Okay.
So let's go ahead and get started with this live task to class.
The focus of this class is on band seven plus body paragraph writing.
Very often students send me questions and there they say, Well, I've taken my exam and I keep getting
a six or I keep getting a 6.5.
I can't get a seven.
Why can I?
Why can't I get a seven?
I'm doing everything that you told me to do and I have to constantly explain is not a matter of you
doing what I'm telling you to do strategically.
It's about the level at which you do this.
Are you doing it at a seven plus level?
The purpose of this live class is to help you understand what's required for Band seven plus writing
and also to walk you through how to achieve that.
So let's get started.
So coming up, I'm going to talk about attacking the rubric band seven plus style.
I'm going to talk about how to ruin a score before you even start to write.
And then I'm going to walk you through.
How to really work on improving a paragraph so that you can raise the level of your writing.
And I'm going to do that with just one body paragraph, and I'm going to show you all the different
things you're supposed to do to a body paragraph to be able to raise it to the appropriate level according
to the rubric.
So first, let's talk about attacking the rubric because students who do very well on the writing staffs,
too, they write with the goal in mind that I need to attack these different parts of the rubric.
The majority of students just write in a mindless way.
And they're just trying to focus on.
Answering the question.
But the students that are really scoring really well on the exam are trying to answer the question,
but they always have in mind.
Is what I'm doing.
Does it fit into the band seven, eight, nine category?
They always have that in mind and so they're always attacking the rubric.
You can't just theoretically understand these different concepts.
You have to be able to actually illustrate them.
Right.
You can you can understand what sentence variety means.
Most students understand theoretically what it means, but very few effectively accomplish that or illustrate
that in their writing.
Something can be written correctly and at a low level.
An essay could be written perfectly correct, but still at the level of a five or six because of the
quality of your writing.
And so what I'll be talking about today a lot is quality.
So whenever you're talking about task achievement.
And you're talking about the band seven plus standards.
You're talking about whether or not it fully addresses all parts of the question has relevant well developed
explained details.
The second is that second one is really important.
Number one has irrelevant.
That means that what you put in your body paragraph is irrelevant to answering the question and more
importantly, is irrelevant to your controlling idea.
And all your details.
We'll explain.
Or are you doing what we call serial listing, which is a low level type of writing?
It specifically answers the question.
The reasoning is not opaque.
The details are directly connected to answering the question without requiring any type of inferencing
or inferring what you're trying to say.
There's no memorize phrasing.
Trust me.
I and other people that examine Ills essays understand.
When someone is using memorized phrasing, you have a there's a database of memorized phrasing.
So students when you use memorized phrasing.
That is often used.
They know it and they don't like it and they penalize you for it because when you use memorized phrasing,
you're not really showing your writing.
You're just showing something that you that you memorize.
It's not showing your skill, not showing your talent.
And then, of course, does your thinking reflect your competency in English?
When it comes to coherence and cohesion.
And you're talking about the band seven standards.
Does your cohesion?
Does your cohesion attract attention or your cohesion is not supposed to attract attention or is not
supposed to be overused.
One of the biggest problems is that I see a lot of students who commit the fault of overthinking.
Is somebody sequencing the paragraphs properly?
Are the paragraphs connected and logical?
Is there clear progression of answering the question I've asked?
I can probably ask 100 students.
What does clear progression mean?
And probably 999 of them do not know.
And that's one of the biggest problems is that students aren't clear about what things mean on the rubric.
I tried to explain it and there are there are rubric analysis parts that I have in the course that try
to explain these things.
But a lot of times students skip over that kind of stuff thinking it's not important.
And that's the most important stuff, is do you understand the rubric and how to attack it?
Very little effort is needed to make idea connections.
Concise writing builds cohesion, a minimal, minimal functional language.
Very often, when a student is stuck between a six and a 6.5, they write sentences that have a lot
of functional words.
And when you have a lot of functional words, it lowers your score because you're writing these verbose,
long sentences that are 20 and 30 word sentences, which are hard to read.
And when a sentence is hard to read, that means that your call, your coherence score, will be lower.
Then we have the band seven Standards for Lexical Resource.
And here, whenever you're talking about lexical resource, which means vocabulary or grammar, the
key point here relates to range.
What is the range of your lexical resource?
What is the range of your grammar that you're using?
Are you using general, broad, vague language or are you using are you using subject specific language
to score really well?
In lexical resource, you have to have rare mistakes in word form, word choice collocation.
Does your vocabulary show flexibility of skill again?
What does that mean?
Flexibility it means are you able to use synonyms and paraphrase or are you repeating the same words
over and over and over again?
Are you using broad, vague words like people, things?
Those are broad, vague words that basic level English students use.
You shouldn't be using any basic words.
Do done, make get good, bad, give help.
You know, all those B verbs, auxiliary verbs, those are low level verbs.
And then you have certain band seven standards and grammar.
And there when we're talking about Band seven Standards for Grammar.
What we're talking about relates to having a majority of your sentences to be mistake free.
If you have mistakes, even one mistake, if you have mistakes in every sentence, it's really hard
for you to go over 6.5.
It's difficult to be able to do that because you have to understand 50% of the scoring is grammar and
lexical.
50% of the scoring is task achievement and coherence.
So you might be 7.5 in task achievement, 7.5 to 8 in coherence, but if you're 5.5 to 6 in grammar
and lexical, that is what is pulling your score down.
So you can't be 50% high and 50% low.
That's that's the main reason that people are not able to go above a 6.5.
You know, if your writing is heavily relying on simple sentences, simple sentence structures, you're
not showing range.
When somebody looks at your writing from a grammar standpoint, is there evidence of you mastering the
different levels of English?
Does your grammar that you use accentuate communication or detract from communication?
So if you're having a lot of grammar mistakes, what you're doing is you're detracting from communication.
That means that.
An examiner has to look at your sentence two or three or four times to figure out or mentally correct
the mistake so they can understand what you're trying to say and then use the active voice, not the
passive voice.
The act of voice creates concise sentences.
Most students, when they use the passive voice, they don't follow the rules.
They're only there only two rules for being able to use the passive voice.
And most students just violate the rules because they think, Well, I just need to show I can use the
passive voice.
Use the active voice.
Any, any examiners will tell you the active voice gets better scores because it creates concise sentences.
You eliminate a lot of the functional words that make sentences to be verbose or to be wordy.
Right.
So like I said earlier, you know, when somebody is looking at band six to band eight, the percentage
of mistake free, I think a great tool to use is the if you're studying for the the Isles exam or the
full exam.
Is to use the premium version of Grammarly.
It allows for you to see your mistakes.
All your mistakes.
Because if you're if you have 50% of your sentences that have mistakes, then that very often leads
to a six.
Are you answering some of the question or the question?
Very often students are stuck in the six or 6.5 because they are not answering all parts of the question
or they're talking around the question and not answering it directly.
Do you have relevant versus irrelevant information?
Right.
When you have an essay, every sentence is relevant to the controlling idea and answering the question.
Band six students normally leave connections unstated or they have irrelevant information to the question
or the controlling idea.
Earlier you heard me talking about overthinking, and that's what this looks like.
First.
However, in addition for example, nonetheless write these this link link link, link, link, link
link and that's called over linking.
It makes your writing to be mechanical robotic.
You're not supposed to just keep throwing in a transition word every single time.
Right.
There are different ways to make coherence.
Being able to connect your ideas together between sentences with better language than that.
And over here you can see what more proper linking might look like.
Sometimes linking.
Linking words go at the end of a sentence, not always at the beginning of the sentence.
But whenever a student or a student is using these same linking words at the beginning of each sentence,
that shows very little range of how they really create cohesion.
And then, of course, you have your vocabulary range in terms of what that means.
Some mistakes you want to avoid in a body paragraph.
Don't use contractions type numbers instead of words.
Do not write, run on sentences and fragments.
That's I see that a lot.
You know, use common spices, lack of foundational control.
Sometimes students think that basic level mistakes are not important, and they're very important because
if you don't have foundational level control.
If you don't have any control at the basic level of English, like you're making mistakes with articles
or subject verb agreement or or prepositions if you lack foundational control, how is an examiner going
to score you at a seven?
They can't.
So the basics matter.
Strong foundation matters.
Another mistake is that your language does not exude formality.
It's a formal essay, not informal.
You don't need to be putting in personal pronouns or personal examples unless a question specifically
tells you to use something from your own personal history.
And the only time you really see that it's more on the general exam than the academic exam.
Another problem is I see students trying to be fancy and they end up looking ridiculous by putting in
these these weird words or weird phrases that somebody looked up in the dictionary.
And it makes absolutely no sense in the context.
Paragraphs only have one central idea.
If you have more than one central idea, you have just probably dropped yourself below a seven.
And then, of course, poor progression.
And I'll talk about that later on in terms of poor progression.