If sentences

If sentences are another very flexible way to add complexity to your IELTS writing. One of the most flexible ways in IELTS writing is to use them to talk about how people can achieve their goals. Here are a few example sentences:

If the government wants to reduce air pollution, they should decrease the number of cars on the road.

If students want to find a career that is satisfying for them, they should get some work experience.

These can be used essentially any time you want to say a group of people should do something. Most essays involve people doing something, so you should be able to use this in almost any essay.

Although and even though

The last piece of grammar is ‘although’ and ‘even though’. We use these two in the same way which is to show contrast between two ideas. You can think of ‘although’ and ‘even though’ as similar to ‘but’ or ‘however’. The only difference is that ‘but’ and ‘however’ go in the middle of the sentence and ‘although and ‘even though’ go at the start. The structure is:

Although or even though + first idea + comma + second idea.

For example:

Although he is rich, he never pays for dinner.

Even though I didn’t sleep much last night, I feel great today.

Remember that we only use ‘although’ and ‘even though’ to show some kind of contrast. In the first sentence, the two ideas are contrasted because someone who is rich would usually pay for dinner). In the second sentence, these are contrasted because if you didn’t sleep much last night, you probably shouldn’t feel great.

How to practise

From the last two classes, you should understand these three grammar points:

1. Appositives
2. If sentences
3. Although and even though

However, we want to go beyond just reading about these grammar points and learn how to use them in action. To do this we’re going to repeat a fairly simple sequence. This is in some ways similar to a workout: you do the same thing over and over again regularly and get better. In a sense, we’re flexing our ‘grammar muscles’ every time we do this. The sequence I want you to use is.

1. Write an IELTS part two essay. For this exercise, it’s better to use a computer so you can edit it.
2. Read through it and underline all of the complex sentences you’ve used.
3. Check those complex sentences to see if you’ve made any mistakes.
4. If there are any sentences that aren’t underlined, try and rewrite them to make them more complex. Try and use if, appositives and although/even though.

This kind of practice is much more beneficial than just writing essays over and over again without analysing them.