Arguably, it could be said that understanding the topic of your writing might be the most important part of your writing. Not completely understanding the topic looks like making a bad turn at the beginning of your road trip.
It’s common among candidates to walk out of the test session, be satisfied with their performance, and expecting a high score. However, it’s not uncommon to see a lower-than-expected score. You will often hear them say, “My vocabulary and grammar were perfect. I managed to paragraph skillfully and used lots of connectors. I don’t know what went wrong”.
These are some of the problems that candidates can have:
Some candidates write about the topic in general, failing to answer the question.
Some of them misunderstand the question.
Some candidates only partially answer the question.
An examiner uses a rubric and marks you in these 4 categories:
Task Response
Coherence and Cohesion
Lexical Resource
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
If you take a closer look at Task achievement, you will see that you will get only 5 in this category if you address the task only partially, and 4, if you deal with it in a minimal way, and not more than 3 if no parts of the task are adequately answered.
But how can we understand the topic? When we are given a topic, there are three groups of words that we really need to pay attention to:
This is the general theme of the topic. Your writing should not be focused on this. You need to look for Specific topic words.
Specific topic words are words that determine what you should write about. Sometimes they show the two sides of the argument. It is important to find these words, but it is also important to look at the instruction.
The instruction will tell you what you need to do with the specific topic words.
Some people say that the main environmental problem of our time is the loss of particular species of plants and animals. Others say that there are more important environmental problems.
Discuss both these views and give your own opinion.
What do you think is the general topic word? Yes, you got it. It’s “environmental problems”.
There are candidates who read the topic quickly and decide that it’s about “environment” or “environmental problems”. What they do next is to write what they think the main environmental problems are, and what the solutions to these problems could be. Obviously, these candidates will lose mark in task achievement which will bring the whole writing score down.
To avoid this problem, we need to pay attention to the specific topic words and the instruction. What do you think the specific topic words are in this topic? Yes, it is “loss of particular species” and also “more important environmental problems”. These words give direction to your writing and prevent you from writing in general. But what are you supposed to do with all these specific topic words? The instruction will tell you:
Discuss both these views and give your own opinion.
Let’s look at another topic from the same book.
Some people say that music is a good way of bringing people of different cultures and ages together.
Let’s see what these are by looking at an example from Cambridge IELTS Tests, volume 14:
What do you think is the general topic word here? That’s right, it’s “music”. But what can help us to avoid writing in general about music? Yes, that’s the specific topic words. But what are they? “Bringing people of different cultures and ages together”. But what are we supposed to do with all these general and specific topic words? That’s right. We need to say to what extent we agree or disagree with the opinion.
