Top 5 Tips to Improve IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 Skills

Top 5 tips for improving Writing IELTS Academic Task 1 Skills

Chris Quinn
August 3, 2022
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To get a high score in Writing Task 1 IELTS responses for the Academic test you need to Learn English skills. Follow these recommended practice activities to increase and see your IELTS writing score improve, even if you only prepare for the IELTS at home. These are important IELTS Task 1 skills to master.

You can find more IELTS tips and strategies in PELA Online’s IELTS Preparation modules, but here are just a few of ways to strengthen your English ability and improve your IELTS Writing band score. Study these IELTS tips below to improve your Academic IELTS Writing score!

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Tip #1: Do daily ‘journal writing’ to write faster

Because you do not have much time to write your Task 1 response, you need to be able to write quickly. Also, because the IELTS Examiner needs to be able to read what you wrote in order to give you a good score, you need to write clearly.

One of the best ways to build these two skills is by ‘journal writing’. This is where you spend 10-20 minutes each morning or evening writing about whatever you want to write about.

Some students will create a diary, writing about their feelings and thoughts about what happened that day, their memories, or their thoughts about their future.

Other students will listen to a TED Talk, watch a documentary, or read a news article and then write their reaction to it in their journal. This is a great way to build their writing skills while also building a ‘database’ of ideas and opinions they can use in the IELTS Writing and Speaking tests.

Whatever you write about, you want to push yourself to write as quickly as you can while still being readable.

Show another person what you wrote to see if they can read it. If they are having a hard time, slow down a little so that you can write your words and letters better—just having better penmanship can raise your score!

Tip #2: Practice using dependent clauses & subordinate clauses

To get a high score in the IELTS Writing test, you need to demonstrate you know how to add subordinate clauses and dependent clauses to sentences.

Subordinate clauses and dependent clauses show you know how to create complex sentences. The IELTS Examiner will actually count how many of your sentences is not ‘complex’, and if you have too many simple sentences that can lower your IELTS Writing score.

One way to practice creating complex sentences is to study how to use pronouns like ‘which’, ‘that’, and ‘where’ to add extra information to sentences. We could also use gerunds or prepositions like ‘with’ to add dependent clauses at the end of sentences.

If you have already written an IELTS Writing Task 1 response, look at it and see if there are sentences that you can combine by making one of them a dependent clause for the other.

For example, look at the following IELTS Task 1 Graph:

If you wrote these 2 sentences:

These rates are markedly different in 2015.

A total of only 20% of respondents expressed either a ‘dissatisfied’ or ‘very dissatisfied’ opinion.

We could combine them by using the pronoun ‘where’:

These rates are markedly different in 2015, where a total of only 20% of respondents expressed either a ‘dissatisfied’ or ‘very dissatisfied’ opinion.

Or we could use the preposition ‘with’ and changing a verb into a gerund to combine them:

These rates are markedly different in 2015, with a total of only 20% of respondents expressing either a ‘dissatisfied’ or ‘very dissatisfied’ opinion.

Tip #3: Practice writing IELTS TAsk 1 ‘overview paragraphs’

In many ways, the first paragraph of your Academic Writing Task 1 response is the most important paragraph. This is because the first paragraph is where you should have both a ‘description sentence’ and an ‘overview sentence’.

The ‘description sentence’ is the first sentence of your responses where you describe what kind of information is in the chart.

Here is an example of a ‘description sentence’ for the Cairo Museum Survey graphs above:

The table and charts compare how many people went to the Cairo Museum in 2013 and 2015, along with how they rated their experience there.

The ‘overview sentence’ provides one or two very broad descriptions of what is most important to know about the information in the chart.

Here is an example of an ‘overview sentence’:

Overall, it is notable both the number of visitations jumped dramatically over this time, an increase mirrored in their positive impression of the museum.

These two sentences are very important to get a high score in IELTS Writing, so the more you practice creating them, the better and faster you can get in writing them on test day. Practice writing these two kinds of sentences for as many different charts, tables, maps, diagrams, and graphs as you can.

Tip #4: Practice describing what statistics ‘are’ or ‘are doing’

One of the most important things you can practice is using adjectives, verbs, and adverbs to describe what you see in a Task 1 chart, table, graph, map, or diagram.

For example, if you are looking a chart which shows you how the prices of shoes are changing over the years, how are they changing?

Are prices the high or low?
Do the prices rise or fall?
Are prices rising quickly or slowly?

Think of various ways of describing the same statistics and writes sentences that use different techniques to do so. For example:

Prices rose by $2 over two years.
The prices increased from $10 to $12 during a two-year period.
Prices jumped by 20% between 2012 and 2014.

All of those sentences are describing the same statistics but in different ways!

So, to build your describing and paraphrasing skills:

Find a variety of Task 1 charts. You can find some here.
Create lists of verbs, adjective, and adverbs that could be used to describe statistics and review those lists before analyzing each chart you look at.
Look at a chart and write sentences describing various parts of the chart.
Review your sentences and try to write new sentences using different words to describe the same information.

Practice, practice, practice! The more variety you can show in how you talk about statistics in Task 1 responses, the higher your Writing score can go!

Tip #5: Create a ‘perfect’ Task 1 response as template

Because we recommend writing your Academic Task 1 response after you finish writing Task 2, you are going to be very tired and stressed when you start your Task 1 response.

Therefore, it is important that you already have a clear outline of what you need to do in each paragraph and sentence of your Task 1 response. Luckily, most Academic Writing Task 1 charts follow a similar pattern of having a few things that are similar, a few things that are very different, and a few things that are unusual.

Before test day, you want to create a ‘Template Response’, with transition words and phrases for each sentence. Reuse these transition words and phrases every time you practice writing another Task 1 response. This will help you memorize a clear outline you can use on test day.

Show your Template Response to a native speaker to see if you are using transitions correctly.

In your Template Response, you should include dependent clauses starting with gerunds and prepositions. Study sample Academic Writing Task 1 responses to see how they use dependent clauses to provide statistics in the dependent clauses.

However, you need to be flexible when using your Template Response. For some Task one charts you may not be able (or need to) use some of the transition words or phrases you were planning on using. So, the more you practice using your template response and all the IELTS Task 1 skills above, the more you will find charts where your template needs to change just a little.

Summary

So, remember to build your writing skills in different ways to help you raise your IELTS Writing score. Write in a journal every day to increase your writing speed, and practice creating complex sentences with one or more dependent clauses. Practice writing the first paragraph of your Task 1 responses, so that writing them becomes automatic, and practice describing Task 1 statistics in a variety of ways. Create a template response or sentence structures that you can reuse in every Task 1 response you write. Practice using these techniques many times before IELTS test day so that they become a natural part of your writing style, and you will see your IELTS Writing score improve!

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