IELTS Essays From Examiners 3.0, by various authors

This book marks an interesting development with regards to writings about the IELTS. As I have mentioned before, authors can choose whether to focus on giving tips and theory about the IELTS exam or seek to provide opportunities for the candidate to practice writing essays as a means of providing education. What this book does is an interesting and somewhat anonymous phenomenon, and that is providing a compendium of more than 100 exemplars of IELTS Task 2 essays from a wide variety of sources. One thing that ought to strike the reader of this book is that there is a great deal of sameness in what is included, not only in that there is a strikingly limited range of questions that are asked for the IELTS task 2 itself, but also that the writing samples themselves are not particularly varied in their structure and approach. While this sameness is evident when one reads books that talk about the position essay mixed with other material, it is even more evident when one reads the more than 100 essays that are included in this collection, many of which read like copy/paste jobs with changes to account for the specific question and the specific development which is nonetheless covered in the same way over and over again.

As a compendium, the structure of this book is pretty rudimentary. The book begins with a table of contents that lists the topic of the essays included organized based on the source of the essay lightly formatted (and not always correctly). The book begins with essays taken from “Simon” (some 44 essays), then “howtodoIELTS.com” (some 28 essays), then “Cambridge” (with 13), Pauline Cullen (with 11 essays), and then finally Macmillan with 15 essays. Some of these essays are listed as being an example of a very good essay, and some are labeled as being in band 9, and those essays which have their word count listed show between 250 and 300 words for the essay in question, which is certainly a reasonable goal for a candidate. Most of the essays, though not all, can fit on a single typed page with spaces between each body paragraph, and some of the essays show some improper formatting where there are additional random spaces within paragraphs by error. At the very end of the book there is an index that shows the topics of the various essays that the book includes which indicates the very small range that the essays included deal with. Some of the essays explore both agreement and disagreement with the same question to give at least some range to the responses.

Among the most notable aspect of this book as a prolific writer of essays myself is just how little range there is in how these essays are written and organized. The vast majority of the essays in this book begin with a short introduction of a couple of sentences that rephrases the question in some fashion and then provides the author’s own position. This is followed in most essays by two well-developed body paragraphs and then a conclusion of a single sentence that restates the author’s thesis in a straightforward way. Only rarely are other formats chosen to vary the picture of sameness for the reader, where instead of two long and well-developed body paragraphs the author explores three different and shorter body paragraphs that are connected by transition words and phrases that show parallel development, with the same kind of introduction and conclusion. Frequently the authors will present both sides, the side they reject in the first body paragraph and the side they accept in the second one, or they will adopt a problem/solution structure or argue both sides of a debate as being equally important, as when the author of one essay argues that architects need not sacrifice either form or function in the design of buildings. A reader of this book, if they are able to master the structure of the essays shown as well as the level of vocabulary and accurate grammar that they contain, is likely to be convinced that not only passing, but achieving a 9 score, is within their reach.