesson the question is about effects but she's often talking about causes because she didn't spend the time thinking about the question planning it out if you do your thinking you're not going to make mistakes like this so we give her a new system to follow the primary effect of this so not cause effect widespread of this is so you should missed out the word is widespread chronic fatigue unspelled fatigue wrong that is to say large sections of the population do not get the required eight hours and this results in a high percentage of them being too tired to live their lives effectively so she's making a lot of carless mistakes and we'll look at the at the end of this lesson how she fixed those and how she got over that problem this could mean that they underperform at work are more irritable with those around them or could even have health problems for example the golden state warriors basketball team employed a sleep expert and the studied players who sleep force who slept for more than nine hours a night and compared than with those that only got six so she's getting again making carless mistakes her grammar is actually quite good but she was when she was doing this essay she didn't she hadn't mastered all of the techniques yet and she was a little bit under pressure with time because when you're learning new systems and new techniques takes you a longer amount of time to do essays and to do anything but she will show you how she fixed this those that slept less had more injuries and actually performed worse on the court and I said how did you think of that example she said oh I read a book about sleep it's like why didn't you use this in the real test she said oh it was under pressure and I just didn't think about it and I said okay what was the difference she said well because I divided it into thinking writing and planning it gave me my just more room to think about this and the ideas came a lot more freely and flowed a lot better and I was able to think of this great example so the examiner would look at this and they would obviously see that there are quite a few small grammar and vocabulary mistakes and they would mark them down for that but they would look at this and see you know clear topic sentence clear explanation clear example very very good example that helps the reader understand their point of view and answers the question effectively so let's look at some key principles from this you need to fully develop your main ideas stop putting multiple main ideas and not developing any of them in your main body paragraphs do not have multiple main ideas in one paragraph help the reader understand what the paragraph is about by writing clear topic sentences help the reader understand your main point by explaining it to them and support your main idea with evidence by giving an example personal examples do not normally provide sufficient evidence you can use them but most of the time they're not that good use vocabulary as a tool to help you express meaning memorizing high level vocabulary does not help you do that showing off your vocabulary i'm making lots and lots of mistakes does not normally end well use vocabulary to help you express meaning that is the purpose of vocabulary is to help you express your thoughts so use it for that purpose let's have a look at our first conclusion to sum it all up we live in fast-paced hectic world where drowsing is not prioritization it is my future prediction that this will continue to be problem and will even gather pace in the coming century okay why are you putting in new ideas and future predictions again i've seen this somewhere else and i just thought i would do this so this person was a very very intelligent woman she was a doctor but she wasn't thinking for herself she was just memorizing stuff and looking what other people were doing rather than actually learning how to write which is what we taught her when you switch your perspective from i just want to look at a bunch of essays and copy a bunch of things to i want to learn how to write an essay then your scores are going to improve dramatically her new conclusion in conclusion people are more sleep deprived than in previous generations due to longer working hours and the effect is that many are chronically tired to the point of exhaustion so summarizing our main points making our position clear on both questions that's what the examiner would be thinking about do the points link up with what is discussed in the rest of the essay because what is a conclusion a conclusion is a summary of the main points they'll also be thinking about is their position clear throughout the essay your position on each question what you think about each question should be clear throughout the essay because that's what it states in the marking criteria some key principles for writing a conclusion a conclusion to summarize your main points and provide a clear position do number one just do that don't do anything else and you should not have new ideas in your conclusion you shouldn't be adding in your future predictions and stuff like that you can do that but make sure they're actually related to what you wrote about and just avoid doing it in fact because it doesn't actually add anything to your essay just keep it simple follow the basics follow the fundamentals so third stage is checking so you might have noticed that she made a lot of mistakes especially in the in the third paragraph the second main body paragraph so we're going to divide the checking stage into three parts checklist grammar and vocabulary checklist so we provided her with a checklist of things to think about at the end of her essay so because we trained her in a certain way five to ten minutes at the beginning she was doing her thinking and then five minutes at the end she was doing her checking so these are the things that she would be thinking about when looking at her essay that I demonstrate that I understood the question so if you have followed the system that we showed you in this in this video that will come inevitably you will do that inevitably if you spend the time thinking about it you know dividing it into a general topic and specific topics and thinking about the questions are my ideas relevant did I structure my answer appropriately again if you use a proven structure that happens automatically why was my paragraphing so did I have a clear introduction clear main body paragraphs and a clear conclusion did I paraphrase effectively was my introduction effective did I do the right things in my introduction did I develop my main ideas topic sentences explanations examples did I summarize my main ideas in the conclusion and was my position clear throughout the essay you also be thinking about was my grammar accurate and appropriate and did I display a wide enough range of vocabulary and was my vocabulary accurate so let's now look at 10 11 and 12 but you can see that if you learn this and you learn how to do all these things you're not going to be going like tick ticking each of these off in your essay you've learned them to the point where it's you look at your essay and you can understand them automatically whether you've done these things or not so let's move on to grammar so you might have noticed that she had one major issue which was articles she nearly every sentence had an article mistake in it and that's that was a big big problem because the examiner will be looking for error free sentences the more error free sentences you have generally the better your grammar score is going to be so if you look at a typical essay you'll see multiple articles so if you are struggling with articles then you're going to have a major issue but this was her problem you might be great with articles but you have a problem with prepositions or you might have a problem with punctuation or a problem with tenses or a problem with verb subject agreement or one of the other areas of grammar but the key thing was we if we fix this problem for her we could increase her score dramatically because 90% of her mistakes were article mistakes so you fix that big mistake that big problem then the number of error free sentences increases dramatically so we did two things for her we improved her use of articles and we taught her how to check articles when editing she also made quite a few just careless mistakes so what do I mean by careless mistakes I mean that she knew the grammar so she made a little tense mistake she made a mistake with like countable uncountable nouns but she knew that area of grammar it wasn't a big problem since she was rushing through everything and she didn't get to check it so we can fix this we don't need to you know review the whole area of grammar because she made one mistake we help her fix this by checking her writing three times after each sentence read the sentence did you make any mistakes if you did correct them at the end of each paragraph read that paragraph any mistakes fix them and then at the end of the essay read the whole essay any mistakes fix them and this dramatically improved her performance in grammar she went from you know making a mistake in nearly every sentence to only making one or two mistakes in the whole essay vocabulary so her vocabulary was really already at a seven or above the problem was she was using it incorrectly because she was doing two things she was memorizing lots of high-level words you've seen that in her original essay and she was showing off so she was just showing off I know this big word like myriad and plethora and humongous just didn't didn't really fit in the essay at all it didn't really help her answer the question and she was using them incorrectly a lot of the times and we can fix this immediately by changing her mindset changing her mindset from using and showing off high-level words to use vocabulary you already have as a tool to express meaning not to show off so we looked at her vocabulary and said your vocabulary is actually pretty good you're making way too many mistakes but you're making mistakes because you're pushing too hard like going to the gym and lifting a weight that's too heavy for you lift the weights that you're capable of lifting and you'll get stronger and stronger and perform better but if you lift a weight that's too heavy you'll drop it on your head and kill yourself same with your essay if you use vocabulary you don't know how to use you're going to destroy your chances of getting a high enough mark so let's check her essay again when it comes to vocabulary because we had a little bit of a debate and you're probably looking at her essay and I'm screaming at the at the at the at the screen that there's a big big mistake in it if you know that mistake put the comments and tell me what you think of a vocabulary before we actually look at this big problem that she thought she had but she didn't really have so this is her essay let me blow it up a little bit for you so let's see okay so when you look at her original essay she varied the word sleep over and over and over and over again but incorrectly and we'll look at that in a second so when I gave her feedback I said I marked all of most of the the variations the synonyms of sleep incorrect so some of them were informal some of them just the meaning was wrong some of them the style was wrong and she had a bit of a debate or an argument with me and she said you can't repeat any words if you repeat words you'll get a low score everybody knows that all of my teachers told me that and I said okay well let's have a look at it so we took her essay so this is her essay and we put it in here which is word counter so you can just copy and paste anyone any document in here 272 words shows your your mistakes and all of those things but let's have a look here keyword density all right so she used sleep seven times so she said I can't repeat the word sleep seven times and hope to get a high enough score so I said okay let's take the word sleep and put it into a thesaurus so let's have a look at all of these and she said yeah what I need to do is just use these words that's going to impress the examiner and and we'll be able to get a high score so I said okay let's look at these coma is coma the same as a sleep no dream is dream the same as sleep not really hibernation no slumber yes but it's not really it's a little bit informal trance no cat map no dormancy no so very very few words here that you could actually use so she made a big mistake thinking all you have to do is just put in a synonym these are all synonyms of sleep but you can't actually use most of them in an essay so we talked about it a little bit more and she said well if I use sleep many many times I'm going to get a little score I said okay well let's have a look at this let's think about it so the first time you sleep fine the second time you use sleep so you're writing your essay what happened and she explained that she thought for a very very long time about how to change the word sleep and she couldn't think of a good way so she guessed and that was snooze which was wrong so I said okay two things have happened here number one you've wasted a lot of time just trying to think of one word and then when you did think of it it was wrong lowering your score which is better is it better just to use the word sleep again and get on with your essay vary your language as much as you can if you can change it change it but if you can't think of a word and if you can't think of a correct word don't use it because in an essay like this about sleep you have two choices you can repeat the word sleep or you can try and use one of these words and most of them will be wrong you know so it's really up to you it's you have to vary your language as much as you can and demonstrate to the examiner that you know how to paraphrase you know how to use synonyms but there will be some words that you just have to repeat and if you disagree with me tell me the alternative tell me what you should do instead should you use a bunch of words that don't mean anything or don't you know don't mean exactly the same as the word you're trying to replace use the wrong words or sit there for 20 minutes trying to think of one word you should always be trying to improve your vocabulary but don't sit there for 20 minutes and then use the wrong word you're going to be in all sorts of trouble but if we look at there is the rest of her vocabulary fatigue disrupts their sleep pattern cutting into their sleep widespread chronic fatigue there's some great vocabulary and great collocations in there and and that's my point to her was you've got some great vocabulary but you're trying too hard to show off and you also are so afraid of repeating a word that you are scuppering your chances of of actually improving and she did make some little you know she would be marked down for making those little spelling mistakes but again checking your work at the end and fixing those and then planning and writing and then checking is going to alleviate that problem and that's one of the main reasons why she improved even further to a band eight so as promised if you click the link in the video and it should pop up now that a link or you'll find it in the description below just click the link that's popping up right now to get access to our free five day challenge I threw a lot of stuff at you today and it was kind of very from this kind of 30,000 foot view point and we're looking at a lot of fundamentals and basic principles if you want to look at things in a lot more detail and look at a five day challenge five lessons showing you exactly what to do and giving you five tasks and five feedback sessions just click the link it's totally free and you can get it now your turn so what I would like you to do is look at an essay write a response and I will pick a few of them randomly and give very very detailed feedback in a new lesson so it's your opportunity to get feedback on your work normally for one feedback session with me it's about 25 dollars so you can get an opportunity to make 25 dollars basically or get a free correction people eat more processed food than they did in the past why is this what are the effects of this I will randomly select a few essays and give detailed feedback feel free to comment on other people's essays too so this will really really help you understand the the basic principles that we talked about today and giving other people feedback really helps you learn the material and really solidify what you have learned today and see you on Friday for the feedback session so what I'll do is I'll look at a few of the essays that that you'll put in the comments and what I'll do is I'll take some of them randomly and I'll create a feedback lesson where I give detailed feedback to a few of them so to a few random people I'm not going to do it like first come first served I'm just going to pick a few of them randomly and to make it fair I'll pick about two or three maybe even four if I have time and I'll make a lesson on Friday and I'll post in the comments and to let you know that your lesson our essay has been chosen for the lesson hopefully you find that useful guys if you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up or just say thank you it's totally free hopefully you were able to get some benefit from that student she's a little bit shy she didn't want to do a success story but hopefully that was even better and if you have any questions or anything like that feel free to comment below and we'll get back to you or if you want to get in touch with us my email address is chris at aislesadvantage.com hopefully you find that useful and look forward to reading your comments thanks very much guys bye bye