how to correct your IELTS essay hello there my name is Ben Worthington and in this
tutorial we're going to look at how you can correct your own essay we're going
to look it's going to be divided into three parts we're going to look at
correcting for language skills correcting for exam skills and
correcting your own paper in the exam and I divided it up into three
components so that you can approach it effectively and I think it will let you
do this task with more clarity if you know exactly which part you want to do
and I know this because I've corrected thousands of essays with my own company
and I've taught other tutors how to correct exams as well how to correct
essays so let's jump into it like I said we're going to look at three different
parts we're going to correct for language skills we're going to correct
for exam skills and then we're going to correct our own paper in the exam which
is a very useful technique to boost your score let's jump straight into it so
obviously you're going to write your own essay now because the focus is language
skills we're not really going to be so concerned about doing this essay about
writing this essay in 40 minutes assuming we're doing the IELTS Task 2 so
take your time spend an hour an hour and a half remember the focus is the
language so this is why we want to spend an hour and a half just writing it out
and really just focusing on accuracy on the grammar we're not going to be
bothered about 40 minutes about you know task
response and these things they're going to take a secondary they're going to
take a back step a back stage the main focus will be the accuracy of our
language and our writing ability now what you want to do is you write it out
then you go back and you check it take some time you might also want to take a
break you finish writing go make a cup of tea then come back with a fresh pair
of eyes and you'd be more likely to spot the mistakes also if you leave it a day
and come back the day afterwards but when you do sit down and you do look at
it okay go through a different colored pen
of course if you can computer whatever and just you should try and identify
areas that you think are wrong obviously and one way you can do this is you can
take the exact phrase write it and then put it between inverted commas go to
Google and see if there other phrases like that
of course this technique is limited because if you've got a whole fragment
you're not going to get the most accurate feedback but at least little
fragments little clauses perhaps you're going to get feedback now my favorite
okay I'll tell you my favorite in a second
but the other way is you can get a tutor to give you feedback get a friend to
give you feedback if you're getting a friend to do it don't ask them to
explain the grammar rule as just from general personal experience yeah you usually
end up more confused can be possibly a bit embarrassing for the native speaker
just ask them to circle it and then you go through it you deconstruct it and say
okay this is an article this is a noun this pronoun whatever and then go and find
the rule online that explains why it is wrong but first you need that native
speaker or that yeah the native speaker just to identify the error in the first
place also you can find online services at my website
we've got an essay correction service 24 hours you get your essay back in 24 hours
very fast we've got extremely qualified staff extremely qualified teacher doing
this if you just want to get ahead get some feedback and move now move ahead so
my favorite when we are correcting the essay is we want to master the
construction okay we want to master the constructions of the sentence certain
constructions in certain sentence structures okay and then we want to
master thispecific one and I think mastering the actual sentence
construction is more valuable more practical than actually mastering the rule
okay let me give you an example so we've written our essay a
paragraph half way through it and we want to give an example so we say we can
memorize this structure for example if the tests were never allowed to happen
there would most likely be serious consequences such as okay next one for
example if the government were never allowed to implement such changes there
would most likely be serious consequences such as can you see I'll
put these in the comments for example if the employees were never permitted time
off there would most likely be serious consequences such as okay so this is
a conditional sentence but we're just going to memorize this specific example
and now we can interchange it in the example I gave you what I interchanged
it for if the employees were never permitted time off if the government
were never allowed to implement such changes if the tests were never allowed
to happen so we memorize this construction and now
we can just interchange the nouns or interchange the subjects and we've got
a whole new sentence that's grammatically perfect this is the
important thing it's going to be grammatically perfect now we can test
with this if you want more sentence structures like that you want more
constructions to master this is what the online course is built around we give
you sentence structures like this that you can just drop into your essay and
hey presto you've got a very coherent essay let's move on to the next part
and this is correcting your exam for correcting your writing for exam
purposes here what we're going to be looking at is not really identifying the
errors okay also we are going to be doing that that
is the part of it that the main focus here is improving the essay we're going
to upgrade the essay so here what we do is we'll go through it look
opportunities where we can change and modify it so for example we could look
at the vocabulary and look at opportunities to upgrade that vocabulary
maybe we could go for topic-specific vocabulary maybe we could use a
collocation also we're going to be looking at is there any repetition am I
using the same phrase over and over again can I change it can I reword it
yeah can I upgrade the sentence structure for example I said this
in one way could I say it in a hypothetical way yeah
or could I give the example as in the past or possibly predict future events
and what we're doing here is just looking at the body paragraph mainly and
as I said looking for opportunities now while we're doing this
we're only going to be doing this when we're at home or in the library or in
the cafe preparing we're not going to do this as much in the exam because when
we're doing this at home we're only going we can experiment we can test we
can get feedback afterwards we can send it off to a professional as they correct
and get some feedback afterwards of course in the exam we don't have this
luxury we cannot really experiment so in the exam we're going to play it safe and
we're only going to possibly upgrade these sentences if we know the
opportunity if we feel safe with the opportunity for example we've mastered
that conditional sentence that I just said before and we see a perfect
opportunity to put it in and maybe we even got feedback on that specific
sentence from the essay corrector a week ago so we know it's perfect so we're
going to put it in there now exam writing when we're actually in the exam
what we're going to do is once we've written our essay hopefully we will leave a
few minutes before the end of the exam and in those few minutes what we're
going to do is go through and look for mistakes now the way we do this there are
two different techniques one is to go backwards backwards through the essay
and just basically analyze each word I'm not so keen on this but it works for
some students the other way you can do it is just start at the beginning and
just go through slowly and this is a skill that you need to develop and it's
a skill that you're going to develop while you're at home so in the exam you
can do it quickly effectively and you can most likely boost your score so you
go through and you look for mistakes now when you're doing your stuff correcting
at home hopefully you were making an error list
and that just shows you where the mistakes you as a writer were
making the mistakes what areas so I was losing points in
prepositions so now when it comes to the exam day and also after you've finished
writing your exam your essay you go through and you look for prepositions go
through the articles okay also we're going to be looking for opportunities to improve but
in the exam I think the best way to spend your time would be to look for
errors that you can correct rather than risking it with improving so
that's what we would do on exam day in this video we looked at the three
different ways you're going to correct at home you're going to correct your
essay the first one looking at language skills that's your main focus second one
looking at exam skills and then the final one in the exam we're going to
hopefully implement both of our self correction self correcting skills that
we were developing before we put them to good use come exam day so we pass the
exam my name is Ben Worthington if you need more help in getting ahead with
your IELTS and getting it out of the way and moving up then have a look at the
IELTS course in the description and don't forget that you can do this you can pass
the IELTS exam and all the best and good luck take care