Task 2 counts twice as much as Task 1. So the most consequential decision you make is not a good phrase — it is stopping Task 1 at the twenty-minute mark.
Before any task type, the number that decides your tactics:
Task 2 counts twice as much as Task 1, and is given twice the time — forty minutes against twenty.
Which means spending thirty minutes making Task 1 beautiful is a self-inflicted wound: the ten minutes you took came out of the half that is worth double. Twenty minutes and stop, even when you are not satisfied.
The Academic paper asks for at least 150 words describing a visual. There are seven kinds:
1. Line graph — change over time. 2. Bar chart — comparison between groups. 3. Pie chart — proportions of a whole. 4. Table — several variables at once. 5. Process diagram — sequential stages. 6. Map — one place at two points in time. 7. Combination — two visuals in one question.
They look different and are marked identically, and the job is always the same: select the significant features and report them. The question does not want your opinion, and giving one loses marks rather than earning them.
What is the largest and the smallest? What changed the most, or stayed unusually flat? Which groups can be compared against each other?
Any figure that does not fall under those three does not need mentioning. Listing every number is the commonest error and it pulls the score down rather than up.
This is the clearest thing in the whole descriptor set: band 6 Task Achievement requires that a relevant overview is attempted. Without an overview you cannot reach band 6 on that criterion, however well the rest is written.
An overview is not a conclusion and carries no figures. It is one or two sentences stating the shape of the whole: what rose, what fell, what dominates.
Line and bar: trend language and comparison language. Learn it in chunks — rose sharply, levelled off, remained stable — not as isolated words.
Pie: proportion language, and remember the total is always 100%. Compare slice against slice rather than describing each in turn.
Table: the most dangerous type, because there are too many numbers. It demands far harsher filtering.
Process: the grammar changes entirely — passives and sequencing connectives, and almost no figures. The mixture is then heated, Once this has cooled…
Map: past and present perfect tenses plus directional vocabulary. The spine is what disappeared, what appeared, what was replaced.
An essay of at least 250 words in forty minutes. Five types:
1. Opinion — To what extent do you agree or disagree? You need one clear position, held throughout.
2. Discussion — Discuss both views and give your opinion. Three jobs, not two: view one, view two, and your own opinion. Missing that third part is the commonest mark-losing error in the whole paper.
3. Advantages and disadvantages — and if the prompt adds do the advantages outweigh…, you are obliged to weigh them, not merely list them.
4. Cause and solution — the solutions must answer the causes you yourself named. This is where essays come apart into two unrelated halves.
5. Two-part question — one statement followed by two different questions. Each question needs its own body paragraph.
Underline each part of the task and count the jobs. On topic is not the same as answering the whole prompt. However well written, an essay missing a part is capped on Task Response.
Task Response — did you answer every part, and is your position clear and consistent.
Coherence and Cohesion — the most misunderstood of the four. Sprinkling Moreover, Furthermore, In addition across sentence openings is surface cohesion, and overusing them is explicitly penalised as mechanical. Real cohesion lives in the thread of ideas — each sentence growing from the last — and in reference: this trend, such policies, the former. The test: delete every linking word and see whether the ideas still hold together.
Lexical Resource — this is natural collocation, not rare words. Swapping start for commence in an essay about education earns nothing and may read as unnatural. But raise awareness, pose a threat, meet the demand do. Learn words in chunks from the beginning.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy — marked on both range and accuracy, so one correct complex sentence is worth more than three broken ones. Pick two or three structures you already own and use them fluently; expand your range during practice, not in the exam room.
You cannot fix errors you cannot detect. No trick removes that, and it is the real limit of practising Writing alone.
Three things reduce it, all free: back-translation — write today, reread tomorrow and translate from what is actually on the page; wherever it drifts from your intention, there is an error. Read it aloud — many word-order faults are audible even when invisible. And constrain yourself to structures you already own.
An honest note: the field is genuinely divided on whether grammar correction in second-language writing works — Truscott (1996) argued it does not; Ferris (1999) answered him. The dispute is not settled.
Writing is where the two formats feel most different to sit through, even though the tasks, the timing and the marking criteria are identical.
The gain is real. Editing on a keyboard is not the same activity as editing with a pen. On paper, restructuring a paragraph means crossing out and squeezing words into the margin, and most candidates simply do not do it — they leave a weak sentence standing because fixing it would make the page unreadable. On screen you can move a clause, split a sentence, or replace an opening line in seconds, and the script stays clean. Coherence and Cohesion is a quarter of your mark; the computer format makes it genuinely easier to earn.
There is also a running word count on screen. That removes a small but constant tax: on paper you have to estimate, and candidates either count words during the exam — minutes spent on nothing — or write far past the minimum out of anxiety. On computer you glance at a number.
Now the part that catches people out. There is no spellcheck, no autocorrect and no red underline. It is a plain text box, not a word processor. Anyone who has learned to write English on a phone or in a browser has been quietly outsourcing spelling and typo-catching for years, and in this box that support disappears. Lexical Resource is another quarter of your mark, and spelling sits inside it.
Which gives you a precise way to practise: write your timed essays in a plain editor with every correction feature switched off, and proofread them yourself before running any checker. What the checker then finds is your real error list — and it is usually shorter and more repetitive than people expect, which is exactly what makes it fixable.
Two more practical points. Typing speed matters: forty minutes for 250 words is comfortable at any reasonable speed, but slow hunt-and-peck typing turns Task 2 into a race. And leave the last five minutes for reading, as on paper — the errors that cost bands are agreement, articles and tense, and those are found by rereading, not by any tool the screen provides.
One timed Task 2, exactly forty minutes — handwritten if you sit the paper test, typed in a plain editor with every correction feature switched off if you sit it on computer.
One timed Task 1, exactly twenty minutes — mostly to practise stopping.
Two planning sessions, five prompts each, outlines only and no full essays. This is the cheapest and most effective drill for Task Response, because a missing part shows up in the outline immediately.
One collocation session by topic — education, environment, technology, health. Kellogg (2008) showed argumentative writing skill develops slowly and over a long span, so this is accumulation rather than something to cram in a fortnight.
The same article, told in plain words — for younger readers, or for anyone who wants the point quickly.
Two tasks, sixty minutes. Here is what each type actually demands, and where the marks go.
Coherence. The most misunderstood of the four criteria. Sprinkling Moreover, Furthermore, In addition across sentence openings is surface cohesion, and overusing them is explicitly penalised as mechanical.
Real cohesion lives in the thread of ideas — each sentence growing from the last — and in reference: this trend, such policies, the former. The test: delete every linking word and see whether the ideas still hold together.
Vocabulary. This is natural collocation, not rare words. Swapping start for commence earns nothing and may read as unnatural. But raise awareness, pose a threat, meet the demand do.
Grammar. Marked on both range and accuracy — so one correct complex sentence is worth more than three broken ones. Pick two or three structures you already own and use them fluently. Expand your range in practice, not in the exam room.
You cannot fix errors you cannot detect. No trick removes that, and it is the real limit of practising Writing by yourself.
Three things reduce it, all free:
An honest note: researchers are genuinely divided on whether correcting grammar in second-language writing works at all. The dispute is not settled.
Editing on a keyboard is not the same activity as editing with a pen, and that is a real gain. But there is no spellcheck, and typing speed matters — forty minutes for 250 words is comfortable at a reasonable speed, and a race if you hunt and peck.
Leave the last five minutes for rereading either way. The errors that cost bands are agreement, articles and tense, and those are found by rereading — not by anything the screen provides.
These articles summarize well-established research in learning science and linguistics. Key sources and further reading:
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