IELTS Writing Test

After finishing the reading test, the representative from British Council gave instructions for this section. My mind was playing tricks on me, I had lost all the ideas I have studied, all vocabularies that I should use, some phrases and grammar rules that I memorized. Well, when she finished her last sentence: you may start now… everything stores in my mind gone. And I wished to get a graph or a table for the part 1 instead of diagrams, which I am really poor in describing them neatly…

I flipped the question paper, which comprised of two sections: Part 1 and Part 2. The first part was a double-line graph show the difference of the number of car users and public transport users in five towns in Australia. I looked at the huge clock and estimated about 5 minutes for drafting, 15 minutes for writing it plus 5 minutes for touch-ups. Guess what, I ended up spending 10 minutes to think whether I should discuss it based on types of cars and transportation or based on different cities. I chose to explain the differences of cars and public transport users in every city, which my essay ended up over lengthy in order to describe them.

When I started writing, I strictly follow the rule: 1st paragraph must be the introduction by rephrasing the topic of the question~ “The graphs indicated…” And 2nd paragraph would be the overview of significant pattern of the graphs, for mine, car users experienced a drastic rise during 1900-2000. So I mentioned about this and added other distinguished features of the graphs, such as the lowest, highest, drastic changes of some figures…

Then, I described the changes of every line as my 3rd and 4th paragraph. Reminder: do not add in any information which is not shown in the graphs, tables or diagrams. And of course, make sure your writing more than the minimum word limit.

In section two, I got the question briefly about: Do you think we should be vegetarian in order to maintain our healthy lifestyle. This kind of discussion question tests our critical thinking and reasoning based on our point of view. So, we can choose to support any stand as long as with proper reasons and examples. I agree this statement where I gave reasons that there are many vegetables provide enough proteins as meat such as bean curd in order to support our growth. And I wrote a total of five paragraphs for this section and filled in some words at the end, to ensure I have enough words in this section.

*Just keep calm, brainstorm and organize ideas on the question paper, start writing steadily, and get some time for final checking. The pencil that they provided was hardly for me to write my essays fast:

So, I ended up with 6.5 for this section, which I thought I only get 6.0 for it.

~ Photo credit (modified): StockSnap / Pixabay / CC BY-NC