Improve your IELTS Writing Skills: Study Skills [Paperback]

After teaching IELTS for six years I can say with confidence that this is by far the most useful book I have come across. Taking a task based approach, each aspect of the writing exam is broken down into small achievable chunks. These then build into full task one and two practice papers, which students are able to write, based on the previous exercises.

What I like most is the use of very authentic English both here and in the listening / speaking book. This allows students to develop collocation knowledge, which is essential for IELTS 7.

The IELTS exam is often very overwhelming for even high-level students but this series presents it clearly and practically. Compared to most other IELTS books, this series is cheap and represents superb value for money. Can be used by students for self-study or with a tutor (answers and model essays provided).

The strong point about the book is lots of exercises it contains: phrases for starting your sentences with and for linking your ideas. Lots of useful vocabulary and drills on grammar structure. It's like a workbook.

Nevertheless, as the front cover says "Improve your IELTS", and the back cover says "complete preparation course" I hoped to find something more. First, as the writing part of IELTS exam is to be written in handwriting, I expected to find advice on writing by hand: an advice on whether to write with a pen or a pencil. Then, how to improve my handwriting to be readable. It is well known that illegible handwriting can affect your score. And it is also a fact that the learners of English of different ages and around the world have very different ideas of a good handwriting. Some of the exercises are printed in "Bradley Hand" font type - is this meant to be an example of neat handwriting? It would be great if the book gave some examples of really bad handwriting and even more samples of acceptable handwriting styles.

Another thing that could be improved in future editions is giving good examples, good models to learn from. The book gives 20 samples, from which 13 samples ... are weak (they are given not so high score of 5 or 6). There are five samples with score 7 and only two samples with score 8. There is no perfect sample with score 9! Ambitious students who do IELTS for entering the best universities often need at least band 7 in each part, so samples with band 5 and 6 are useless for them. Those who would like to be IELTS teachers and examiners need to get score 9. How can one get an idea of an ideal to strive for, if no perfect model is given? I would learn much more if I could study and analyse perfect model answers. Good ratio would be 10 samples scored 9, and another 10 samples with lower scores. Furthermore, it would be useful if the structures or words that are inaccurate were highlighted in the lower scored samples.

I believe that the book can be useful as an additional resource for students in classroom. But for self-study and as a stand alone resource it needs improving.

I bought this book last week and immediately started using it. I personally think it's a very good practice material, even if have very strong bases in the language - it gradually reinforces your sense of structure and increase your vocabulary accuracy at the same time, and that's probably the skills they will evaluate in the IELTS. However, when I got to the samples for the practice tests, I was a bit disappointed - if you're aiming for the best grades, you will only find 2 band 8 texts, among a lot of band 6 results.

On the whole, I would still strongly recommend it - but if you're seeking good samples, buy something else, honestly.