Hey! One element of your score for grammatical range and accuracy will be good use of punctuation. This includes accurate use of capital letters. You may think that this will be easy, but time and time again, I have seen students make the same mistake with capital letters in IELTS Writing Task 1!

Watch this express lesson to find out what the error is and how you can avoid it!

How is your score for Writing Task 1 calculated?

Your writing score for Task 1 will be calculated using four elements:

• Task Achievement: This is how well you actually achieve the task of writing an academic report. The main consideration for this criteria is the quality of your overview (if you do not know what an overview is, then you can watch this video to find out), and how well you have considered and highlighted the main trends. Make sure you use statistics to support your statements and include at least one sentence for every item on the chart.
• Coherence and Cohesion: This is how easy your report is to understand and how well you have joined the ideas. The main consideration for this criteria will be your use of referencing, and cohesive devices. Plus, if you are aiming for the highest scores, you should also make sure that your paragraphing is logical and there is no repetition of ideas.
• Lexical Resources: This is how accurate the vocabulary you have chosen to write your report is. The good news is that there is a fixed set of vocabulary for Task 1. You are find out more about what that is in this blog post.
• Grammatical Range and Accuracy: This is how well you have managed your sentence structures in the report. The main criteria where is having a range of complex sentences that are error-free. However, punctuation is also a factor, which is why is is important to use capital letters in Writing Task 1 accurately!