Nobody is afraid to take the IELTS Listening and Reading sections. You have the questions to rely on, and there is always the choice of guessing, so you can’t do it that badly.

In Speaking, you have multiple questions to answer, thus, if you miss one, you’ll be able to expand on the following.

But with the essay in the Writing section, it’s different: if you misunderstood the prompt, it’s quite possible to score zero and fail the test completely.

To avoid this mistake, let’s analyze a Writing Section question.

WRITING TASK

A person’s worth nowadays seems to be judged according to social status and material possessions. Old-fashioned values, such as honour, kindness and trust, no longer seem important.

To what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion?

Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.

Write at least 250 words.

What are the pitfalls of this question?

When taking the Writing section, students often tend to choose several words from the prompt and think that that’s what the question is about.

For instance, a student could believe that the question lies in the ‘importance of social status and material possessions’ for modern people, and fail the test, because that was not the point of the task.

To avoid this mistake, you should allocate one or two minutes to simply reading the question carefully and understanding what is required.

Our example is a so-called ‘for-and-against’ type of essay. You have to dedicate a paragraph to the point of view of people being appreciated because of their social status and money, then another to the opposite view where everybody assesses people according to their honor and kindness.

And then you should make conclusions and show which point of view you support.

How do we write such essays?

To recognize what kind of essay is required and learn to write it accordingly, you need to study some test-preparation materials at the British Counsil website and multiple IELTS-preparation portals. You can also google ‘Essays: for and against’. You’ll get a lot of practice and sample essays to understand what these tasks are about.