The IELTS Writing test involves 2 tasks. The time limit to complete both of these tasks is 60 minutes and it is recommended that students spend 20 minutes on part 1 and 40 minutes on part 2. The reason that this is recommended is that task 2 is worth twice as many marks as task 1.
Task 2 for the Academic and the General tests are pretty similar whereas the part 1 questions are very different.
IELTS Writing Task 1 Academic
This is usually involving a graph, chart or flowchart. The task is to describe the features of the chart in a well-structured description of what is shown. The word limit for this task is 150 words and you should make sure you write at least that amount.
Find out more about Academic Task 1 here.
IELTS Writing Task 1 General Training
This involves writing a letter to address one of the following; complaint, invitation, application, inform, ask for information or to advise. The question tells you the type of letter to write and to who you are writing but it is up to you to gauge the tone and how formal it should be. The word limit for this section is 150, so you should write about this amount.
IELTS Writing Task 2
The second task in IELTS writing is broadly similar for both Academic and General Training. They do set slightly different questions but generally, you will be asked to write about a topic, testing your ability to respond by giving and justifying an opinion, discussing the topic, summarizing details, outlining problems, identifying possible solutions and supporting your ideas with reasons, arguments and relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.
Task 2 requires a well structured and logical response of at least 250 words. If you submit less than the word count, this will negatively affect your score.
To find out more about Task 2 follow this link.
How Is IELTS Writing Assessed?
There are 4 areas that the examiner will look at when assessing writing tasks. These are as follows:
- Task Response/Task Achievement
- Coherence and Cohesion
- Lexical Resource
- Grammatical Range and Accuracy
The 2 tasks are marked in the same way but task 2 looks at task response whereas task 1 looks at task achievement in the first band descriptor.
Each of the 4 areas is marked from 0 to 9 and the average of these markets gives you the score for that task. Task 2 accounts for twice as many marks as task 1.
The public version of the marking criteria and band descriptors can be found here.