Don't Make These Mistakes!

Hello again everybody. Now in the years that I’ve been teaching I outs I’ve come across a number of students who have taken some rather misguided approaches into their exam. They told me that they heard about these pieces of advice on the Internet or from a fellow student or from a teacher who was a little bit inexperienced. So what this lecture is going to do is highlight some of the most common of these misconceptions. Three of the most harmful myths that can damage your task to essay school. So Myth Number one is that you master all right at least three hundred words if you want to score bad. Seven to nine. Time is your most crucial resource in the eilts writing test. If you waste your time you will not get the score that you need. Writing more than three hundred words is a waste of time. You don’t need to write that many words to score a bad seven bad date or even a bad nine. You can score a band 9 with just 250 words. As long as the quality of the development of your ideas is good then you can score a band 9 250 word minimum. You’re meeting the task requirements. Once you reach two hundred and fifty words quality is much more important than quantity. So save that time at the end for checking your work. Two hundred and fifty to two hundred and eighty words is a good number. Check your work once you finished your essay and that will allow you time to check for grammar errors thus boosting your grammar score. Check for vocabulary areas that’s boosting your lexical resource score much much better idea than just trying to fill up a page with writing. Number two then always include your opinion. This depends on the question type. Although you are often required to give your opinion in task too there are some essays in which you should not give your opinion. Look at this one here. These days more and more people are going to other countries for significant periods of time either to find a job or to study. There are clearly many benefits to doing this but people who live abroad can also face some difficulties. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of living and working in a foreign country. In the question above. Where are you asked to give your opinion in any way. That’s right. Nowhere. Therefore we do not include an opinion. If you do want to include an opinion only put it in the conclusion or you will lose marks for task response. And again you will lose time which could be spent on correcting errors and developing your ideas. The above question is a discussion question and discussion questions do not need opinions. Last myth. The introduction is the most important paragraph. But is it. First impressions are crucial. Of course if you give a strong start you’ll have an impressive examiner and that will make an impression on the rest of the essay. But the introduction is not the most important paragraph. And you must not waste time trying to create the perfect introduction. As we mentioned in a previous lecture looking at timing 5 minutes maximum the introduction should not be any more than that because the pad body paragraphs are far more important. So later on in this course in lection 10 we will learn how to write incredibly fast introductions and actually that follows this lecture here is lection 9 in Lexington will learn how to write very very quick introductions which does not mean sloppy or inaccurate or untidy. They will be good introductions as well. Now we learn how to write introductions very quickly and very accurately because the body of the essay or the place where you develop your ideas is far more important. The majority of your marks are going to come from the body of your essay. That’s why we need to spend ten minutes on each body paragraph to make 20 minutes all together. That’s four times as long as you spend on your introduction. So those are the three myths to remember and to avoid. Number one you need to write three hundred words you do not. You only need to write 250. Number two you need to always include your opinion. You do not. You would not include your opinion in a discussion essay. And number three the introduction is the most important paragraph. Now it is in the body of the essay is the most important area. So thinking about those introductions. That’s what we’re going to look at in the next lecture. So I’ll see you there.