Tips for band 8 essay writing

22. Manage your time:

Ideally before the exam you will have your essay writing down to under 40 minutes. You should have a solid procedure to follow, so as to maximise your time. After you have worked on improving your writing, aim for speed. Do various timed practice exams to get this skill, this should be the last part of your preparation. Also, remember in the exam to check what time you start and expect to finish.

 

23. Practice doing lots of homework:

Do practise sample IELTS essays a home. It helps improve your writing. Another thing that eats away at your time is counting words too frequently.  Again, there are things you can do at home to help reduce this. Count the number of words in 5 lines of your writing.  Divide this number by 5 and that will give you the average number of words you write on a line (assuming that your handwriting is always of a similar size).

Concentrate on each phase of the process – ask yourself the question “what I am trying to do now?”

An IELTS Answer page is just an average A4-sized piece of paper. A full page has about 20 lines; so if your average number of words per line is usually 10, you would write about 200 words on a full page.