DAY ONE: BACKGROUND SENTENCES

Welcome to the course

Welcome to the course. It's great to have you. Over the next week, providing you do the work, you are going to make dramatic progress in your IELTS structure and overall writing score. 

Structure is important because of how IELTS writing is graded. The IELTS writing exam is graded in four sections. These are:

• Task response: How well you answer the question. 
• Coherence and Cohesion: How well you organise your answer. 
• Grammatical range and accuracy: How well you use complex grammar in your answer. 
• Lexical resource: How well you use words to describe specifically what you mean. 

Of these, task response and coherence and cohesion are heavily influenced by structure. As a result, improving your structure is usually the fastest way to improve your grade. In addition, structure is a much smaller topic than English grammar. You can learn what you need to know in a relatively short period of time.

How the course works

This course works by breaking down structure into small skills. At the end of the week, we'll look at how those all fit together to make a whole essay. As a result, you might feel a bit confused along the way. It's important to keep going with this process as you need to put these skills into practice to learn them fully. The course schedule will be: 

Background Sentences

What is a background sentence? The background sentence is the first sentence of your essay. It has one job: to introduce the topic. Starting an essay without giving some background would sound very abrupt so it is important to include some. How to write a background sentence To write this sentence, we can use information from the question. Some people call this paraphrasing. This means taking the information from the question and changing how it's written. However, you need to be careful because there is a good and a bad type of paraphrasing. Bad paraphrasing The bad way of paraphrasing involves changing individual words in the question. This is bad because it is usually very obvious what you have done and because it ends up with quite strange-sounding sentences. For example, how does it sound if I paraphrase this:

A reliance on cars to get around causes issues in many cities. What are some of these problems and what are some solutions? 

To this:

A dependence on automobiles to travel around causes problems in many metropolises. 

By changing individual words, we have created quite a weird sounding sentence! Luckily, there is a better way. Good paraphrasing Instead of trying to change individual words, what we are going to do is keep the main idea of the sentence while writing it in our own words. There is a simple two-step process for this:

1. Read the background information in the question and gain a deep understanding of what it means.
2. Without looking at the question, write your own version of the background information.

During step two, you might even find it helpful to cover up the question with a piece of paper or your hand. Using this process, your sentences will be much more natural sounding. They'll sound like something written by a human being because they are!

Exercise

As we go through this course, I want you to write an essay as we go. This will help you practice the skills we've learned and will be a good reminder of what you have learned. The essay question for this is:

Celebrities can often be found sharing their views on political issues that have nothing to do with their profession.
Is this a positive or a negative development?

For today, you need to write the outline. Just to remind you, this means you need to rewrite the information in the question by understanding the main ideas and then writing it in your own words.

Feel free to post your sentence as a comment below. 😊