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Okay.

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So let's go ahead and get started with this live task to class.

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The focus of this class is on band seven plus body paragraph writing.

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Very often students send me questions and there they say, Well, I've taken my exam and I keep getting

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a six or I keep getting a 6.5.

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I can't get a seven.

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Why can I?

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Why can't I get a seven?

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I'm doing everything that you told me to do and I have to constantly explain is not a matter of you

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doing what I'm telling you to do strategically.

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It's about the level at which you do this.

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Are you doing it at a seven plus level?

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The purpose of this live class is to help you understand what's required for Band seven plus writing

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and also to walk you through how to achieve that.

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So let's get started.

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So coming up, I'm going to talk about attacking the rubric band seven plus style.

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I'm going to talk about how to ruin a score before you even start to write.

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And then I'm going to walk you through.

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How to really work on improving a paragraph so that you can raise the level of your writing.

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And I'm going to do that with just one body paragraph, and I'm going to show you all the different

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things you're supposed to do to a body paragraph to be able to raise it to the appropriate level according

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to the rubric.

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So first, let's talk about attacking the rubric because students who do very well on the writing staffs,

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too, they write with the goal in mind that I need to attack these different parts of the rubric.

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The majority of students just write in a mindless way.

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And they're just trying to focus on.

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Answering the question.

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But the students that are really scoring really well on the exam are trying to answer the question,

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but they always have in mind.

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Is what I'm doing.

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Does it fit into the band seven, eight, nine category?

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They always have that in mind and so they're always attacking the rubric.

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You can't just theoretically understand these different concepts.

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You have to be able to actually illustrate them.

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Right.

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You can you can understand what sentence variety means.

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Most students understand theoretically what it means, but very few effectively accomplish that or illustrate

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that in their writing.

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Something can be written correctly and at a low level.

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An essay could be written perfectly correct, but still at the level of a five or six because of the

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quality of your writing.

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And so what I'll be talking about today a lot is quality.

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So whenever you're talking about task achievement.

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And you're talking about the band seven plus standards.

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You're talking about whether or not it fully addresses all parts of the question has relevant well developed

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explained details.

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The second is that second one is really important.

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Number one has irrelevant.

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That means that what you put in your body paragraph is irrelevant to answering the question and more

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importantly, is irrelevant to your controlling idea.

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And all your details.

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We'll explain.

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Or are you doing what we call serial listing, which is a low level type of writing?

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It specifically answers the question.

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The reasoning is not opaque.

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The details are directly connected to answering the question without requiring any type of inferencing

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or inferring what you're trying to say.

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There's no memorize phrasing.

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Trust me.

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I and other people that examine Ills essays understand.

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When someone is using memorized phrasing, you have a there's a database of memorized phrasing.

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So students when you use memorized phrasing.

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That is often used.

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They know it and they don't like it and they penalize you for it because when you use memorized phrasing,

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you're not really showing your writing.

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You're just showing something that you that you memorize.

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It's not showing your skill, not showing your talent.

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And then, of course, does your thinking reflect your competency in English?

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When it comes to coherence and cohesion.

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And you're talking about the band seven standards.

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Does your cohesion?

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Does your cohesion attract attention or your cohesion is not supposed to attract attention or is not

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supposed to be overused.

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One of the biggest problems is that I see a lot of students who commit the fault of overthinking.

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Is somebody sequencing the paragraphs properly?

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Are the paragraphs connected and logical?

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Is there clear progression of answering the question I've asked?

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I can probably ask 100 students.

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What does clear progression mean?

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And probably 999 of them do not know.

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And that's one of the biggest problems is that students aren't clear about what things mean on the rubric.

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I tried to explain it and there are there are rubric analysis parts that I have in the course that try

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to explain these things.

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But a lot of times students skip over that kind of stuff thinking it's not important.

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And that's the most important stuff, is do you understand the rubric and how to attack it?

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Very little effort is needed to make idea connections.

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Concise writing builds cohesion, a minimal, minimal functional language.

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Very often, when a student is stuck between a six and a 6.5, they write sentences that have a lot

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of functional words.

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And when you have a lot of functional words, it lowers your score because you're writing these verbose,

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long sentences that are 20 and 30 word sentences, which are hard to read.

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And when a sentence is hard to read, that means that your call, your coherence score, will be lower.

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Then we have the band seven Standards for Lexical Resource.

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And here, whenever you're talking about lexical resource, which means vocabulary or grammar, the

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key point here relates to range.

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What is the range of your lexical resource?

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What is the range of your grammar that you're using?

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Are you using general, broad, vague language or are you using are you using subject specific language

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to score really well?

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In lexical resource, you have to have rare mistakes in word form, word choice collocation.

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Does your vocabulary show flexibility of skill again?

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What does that mean?

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Flexibility it means are you able to use synonyms and paraphrase or are you repeating the same words

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over and over and over again?

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Are you using broad, vague words like people, things?

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Those are broad, vague words that basic level English students use.

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You shouldn't be using any basic words.

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Do done, make get good, bad, give help.

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You know, all those B verbs, auxiliary verbs, those are low level verbs.

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And then you have certain band seven standards and grammar.

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And there when we're talking about Band seven Standards for Grammar.

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What we're talking about relates to having a majority of your sentences to be mistake free.

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If you have mistakes, even one mistake, if you have mistakes in every sentence, it's really hard

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for you to go over 6.5.

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It's difficult to be able to do that because you have to understand 50% of the scoring is grammar and

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lexical.

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50% of the scoring is task achievement and coherence.

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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

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and lexical, that is what is pulling your score down.

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So you can't be 50% high and 50% low.

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That's that's the main reason that people are not able to go above a 6.5.

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You know, if your writing is heavily relying on simple sentences, simple sentence structures, you're

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not showing range.

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When somebody looks at your writing from a grammar standpoint, is there evidence of you mastering the

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different levels of English?

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Does your grammar that you use accentuate communication or detract from communication?

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So if you're having a lot of grammar mistakes, what you're doing is you're detracting from communication.

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That means that.

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An examiner has to look at your sentence two or three or four times to figure out or mentally correct

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the mistake so they can understand what you're trying to say and then use the active voice, not the

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passive voice.

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The act of voice creates concise sentences.

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Most students, when they use the passive voice, they don't follow the rules.

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They're only there only two rules for being able to use the passive voice.

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And most students just violate the rules because they think, Well, I just need to show I can use the

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passive voice.

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Use the active voice.

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Any, any examiners will tell you the active voice gets better scores because it creates concise sentences.

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You eliminate a lot of the functional words that make sentences to be verbose or to be wordy.

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Right.

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So like I said earlier, you know, when somebody is looking at band six to band eight, the percentage

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of mistake free, I think a great tool to use is the if you're studying for the the Isles exam or the

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full exam.

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Is to use the premium version of Grammarly.

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It allows for you to see your mistakes.

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All your mistakes.

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Because if you're if you have 50% of your sentences that have mistakes, then that very often leads

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to a six.

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Are you answering some of the question or the question?

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Very often students are stuck in the six or 6.5 because they are not answering all parts of the question

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or they're talking around the question and not answering it directly.

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Do you have relevant versus irrelevant information?

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Right.

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When you have an essay, every sentence is relevant to the controlling idea and answering the question.

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Band six students normally leave connections unstated or they have irrelevant information to the question

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or the controlling idea.

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Earlier you heard me talking about overthinking, and that's what this looks like.

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First.

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However, in addition for example, nonetheless write these this link link link, link, link, link

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link and that's called over linking.

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It makes your writing to be mechanical robotic.

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You're not supposed to just keep throwing in a transition word every single time.

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Right.

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There are different ways to make coherence.

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Being able to connect your ideas together between sentences with better language than that.

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And over here you can see what more proper linking might look like.

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Sometimes linking.

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Linking words go at the end of a sentence, not always at the beginning of the sentence.

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But whenever a student or a student is using these same linking words at the beginning of each sentence,

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that shows very little range of how they really create cohesion.

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And then, of course, you have your vocabulary range in terms of what that means.

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Some mistakes you want to avoid in a body paragraph.

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Don't use contractions type numbers instead of words.

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Do not write, run on sentences and fragments.

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That's I see that a lot.

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You know, use common spices, lack of foundational control.

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Sometimes students think that basic level mistakes are not important, and they're very important because

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if you don't have foundational level control.

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If you don't have any control at the basic level of English, like you're making mistakes with articles

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or subject verb agreement or or prepositions if you lack foundational control, how is an examiner going

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to score you at a seven?

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They can't.

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So the basics matter.

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Strong foundation matters.

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Another mistake is that your language does not exude formality.

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It's a formal essay, not informal.

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You don't need to be putting in personal pronouns or personal examples unless a question specifically

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tells you to use something from your own personal history.

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And the only time you really see that it's more on the general exam than the academic exam.

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Another problem is I see students trying to be fancy and they end up looking ridiculous by putting in

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these these weird words or weird phrases that somebody looked up in the dictionary.

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And it makes absolutely no sense in the context.

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Paragraphs only have one central idea.

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If you have more than one central idea, you have just probably dropped yourself below a seven.

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And then, of course, poor progression.

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And I'll talk about that later on in terms of poor progression.