words for IELTS writing hello there my name's Ben Worthington in this tutorial
we're going to look at words you can include to improve your IELTS essays and
then we're going to look at formulas for improving the words in your IELTS essays
and the reason why I want to look at the formulas is
because if you know the formula then you can quickly improve any essay but if
you've only got three four five words then okay you've got those extra words
but you have to wait for the ideal opportunity to insert them into your
essay and sometimes the ideal opportunity does not always arise which
can cause you to force the word into the essay which makes it sound unnatural and
that's definitely what we do not want to do so first in this tutorial we're going
to look at three good words that we can use and I will explain why they are
useful valuable words and then I'll give you two strategies that you can use to
improve any essay to improve the words in any essay that you write let's get
started so the first word is ascertain now the reason why I chose ascertain was
because it's not very common in everyday spoken English or even that common in
written English so if you show the examiner that you can use these fancy
words or words that are less common you're going to help impress her or him
so let's see what does ascertain mean well it means to determine okay so we
could say it is increasingly difficult to ascertain the reasons for more
regulations in the workplace okay more often than not more red tape makes it
increasingly difficult for employers to employ so ascertain here we could
just interchange it with determine but ascertain like I said is slightly less
common shows the examiner you've got a wide lexical resource or helps to
persuade the examiner that you've got a wide lexical extensive lexical resource
next one beget now if you've had beget before that's fantastic if you
haven't it basically means to cause to bring about so in this instance we could
say government regulations often beget more bureaucracy red tape and
inefficiencies and once again what we're doing is we're changing something that's
quite common or widespread often cause bureaucracy and we're upgrading it for
something that's less frequent that's used less often and once again we're
showing the examiner we've got a more extensive lexical resource than our
students than our colleagues who are also competing with us
okay next one tantamount what does tantamount mean well it basically
means virtually the same as okay and another reason actually I've just
remembered another reason why we should consider improving our
vocabularies not because we're going to show the examiner that we know how to
use less common words it's just that these less common words often can only be used
in certain circumstances and often have specific grammar rules in this case
it's tantamount to so we're not only going to improve our lexical resource but
we want to slightly improve a grammatical range and accuracy
okay so I'll give you an example to place a modern McDonalds-style
restaurant in one of these areas would be tantamount to architectural
architectural vandalism or would be almost the same as
architectural vandalism and I don't need to explain which sounds better in that
instance hopefully it's clear now let's move on to some of the formulas that you
can use to improve your academic English and I want to be specific here we're
looking at improving academic English because if we do this with messaging
our friends we'll look a bit weird or like a little bit odd so first one
topic-specific vocabulary this is probably one of my favorites because I
think it's the easiest and the quickest to improve your score and I mean
I won't go into how we get topic-specific vocabulary but if you can
see here I've marked it in green and it basically means these are the words that
you would only find when we're talking about a specific topic topicspecificso
you can see we've got performers promoters for the questions about sports
events spending money that's roughly the idea okay so performers promoters
entertainment spectacle not only was that an example of topic-specific
vocabulary it's also a collocation collocations help your language sound
more natural and it's less likely to make a mistake using a collocation
because they come together so you can't really mess it up so we've got to
entertainment spectacle performers promoters and also you'll see as well
that there are lots of other words underlined in this paragraph
beget aspire to cultural wealth monetary considerable wealth can you see
this is sort of like slightly more advanced
vocabulary that you're not going to find on the street or talking especially in
the spoken English most likely not in spoken English but this is
what we're aiming for if you want to get a band 7 or above a good control
solid control of vocabulary that shows like a higher ability and
topic-specific vocabulary uses slightly less frequent common words
that's the way to go so that's one example the next example is once you've
finished finished writing your essay what you do is you go through it okay
and you look for opportunities to improve it hopefully you'll be looking
for opportunities to correct it as well but at the same time why not look for
opportunities to improve that vocabulary so a good place to start is to look for
words like good bad nice verbs like to be to have to get and we can upgrade
them okay we can upgrade and we can show the examiner that we know how to use
words slightly less common and more specialized and more specific I'll give
you an example so in the paragraph before we said entertainment
spending is definitely a good development if we say entertainment
spending is a positive development or is definitely a positive development
then we're using vocabulary that's less common and positive and good in this
instance are interchangeable okay and then I've gone on to improve the rest of
the paragraph slightly changing the meaning in some cases but either way
it's definitely better so when they have access to these events okay I changed
that from upon purchasing access for such events
it sounds more academic it sounds more advanced
when they have access is very basic okay and then once again in the basic
paragraph I've said they have the opportunity to spend some nice time with
their family and friends brah how basic does that sound fair enough it's easy
to write it's simple and it's clear but it's basic it's terribly basic
it's almost criminal so the upgraded version would be I will just start
with the second part they gained the opportunity to spend quality time
quality time another collocation I've substituted
gained for have and I've also elaborated the sentence and make memorable
experiences with their friends and family and it means you know when
you're spending a nice time probably you're going to be making memorable
experiences but here I was a little bit more specific and I just
wanted to emphasize that so those are the ways that you can improve your
writing okay you can improve your writing by improving the words and if we
look at the last two sort of like tips I gave you these are
formulas and adopting formulas is much more powerful than just learning the
specific words so if you can adopt these formulas and go through your paragraph
look for opportunities to change the vocabulary from generic and normal and
standard to topic-specific and at the same time look for opportunities to
upgrade your language okay my name is Ben Worthington
I hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you want more help or if you're in a hurry
and you really just want to get IELTS out of the way then have a look at the
online course we're getting lots of success at the moment
they're like how I explained before you get some feedback it's a very fast way to
improve and yeah basically makes IELTS a lot easier so have a look at that
it's at ieltspodcast.com my name is Ben Worthington and have a great day and
good luck with your IELTS preparation