In this podcast, our essay corrector Ellen puts YOU in the driver’s seat as you review a student’s essay with her, deciding what band score the essay should get. With the band descriptors as your guide, you will learn

* How the introduction makes a first impression on the examiner

* How mistakes and missteps can influence the examiner along the way

* How some strong arguments, precise vocabulary and accurate grammar can redeem your score

* How important the last impression your essay leaves is

In the end, you will see how challenging the task of the examiner is and all the elements they take into consideration. This knowledge will help you to construct stronger essays.

You can download or listen to the audio version here:

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YOU CAN READ THE FULL TRANSCRIPT HERE:

Student: I had Ellen. She was reading my essays. She was highlighting like the weakest points like the errors and in terms of structure and she’s very energetic. She pushes the students and in the end, I was like oh, yes. I want to do it. I want to keep doing it; keep writing.

INTRODUCTION

Ben: Hello there, IELTS students. Welcome to IELTS podcast. You no longer have to worry, fret or panic about IELTS because we are here to guide you through this test jungle. Enjoy these IELTS tutorials and if you need more help or want to access the famous online course, you can visit us at ieltspodcast.com.

Ellen: Hi, everybody. This is Ellen and I’m back today with another podcast talking about Writing Task 2. In a couple of my recent podcasts, I’ve dealt with Task 2 and what I’ve been doing is I’ve been looking at different types of essays.

One was a sample essay that would certainly get at least an 8 if not an 8.5 or a 9. So, we looked at that. We analyzed that and what made it such an essay of a high band score. I also recently talked about a 6.5 essay and what kinds of decisions an examiner has to make and what might lead an examiner to choose to give that kind of a score for an essay.

The reason that I’m bringing that up is because the podcast today is going to deal with some of those issues that I talked about in both of those podcasts, but this time I kind of want you the audience to play the role of the examiner. I would like to hear what you would give this essay.

So, just to give you a little background about this student, this is an old student of mine who was again stuck at a 6.5. He took the test at least five or six times. I don’t even know. Sometimes he would take the test and not even tell me that he had registered for it and his scores really varied. Sometimes he got a 6.5, sometimes he got a 6. So, it wasn’t really consistent. I think he even got a 7 once, but then one of his other scores wasn’t a 7. Anyway, that’s not really the point.

The point is though that this is the person who is almost there, but isn’t consistently there, okay? So, I want today for us to look at an essay of this student and see what would we give hi...