Vary your vocabulary and sentence structures to get a higher band score

Use familiar sentence patterns

Your essays and reports should reflect your natural sentence structure. You don’t have to use complex grammatical structures to get higher marks. If you write longer sentences with several subordinate clauses, you are more likely to make lots of mistakes. In order to get band 7 or higher in the writing module, you should be able to write a large number of grammatically correct sentences.

Students often overuse adverb and adjective clauses. They assume that if they write extremely long sentences, the examiner will be impressed. Well, the examiner will be impressed if you manage to write long sentences with no errors in them. Unfortunately, this is not something most IELTS students manage to accomplish.

Writing extremely long sentences is both difficult and risky. Also, long sentences are confusing for the reader. None of your sentences should have more than 20 words in them. Long sentences may also contain several ideas and the reader may find it difficult to identify and remember your main points.

The IELTS test is not the appropriate place to use tricky and unfamiliar sentence patterns. Instead, use structures you have used in the past and keep your sentences short.

Note that your sentences are easier to follow when they have fewer than three clauses.

Avoid repetition

Don’t repeat the same words and structures several times. Repetition does not make your writing grammatically incorrect, but it is a sign of limited knowledge of the language.

Therefore to get a good band score, you should vary your sentence structures and vocabulary.