IELTS Writing, by Lin Lougheed

There are many serviceable books that one can read in order to help one’s writing when it comes to the IELTS exam. In my efforts at tutoring in English, I have read a great many books that seek to help a candidate out on the exam. Like many such books, this book seeks to combine elements of theory as well as practice, and while the theory is the most useful (at least to me as a reader), the vast majority of the book consists of practice exercises. If you are a candidate for the IELTS who feels that they need more sample writing tasks to work on, by all means, this book will do well, but the amount of information that is novel here or is useful for planning is admittedly somewhat limited, and those readers who already have a lot of practice in mind for their IELTS will find that a lot of this book’s contents mirrors what can be found elsewhere. Whether or not this book is of use to you will depend in large part on how many other IELTS books on writing you are familiar with and whether you think a bit of useful theory is enough to read a lot of redundant practice questions and exercises.

This book is about 300 pages long, most of which is consists of exercises and sample answers. The book begins with an introduction that discusses the IELTS and how to use the book. The first part of the book looks at task achievement and task response. Within this section, the author begins with academic writing task one for charts, graphs, and tables, showing the plan, write, revise structure. This is followed by the same structure for process diagrams for the academic writing task one. This is followed by the same structure for the first task in the general writing test, namely writing a letter. After that the author includes the same three steps in order to structure the second task for academic/general writing for task two, the personal opinion essay. This takes almost half of the book’s total pages. This is followed by material that seeks to instruct the reader on matters like coherence and cohesion, by discussing paragraphing, pronouns, and transition words and phrases. The third part of the book discusses the lexical resource of word families, synonyms, and spelling tips. The fourth section discusses grammatical range and accuracy through discussing articles, subject-verb agreement, real future conditionals, unreal conditionals, adjective clauses with subject and object relative pronouns, active and passive voice, parallel structure, sentence types, and punctuation. The author then includes an appendix with more writing practice on the three tasks of the writing section: academic writing task one, general training writing task one, and then academic/general training writing task two. The book concludes with about 50 pages or so of answers to the questions of the book.

As a reader of this book, I found the theory of this book to be the most useful, so I will give what I thought were the most useful tips to the reader of this review. The author of this book has a useful checklist for revision which urges the writer to address the task with a thesis statement and main ideas, work on coherence with the main idea in each paragraph and supporting details, ensure cohesion with introduction and conclusion material as well as transition words, demonstrate lexical resource with a variety of vocabulary as well as spelling, and show grammatical range and accuracy with sentence variety and accuracy in grammar. This is supplemented by the author’s wise advice for task one to take 5 minutes to plan, 12 minutes to write, and 3 minutes to revise, and for task two to take 10 minutes to plan, 25 minutes to write, and 5 minutes to revise. This is solid advice and gives some weight to the author’s three-step approach to writing that includes enough time to do all of these tasks effectively. If a reader of this book takes those tips, it will be a worthwhile read for them, along with some pretty standard writing exercises.