The Basics of Writing Overviews

Welcome back to the course.

Now that you know how to write a good introduction we’re going to move on to writing the overviews.

So in this video I’m going to show you how to write the second paragraph to your task one essay so first

let’s go over some basic information that you need to know firstly the overview paragraph should not

include any specific or numeric details.

So what this means is when you see any numeric information on an info graphic such as the number of

units or percentages or any other type of data you should not describe that data in the overview paragraph.

This is very important.

The numeric details should only be discussed in paragraph number three and number four.

So in the overview paragraph we just have to describe the general information about the trends differences

or stages.

The best way for you to describe this general information is to simply describe the highest and the

lowest data points at the start of the graph and the end of the graph or if you have a comparative graph

where you don’t have a beginning and an ending then you just have to describe the highest and the lowest

data points in the two infographics that you’re comparing the overview needs to be only two or three

sentences long and you will only have three to five minutes to finish the overview now.

As you know you cannot include numeric details in the overview.

However if you have dates or times listed on your info graphic then it’s fine to mention those So this

here is a sample answer to a task one question as you already know you only have to write four paragraphs

for the task one essay.

So these here are the four paragraphs we have the introduction here we have the overview here and here

we have paragraphs number three and number four.

So this highlighted part here.

The second paragraph is what we call the overview and in this overview you’re going to be giving some

basic and general information about the infographics.

Now here are some useful phrases that you can use for starting overview paragraphs.

You can use these words and phrases to open your paragraph and you can use these words and phrases listed

in the B column to introduce or general information.

So what you can do with this table here is you can simply mix and match the different openings and the

introductory language to start your overview paragraph.

So for example you can mix and match these parts that are highlighted here so you could say in general

it can be clearly observed that and then you can go ahead and introduce the general information on your

infographics so you can mix and match these rows in any way that you want.

For example you could say on the whole it is conspicuous that and then you can go ahead and introduce

your ideas so these are just some useful phrases that you can use to start the overview paragraphs in

the following videos you’ll see me using these phrases for starting different overviews in the practice

questions that we discussed for the trend graphs comparative graphs process diagrams and the map questions

so I’ll see you in the next video in which we’re going to delve much deeper into writing the overviews

and we’re going to start with writing the overviews for trend graphs.