Cohesion and avoiding repetition. This lesson shows you different ways you can improve the cohesion of your writing and avoid repeating words – killing two birds with one stone.
These are extremely important skills to master and the good news is that much of the language you need here is simple language. Simple is very often best. See how it works This paragraph is a model of how you should write your sentences and paragraphs so that they are cohesive and avoid repetition. As you read it, you should see there are different ways I link my sentences together. Think about pronouns Pronouns are words such as: he/she/itthis/that/these/thoseoneboth The way these words work is that they refer back to something already mentioned and replace that word. Former/latter/respectively/such These words work in much the same way and are typical of more academic writing. Former and latter are used with thesuch is typically used with a word following it: e.g. Conditionals clauses in IELTS essays.
In order to get to band 6 your writing needs to contain a mix of both simple and more complex structures.
In plain English this means using some more advanced grammatical structures. I suggest looking at conditionals – that’s if clauses. I have 2 reasons for this: 1. they are relatively straightforward and typically are familiar to most candidates – it’s an achievable goal 2. they have a real purpose in the IELTS essay – they’re not just going to help your grammar, they can actually make the writing process easier for you by improving your coherence and extending the range of your vocabulary. This is the main point: when you are looking at grammar, you should concentrate on it’s use, not just it’s form.
Examples – a key way to produce coherent paragraphs What do I mean by this? Once you have understood that, the next step is to understand how to introduce examples. Some examples These are examples from mysample IELTS essays. Exams and continuous assessment – sample IELTS essay. This sample IELTS essay is designed to help you with the coherence of your writing and structuring your essay.
The general idea is that simple language can be the most effective language when you are structuring your writing. Coherence in IELTS paragraphs 3. How can you make your IELTS essay more coherent and cohesive?
This is a question that matters, particularly if you are after a band score of more than 6.0. Sample IELTS essays. Click on the links below for sample IELTS essays. These essays are organised into 4 and 5 paragraph structures. Write essays yourself I suggest you try these exercises from the Academic Word List to improve your vocabulary Essay writing exercises from the AWL Points to note in using the sample essays Each essay follows the same basic 4 or 5 paragraph structure How the introduction focuses on the question and introduces how the essay is going to be written How each paragraph focuses on one main idea and expands it, using PEE (Point – Explain – Example) How sentences within paragraphs are linked together using pronouns, linking words and repetition.
Academic Word List Exercises. Different types of essay questions in IELTS. The first rule of IELTS essays is to answer the question.
One problem in doing that is there are different types of IELTS essay questions each of which poses its own problems. In this post, I talk you through the three main types of essay questions and show you how to identify them and what problems they pose. I strongly suggest that you practise writing essays on each type of question before you get to the exam. You will find a selection of essay questions organised by question type on my sample essay question page. 1. Sample IELTS essay questions and topics. Questions not just topics While the topics are predictable enough, the actual questions are invariably extremely precise.
Again, there is also a good reason for this: the examiners do not want you to learn an essay, they want to test your English and see if you can answer a precise question, rather than produce a general answer to a general topic. Learn and practice the question formats There are 3 main formats of IELTS essay question Each type of essay has its own difficulty (see answering the question 2 ). The exam format Remember that in the exam these words are always included: Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your knowledge or experience. An introduction to cohesion. The first text is the original text and is highly cohesive – even though it does not contain many obvious linking words.
Some of the cohesion language is highlighted in green and blue. Note, in particular the use of this at the beginning of sentences to link to the sentence before. Cohesion can be really simple. Attracting customers to buy your products and services needs a great deal of research and planning to ensure the money you invest in gaining customers pays off.
This is normally achieved through market research and involves finding more about the people you hope to sell to. This text may at first sight look more cohesive, but in fact most of the cohesion words are wrongly used. An editing checklist for IELTS. One problem in IELTS is that there are only 60 minutes to produce 2 pieces of writing. As a result many candidates do not have time to edit their writing, or if they do edit, they do it inefficiently. Paragraph coherence in IELTS writing. Coherence is crucial to IELTS writing. Why?