Grammar for ielts writing a handbook by David S. Wills Contents

Grammar for IELTS Writing

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Why? Once again, we can see how different items in a sentence must be pre-
sented as parallels – i.e. with the same structure. With paired words we often see 
“and,” “either,” “rather,” etc. used to join words or phrases. Make sure that these are 
the same; for example, in the first instance we needed two adjectives, and in the 
second we needed the verb tenses to be the same.
Why Use Parallelism in the IELTS?
The IELTS writing exam is a fantastic test of English proficiency. There is no way 
to cheat or trick the system. You simply have to demonstrate your English level 
by writing an honest piece of work. The examiner will mark you on the following 
criteria:
„
task achievement
„
coherence and cohesion
„
lexical resource
„
grammatical range and accuracy
The last point on the list is “grammatical range and accuracy.” This means hav-
ing a variety of sentence structures (simple, compound, complex, compound-
complex) and a mastery of verb tenses. Parallelism is something that most 
students don’t fully understand, yet it is not difficult to learn. I teach this to my 
students in one 90 minutes class, and by the end of the lesson, they understand 
it so well they are sick of my examples!
Like learning how to use a comma or semi-colon, it is not difficult, yet it is 
incredibly impressive. Your examiner will see your writing and mark you higher 
than other students on that basis.
Of course, like I said, there is no cheating the system – if all you know how to 
do is make your writing parallel and punctuated, it doesn’t help. But it is a huge 
boost to your armory of English language skills and will be a pleasant surprise for 
the examiner.
Parallelism

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46
An IELTS Example of Parallelism
Let’s look at an incorrect example from an IELTS Writing Task 1 essay:
As a general trend, the chart shows that while the unemployment rate 
in the United States gradually decreased over the period shown, in 
Japan there was a significant increase.
Why is this incorrect? Because in the first part we use the phrase “gradually 
decreased” (an adverb + verb) and in the second we say “a significant increase” 
(adjective + noun). We should rephrase it to give parallelism thusly:
As a general trend, the chart shows that while the unemployment rate 
in the United States gradually decreased over the period shown, in 
Japan it significantly increased.
Let’s correct the following faulty parallelism from:
According to the data from the graph, in March 1993, 7% of Ameri-
cans were unemployed, whereas the unemployment rate in Japan 
was just 2.4%.
To:
According to the data from the graph, in March 1993, 7% of Americans 
were unemployed, whereas just 2.5% of Japanese were unemployed.