{"id":2587,"date":"2016-01-23T11:29:08","date_gmt":"2016-01-23T04:29:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/humorous-knowledge.flywheelsites.com\/?p=2587"},"modified":"2023-04-18T12:57:14","modified_gmt":"2023-04-18T11:57:14","slug":"skip-a-line-and-use-a-pencil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ieltsadvantage.com\/2016\/01\/23\/skip-a-line-and-use-a-pencil\/","title":{"rendered":"Skip a Line and Use a Pencil"},"content":{"rendered":"

Paragraphing<\/h2>\n

When marking someone’s IELTS Writing<\/a> it is very frustrating to see one big block of text. What I mean by this is a full essay that has just one paragraph.<\/p>\n

Did the student mean to write one paragraph? Probably not. However, the examiner can’t know where one paragraph ends and the other starts if you don’t make it very clear to them.<\/p>\n

Simply using an indent is normally not good enough because, under exam conditions, people don’t think about making neat indents; they write as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n

If you don’t skip a line, then three things could happen:<\/p>\n

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  1. You will receive a Band 5 or below for Coherence and Cohesion because you have not demonstrated any knowledge of paragraphing.<\/li>\n
  2. You will also lower your mark for Coherence because an essay with no paragraphs is very difficult to understand.<\/li>\n
  3. You will make the examiner’s job more difficult than it needs to be, and this is probably not a very good idea.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    I used to work in a law firm before I became a teacher, and one of the partners would regularly delete emails without reading them if they didn’t have clear paragraphs. He would do this even if the email was from an important client. He used to say, ‘If they don’t have enough respect for me to simply hit the space bar on their keyboard, then they don’t deserve my time.’<\/p>\n

    You can avoid this by simply skipping a line or two between paragraphs. Two would be better, for reasons I will explain below.<\/p>\n

    Editing<\/h2>\n

    If you look at the video below of me writing an essay under exam conditions, you will notice that I did a lot of editing i.e. deleting and changing what I wrote.<\/p>\n

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