Secrets to Success - Tips and Techniques

Welcome back everybody. Now that we’ve looked at a complete model essay and seen how it works the whole way through we can now think about wrapping things up in this section and in this lecture we’re going to think about some general secrets to success. Some of the things that will help boost your score more quickly than perhaps any other tips. And some of the secrets which many other candidates are not using or not using correctly. So there are four tips for secrets which I want to focus on in this lecture. And the first of those is finish the essay. It sounds obvious. To finish the essay but it’s actually something that a lot of students a lot of candidates will not do in their essay. It’s actually one of the worst things that you can do for your score. So if Thirty five minutes have passed and you still haven’t reached the conclusion yet finish the sentence that you’re on doesn’t matter where you are. In the essay finish the sentence that you’re on and move to the conclusion. So although the essay might not be complete if you do this it will at least be completed so you will have finished the essay and therefore you will be addressing the task requirements with much more accuracy. Even if your body paragraph is not the strongest because of this. If you go through the lecture on quick conclusions you’ll find out how to leave the examiner with a strong impression and finish the essay in style regardless so finish the essay and finish in style. The second secret is to underline things. Now why is this so important. While underlining can help you to both save time and respond with accuracy in the essay you should underline key words in the task. So this will help you to stay focussed on the tosch Requirements. You should underline repeated words so if you have time at the end you can come back and paraphrase without wasting time in the essay. You should underline uncertain grammar. So again you can return to it later. And likewise with uncertain spelling make sure you underline lightly in pencil so that it doesn’t make too much of an impact. And then you can easily return if you have time at the end. This way you don’t waste time which again enables you to complete the essay in time. Even if you don’t have time to go back and check. The third thing is to think about conditional sentences. I like to think of conditional sentences as are some of the most useful sentence types that you can use in your essay. Now we looked at these in section 6 so if you want a quick refresher on conditionals and why they’re so effective and how to use them please go back to the lecture on conditional and Section 6. But when used accurately these grammatical structures are like superpowers for your essay Why is that. Well they expand your range of complex grammatical constructions. They extend the development of your ideas appropriately. They improve the coherence and cohesion of your ideas and they give you an easy way to support and strengthen your ideas without having to do much original thoughts. Now the reasons for this are all made clear in the lecture on conditionals. But as you can see with conditionals were able to boost our score in a number of the bad descriptor categories is super effective grammatical construction here. Finally the last secret plan effectively there are some people out there who choose not to plan at all. There are some people out there who choose to plan but they plan poorly. And this can actually have an even more detrimental impact on their score than if they didn’t plan at all. So the key here is to write a good plan. It’s imperative because not only will it organize your thoughts coherently but it will also help to save you time. Make sure you check out the lecturer in Section 2 on planning and then also the lecture in section 3 on building body paragraphs. When you combine these together and you’ve digested these lectures sufficiently gone over them again and again make sure you practice this planning method. You should get to the point where you can consistently write plans like these in five minutes or less. Will ever end up saving you time in the essay and also create great sense of cohesion of focus within your essay content. So those are my four top secrets for how to boost your score in Isle’s writing task 2.