There are always a very few steps beyond your basic understanding to improve your task one writing. Do not mistake me when I say beyond the understanding. What I actually mean here is that we have a lot of content online helping us to improve our IELTS score, improving in such a way that it looks pretty easy to make even a 9 band score. Well, I too want insist here on the fact that, though it is not that easy, it is possible to come out with 9 band score in IELTS writing. When practicing writing, we are usually concerned about a few points such as including connective devices or the so called Linking words and making comparisons. But we, on purpose or not, ignore the direction given in the question that make comparisons WHERE RELEVANT. this relevant in fact means that make comparisons only where it is appropriate and applicable.
Now I would like to take you through a sample answer written by an examiner, published in Cambridge IELTS book.
“The pie chart shows that there are four main causes of farmland becoming degraded in the world today. Globally 65% of degradation is caused by too much animal grazing and tree clearance constituting 35% and 30% respectively. A further 28% of global degradation is due to over-cultivation of crops. Other causes account for only 7% respectively.
These causes affected different regions differently in the 1990s, with Europe having as much as 9.8% of the degradation due to deforestation, while the impact of this on Oceania and North America was minimal, with only 1.7% and 0.2 of land affected respectively. Europe, with the highest overall percentage of land degraded (23%), also suffered from over-cultivation (7.7%) and over-grazing (5.5%). In contrast, Oceania had 13% of degraded farm land and this was mainly due to over-grazing (11.3%). North America had a lower proportion of degraded land at only 5%, and the main causes of this were over-cultivation (3.3%) and, to a lesser extent, over-grazing (1.5%).
Overall, it is clear that Europe suffered more from farm land degradation than the other regions and the main causes there were deforestation and over-cultivation.”
Have you noticed anything from this piece of writing. Why do you think this is written by an IELTS examiners as an example of a very good task 1, though it is not the only one approach. It is because it meets the assessment criteria and the paragraphs are written in accordance with the instructions given in the questions. It is evident that IELTS writing assessment criteria are meant for fulfilling the purpose of writing, and the purpose of any form of writing is to communicate. The relevant use of comparisons and connective devices in the task 1 is to communicate the information given in the pictorial representation given as questions.
Therefore it is always important to understand the criteria of task 1 writing. They are Task achievement, Cohesion and Coherence, Lexical Resources and Grammatical Range and accuracy. Understanding the requirements and learning to incorporate them in our writing is the key to achieving a great score in writing. This would be simple and possible task well within our capacity to achieve, if we set out to do it with right mentoring and we have a plan for step by step improvement of your writing level.
Analyzing this answer, we understand that it is not exactly in tune with many of the 9 band score answers we see online in its pattern of presentation. It is rather task oriented very much in harmony with the content of the information given in the picture. I would say it communicates well. Apart from that, there are comparisons very coherently expressing the information to the reader. If you need to understand what do I mean in this statement It is important to know what actually the comparisons mentioned at this level of linguistic circles. However, what we are trying to achieve here is to Let the reader know what is the information given in the picture without looking at the picture, but only from my writing.