Safeguard your writing score – don”t squander marks
As an IELTS examiner and trainer I have marked thousands of Writing Tests; both in the real test environment and in New Oriental School courses. When students receive their results they often ask me how they can improve their writing score, or how they should modify their answer to achieve a higher score. What many students fail to realise is that improving a writing score is not simply a matter of writing a better answer; one common reason for a low writing score is that the answer was penalised for failing to meet certain important criteria within the marking system. An examiner will penalise an answer for a number of problems which, for the sake of this article I shall describe as Writing Crimes. Once you have identified these crimes and eradicated them from your answer, a
