However, for IELTS, I strongly recommend that you always START your paragraph with the topic sentence. Now, when I was teaching English for Academic Purposes in universities, I would tell students that it didn’t matter where in the paragraph the topic sentence came – it could be at the beginning, the middle, or the end, you just had to have one! The way to signal to the examiner what the main idea in your paragraph is to start with a sentence that clearly states what you are going to discuss i.e. One of the main criteria in the band descriptors for IELTS Coherence & Cohesion is having a clear central topic in each paragraph. So, if this is what coherence and cohesion are, how do students go wrong in the test? Well, truthfully, in many ways, but here are the 5 that I see most often when I am marking.ġ. Do you have clear topic sentences that tell the reader the main idea in each of your paragraphs? Do you use transition signals to show the relationships between your ideas? Do you use referencing and substitution to replace key nouns that are repeated? Yes? Great – then you have great cohesion! If coherence is how easy an essay is to read, then cohesion is how well your ideas are connected. Is your essay divided into clear paragraphs? Do your i deas progress and build upon one another throughout your essay? Could a well-educated native speaker read your essay and understand your sentences easily? Yes? Great – then you have good coherence! What is Cohesion? Very simply, coherence is how well your essay is organised and how easily it can be understood by the reader. Quite honestly, I am sure that 50% of students aren’t even sure what the two words mean, let alone how they affect their band score! So, in today’s post, I want to look at the 5 most common IELTS Coherence & Cohesion mistakes and show you how to avoid them. Even though coherence and cohesion makes up 25% of a student’s score for Writing Task 1 and Task 2, it is probably the area that most IELTS test-takers overlook in their preparation.
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