雅思写作-这篇作文可得7分

Female Voice: You are now listening to the IELTS podcast. Learn from tutors and ex-examiners who are masters of IELTS preparation. Your host, Ben Worthington.

INTRODUCTION

Ben: IELTS writing: Band 6.5 or band 7. In this tutorial, we will look at an IELTS essay that's around 6.5, 7 probably 6.5 I'd say and we'll look at what factors are causing this essay to lose points. We are going to look at each of the four criteria. We are going to break it down sentence by sentence and together we're going to say okay, this sentence is really good. It's a very useful collocation or this sentence is a complete train crash and the student needs to prepare more. I probably won't be so aggressive, but what we're going to do anyway is just break it down and look at each component of the paragraph.

TASK 2 QUESTION

Here is the question: Some people believe that employees should stay in the same job for the rest of their lives. Others think that they should switch jobs at least once during their career. To what extent do you agree or disagree? So, quite a straight forward typical IELTS writing task 2 question. As you probably know by now, the best way to attack these questions is to cut them up then after we split the question up, think of ideas for each part and then assign those ideas to each part and basically from those ideas build your paragraph. We go into this-- it's quite a straight forward process, but we go into this in much more detail in the online course and it's a very easy to follow formula. Anyway, let's look at this. So, we've done that process already and we've assigned our ideas to the paragraph. Now, we've constructed the paragraph, now we're breaking it down and we're looking at it. So, remember the question: Some people believe that employees should stay in the same job for the rest of their lives. Others think they should switch jobs at least once during their career. So, basically, it's saying should employees stick around with the same employer or should they job hop and switch jobs frequently? By the way, this is another useful valuable skill to have for IELTS; the way that you can simplify the question and just basically make it a lot more succinct. This way, it's much easier to digest and to get what the examiner wants from you. So, you simplify it. Right. Let's have a look. So, we start off with the introduction. It's quite a long introduction in this case and the student says: Recently, the majority of individuals has become more aware. . . Right then. So, first of all, the student missed the article. The student wrote: Recently, majority of individuals. . . but we need 'the majority'. Recently, the majority of individuals has become more aware of what university program they have to pursue in order to launch a great career that will lead them to acquire a high salary in the future that will achieve this life. Right. … achieve the life that they have been dreaming for. Right, so that's a very long sentence. Long sentences aren't bad, but they do have to be grammatically accurate. The longer the sentence is, the greater the risk of committing a grammatical mistake. So, this is why I say long sentences are good, but use them only when you are certain your grammar is perfect. The best way to write your paragraph is to use a mixture of short sentences, medium sentences, and long sentences. Anyway, the first part of this sentence is wrong with regards to cohesion and coherence because we start off with recently and then we follow by the majority of individuals. Why are we talking about recently? What does that have to do with the question? Why are we talking about the majority of individuals? Really, it's not so necessary and a more appropriate way would be to say: These days, most young people. . . It's just one suggestion or we could even take it a step further by upgrading the word people to job candidates or employees, which is more topic-specific. Now, the next issue or the actual good points about this sentence is the use of collocations. The first one, pursue a course of study and the second one, launch a career. So, I'll just go back to the sentence and we say: Recently, the majority of individuals have become more aware of what university program they have to pursue. . . that's the collocation pursue a course of study, in order to launch a great career or in order to launch a career. That's really good then the final part where he says to dream of something. Here, we've got the phrase that they have been dreaming for. So, good lexical resource there. These components would have helped the student considerably. Unfortunately though, there were a few grammatical errors. Moving on to the next sentence: However, staying in one company or running just one business it must be changeable in this century to make people life more interesting and stimulating. Now, you've probably heard these grammatical mistakes. So, we need to omit the pronoun in the first one. We're saying: . . . or running just one business, it must be changeable. . . We need to reorganize the sentence there. We don't need the 'it' because we've got a subject already. The next one obviously, it should not be to make people life more interesting. Clearly, it should be to make people's lives more interesting, not to make people life more interesting. So, be careful. These are all small errors especially with grammar that you can pick up yourself, I think, with a review, a self-review of your essay before you submit it for correction. This is a very valuable habit to get into because if you can catch your mistakes, if you know the mistakes that you are making and you can catch them and correct them, then with regards to getting feedback the essay corrector can now focus on other issues and offer help to improve your work rather than just correct it. Also, with regards to the IELTS exam, obviously if you are self-correcting your work in the final five minutes of the exam you can easily, easily boost your score by at least 10% if you just catch those mistakes and there's a tutorial about this in the online course. It's a really easy way basically to boost your score and it could make the difference between a 6.5 and a 7. Next, we've got some punctuation errors here because the student doesn't use capitalization. We start with yet a small number of people. . . He says yet a small numbers of people. . . So, that's obviously, a mistake. . . . believes that working at the same job from the beginning to the end of their life it's better than working in a different spot with different skills from while to while. So, we've got quite a challenging sentence there and you can probably hear I'm struggling to read it. Obviously, there's quite a few errors there. The first one, we've got-- we've already got the subject, so we don't need . . . until the end of their life. It's better. . . We already know the subject here. Also, there's a lot of singular plural inconsistency. Yet a small numbers of people believes. . . Third-person singular there as well. These are quite basic grammar mistakes and what we do on the course is once we send back the correction to the student, we say make a list of these errors and then the next time you write your essay, remember to check for these mistakes that you've made, okay? This way you get into the habit of catching those mistakes. You can do this at home. So, you write an essay, you self-check it or you get some feedback for it and you write down the list of mistakes that you've made. Then the next time you write your essay you check your essay for those mistakes. It's getting on this positive cycle, getting this feedback cycle of improving your work.

LEXICAL RESOURCE AND COLLOCATION

So, now regarding to lexical resource, the student has used from while to while, which is incorrect. Obviously, we needed from time to time. Such a shame as well because the student got the right structure, just the wrong words for the collocation, which is a shame really. Now, the next sentence is: In contrast, other folks thinks it's crucial to make alterations and changes in your life positions. Now, there's quite a few errors here. So, in contrast… this is good actually because it's good for cohesion and coherence because now we're linking ideas together. We're linking what we said before to what we're saying now. So, it's in contrast, yes? But then we've got other folks. . . Howdy partner. It's a little bit informal; other folks and then there's the grammar mistakes. If we really want to use it, we'd probably say other folk think it is crucial. . . Even then, there is a-- where is it? The inconsistency of the subject as well because at the beginning we're saying other folk then we say think it is crucial. That was the other error. We're using third-person singular, but we put folks in plural. So, that's wrong. The point I want to make about this sentence and this goes back to-- it's not stylish. It's just consistency of subject. We start off with talking about other folks and then by the end of the sentence we switch the subject and he says and changes in your life positions. We don't want to talk about your life positions if we started the sentence with folks. Keep the subject consistent and it helps with the reader. It helps the reader-- it helps the writing flow and it helps the reader to read it more effectively and easily.

FINAL POINT

Final point: However, in this essay, I'll analyze both sides of the argument before presenting my opinion. Right. It's not too bad regarding task response. However, this sentence, it could have been improved. The good thing is kind of we have paraphrased the question a little bit, but to make it really stand out or to make it better, what we can do is link it back to the question and we say: However, in this essay I'll analyze both sides of the argument using examples from America and the World Bank to demonstrate points and prove examples. Now, this helps us with that coherence and cohesion score because the examiner knows what is coming ahead in the next paragraphs. This helps a lot. Next one. So, we're going to go on to the second body-- well, the first body paragraph. We've finished the introduction and it starts like this: Firstly, some people thinks. . . Now, punctuation, capitalization, and subject-verb agreement; quite a double triple hit there of losing points, unfortunately for this student. I probably don't have to go into the rules broken there. It's quite clear. Let's carry on. I'm just going to correct it. Some people think that it is good for employees to continue working for their current employer without their life extension. What do we mean by life extension? So, this is a big issue with lexical resource about their life extension. It's really tricky to say there, but we have, which is good, we are organizing our ideas into appropriate paragraphs. So, this is really good for task response and the organization started with it is good for the employees to continue working for their current employer. . . So, we know that this paragraph now is about this topic and obviously it's on task response as well, so it's good to state your opinion at the beginning. This is basically the thesis statement.

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