A very important skill for IELTS candidates is the ability to learn from their mistakes. Mistakes are inevitable, everyone makes mistakes, if you look carefully through this website you will find a few mistakes. Making a mistake is not really a problem but making the same mistakes over and over again can be a big issue. To avoid repetitively making mistakes it is necessary to learn what mistakes you make and then learn how to avoid them.
There are 3 key steps to help you learn from the most common
mistakes in IELTS Writing Task 1:
1. Identify the mistakes you make.
2. Work on solutions to the mistakes you make.
3. Use the solutions instead of the mistakes.
1. Identify the mistakes you make in your IELTS writing tasks.
It is important that you know what mistakes you make; especially you need to identify your most common errors. Not every student makes the same mistakes so find out what mistakes you make most often. It is quite common to see a student’s writing task with 20 errors
in grammar. If 10 of those errors are related to using the incorrect tense, then the student only needs to change one thing in order to reduce their mistakes by 50%.
The most common errors that I see in students writing for IELTS task 1 are:
Incorrect Tense: If the data shown is from a finished time in the past then the past simple should be used. Check dates that are shown in the diagrams.
Poor Spelling: These mistakes are usually careless. Always read your
work and check for spelling errors.
Wrong Word Order: Another careless mistake. A common example of this
would be “sharply increased” instead of “increased sharply”.
Poor Subject Verb Agreement: A very common example is “the bar chart
show” rather than “the bar chart shows”.
Vocabulary Repetition: This is usually because of a lack of vocabulary. Try
to learn synonyms and parallel phrases.
Poor Organization and Paragraphing: Make sure you know the structure
for task 1 and leave spaces between paragraphs.
Incorrect Word Choice or Form: This error may also be because of a lack of vocabulary or incorrect understanding of vocabulary. Wrong word form means using a noun when the verb form should be used. You don’t need to go and spend hours and hours working on each of those areas. Identify which 2 or 3 of the mistakes above you make most often and work on them.
Use the solutions instead of the mistakes.
Now comes the difficult part. Now that you know the most common mistakes in IELTS Writing Task 1 and you know the solutions you need to do one more thing. You must remember to use the solution instead of repeating the mistake.
This takes time. You need to practice a lot and remain aware of your most common mistakes in IELTS writing task 1. Over time you will
make fewer mistakes and it will be easier for you to identify and correct your errors.
After a few weeks or months, you should re-assess your most common
mistakes and you might find that you have some other problem areas to work on.
Unfortunately, you will always make mistakes. Your aim is not to be perfect but to make a few errors each time you do an IELTS writing task.
