dim/essayforum_raw_writing_10k huggingface dataset:
Mai, IELTS is a very technical Test of English of Language and as such, should be given proper attention during practice, especially by bilingual individuals. The task 2 of writing component of IELTS is used to test your ability to communicate your ideas in writing while heeding the rules of English Grammar. Usually, a model answer to this part of the component should contain only 3-4 paragraphs and that should yield at least 250 words in 40 minutes: as required. Your essay is almost 350 words. In the real test, writing 500-750 words that are not properly structured will earn you nothing but a very low score.  
  
It is a rule of thumb that by the time you develop 3-4 paragraphs of at least 3 sentences each, you shall have hit 250 words or more. A good and perfectly structured 250-255 word essay is far better than 350-500 word essay that contains avalanche of errors. Remember that in the real test, you must write in such a manner that you would have time to review your essay before the elapse of allotted time. Having said that, I want you to examine a model answer to IELTS writing task 2 and take note of how the ideas in the essay are developed.  
  
paragraph 1 = Introduction that gives an overview of the points/ideas that the essay will elaborate on.  
paragraph 2 = first point starts with a topic sentence and then 2-3 subordinate sentences  
paragraph 3 = second point unfolds in similar pattern as in paragraph 2.  
paragraph 4 = conclusion summarizes the points in 2&3 and then makes suggestions where necessary.  
  
Depending on how your points are developed, the paragraphs may be 3 in number accordingly. If you have this in mind while practicing, I promise you that you will improved beyond your imaginations. You can create topic questions by yourself and try answering the prompts after which you give it to others to review or you can post it here.  
  
I hope to see improved essays from you.
Yully-Anne, kindly post the complete, original IELTS task prompt that you are being asked to respond to in order for me to deliver a more accurate review of your work. I cannot deliver the scores for the individual band criteria unless I know exactly you are being expected to deliver the discussion of the topic. What you supplied is incomplete. It is also a violation of the forum rules because you did not come up with an original or interesting title for your essay. You cannot use the prompt topic for the title. Please remember not to violate that rule again because the other students here have found themselves suspended for such a violation. Now, let me offer you a general review of your essay.  
  
The grammar seems to be acceptable. While there are sentence structure problems these did not deviate from your paragraph message. You have capitalization issues strewn throughout your essay. Meaning, you capitalize words such as "law enforcement" and "domestic violence", which are not proper nouns nor titles and are located within the middle of a sentence so these should not be capitalized in the presentation.  
  
Your paragraphs run too long as well. You do not need to keep talking in an IELTS essay. You can present one or two problems and the solutions proposed instead. That way you are able to properly explain yourself and also fully develop the explanation in English for the examiner to consider. The score is not based on the length of the essay but rather, the quality of the content and proper grammar usage skills.
***Hello Yully***, welcome to the medium for improving your writing.  
In my view, you have need learning the way for constructing the good writing in IELTS Test. Your structure couldn't present your idea well and entirely. In the first paragraph, you should create paraphrase of a statement given. Following that, you stand out in the opinion. It used to be called as the thesis statement. Besides that, you should keep in your mind that the paragraph is supposed to consist of at least three sentences. Therefore, you can give description briefly about causes of the matter in a paragraph, and another paragraph contains its solutions.  
  
Turning to your body paragraph, you have missed the prompt. You are supposed to explain people feel unsafe out the home. However, you have review widely. It is more likely to elucidate a reason why some people commit the crime. Be careful of wide explanation. That can make your synthesis out the topic. In addition, please you avoid writing paragraph too long. I have seen one of your body paragraphs so heavy.  
  
If it comes up about the causes and solutions, you have to remember that the solutions which you give should relate to the causes. When you mention two causes, you should present at least two answers. I really believe you can master this skill on condition that you wanna analyse examples of writing task 1. As many as you read, you can get its points quickly.  
  
Happy writing, good luck
Sissoko, you can expand this essay if you can manage to properly introduce the topic for the essay that you are writing. You lack a clear thesis statement and outline of discussion / discussion overview in the opening statement. If you can write a full paragraph that explains the problem that you will be discussing in the essay, the reason why you feel that it is important to call attention to this problem, the areas for discussion that you will be presenting in the essay, the possible solutions to the problem, why you believe that these solutions are important in eradicating the problem, and your personal opinion on the matter leading up too your closing statement, you will be able to add more information for discussion that should more than help you fill an extra page to meet the 3 page requirement of your essay. You have presented a pretty good discussion as of now. There is just a need to add information in order to create a more informed essay that can help educate the reader.  
  
You may find yourself editing the current content of your essay to better fit with the additional information you will be presenting. That is a necessary edit or revision to the current version because the additional data will help to create a clearer picture for your discussion and allow you to present more supporting information to create a sound opinion of the topic you were asked to discuss.
You should actually write a new introduction paragraph to add to the essay. Basically, you will adjust the paragraphs so that the current first paragraph will become the second paragraph instead. In every essay that you write, the most important presentation that you can make is the opening statement or introduction. That is the foundation for the whole essay. So if you don't write a good introduction, the whole essay may not turn out so well in terms of discussion for you. Such as in your case, you came up short with your writing right? That is because you have a weak opening statement. By strengthening that paragraph, you will be able to automatically expand upon and present various discussion topics in the succeeding paragraphs. You should offer more topics for discussion along with additional examples in order to create the most informative and understandable essay that you can.
You may also want to include in-text citations or quotes, properly referenced in your essay so that you can deliver even more accurate information in your essay. Using quotes to help explain your point helps to clarify the message or the paragraph as well. Have you tried writing a research essay that way before? Normally the citations also show the professor that you did a deep research on the topic and the information is accurate and not based on hearsay. For example, when you refer to the New York Times, you can include the actual quote from the report. This adding accuracy and word count in your essay. Which will directly contribute to fulfilling the 3 page requirement as well. Consider the posts of your paper where you can apply these quotes, if you wish to. See if you will like the end result of your essay presentation.
**When people succeed, it is because of hard work. Luck has nothing to do with success. An toefl essay**  
  
## Success = decent skills and determination + a bit of luck

  
  
I have to admit that luck is an important factor for the success of the successful man or celebrities. Lucky people can get the opportunity easily to show their talent or ability. These people are lucky dog. However no everyone has such good luck to get what they want. Such as some of them often encounter a plenty of difficulties and sometime become really frustrated.  
  
As mentioned above, not everyone can has a chance to make their dream come true with ease. So strictly, I think hard work is the fundamental of the success. There were too many people who made their dream came true by the means of extremely hard work. Isaiah Thomas is a case in point. Isaiah Thomas was selected by Sacramento Kings with the final pick and he get few times to show his performance but he worked hard and trained hard so that he can be a start in each game. In sum effort are more important than you think, so if you got a dream, just strive and regardless of the talent or gift.  
  
Though I mentioned that hard work is the necessary part of the final success even if we still can not ignore the luck factor. Luck can bring people the chance or opportunities and then people grasp it to exhibit their talent or show others what competence they have to finish the thing or job. For example, some read a plenty of books and can write an excellent article but no one offer him a platform to publish what he wrote. So everything he did in vain.  
  
In a conclusion, both hard work and luck are quite important for people to success but seriously effort are the most important thing in a journey towards success.
Jan, it is imperative that you provide us with a copy of the TOEFL essay prompt that you are responding to in order to get an accurate review and possible score for your essay. At the moment, the essay cannot be scored properly due to the lack of the prompt requirement. I am unable to get a final reading on your work because I do not know if you accurately represented the prompt requirement and used adequate examples in your work.  
  
So far, the essay has a number of grammatical issues including the use of English idioms in the wrong manner. While "you lucky dog" is a friendly insult, it is still an insult to the person being addressed. Since you are writing an academic essay, try to not use idioms if you are not sure of the context of the word. You do not want to insult someone accidentally. The term that you used should only be used among the closest of friends, never in public, never in a strange setting, never to a stranger, and most specially, never in an academic paper.  
  
Your set of examples seem to be accurate. How accurate a representation it is of the prompt requirement is another issue. So I will reserve further comments on your essay till such a time that you share the original prompt with us. I want to make sure that I give you the best possible review of your work in order to help you improve your writing skills.
Jan, you can always post the prompt requirement in the actual box along with the essay. It doesn't have to be in the title box. Place the prompt in the box before you post the essay. That way you have a title for your essay and the prompt provided at the same time. Based upon the discussion that you presented for the prompt, I can safely say that you did an adequate job of discussing the topic. Though you had some idiomatic problems and there are definite sentence structure errors, I believe that you will not score less than a 4 on this essay. With a little more practice, I do not doubt that you can score a 5 eventually for your future writing tests. You need to familiarize yourself with the proper use of idioms and also, learn to avoid redundancies in your presentation. Keep your discussion general in scope and try to avoid being specific like saying "successful man or celebrities", saying "a successful man is sufficient enough to prove your point.
***Hello Jan Hsu**, these are my thoughts about your writing. I hope you can review my notes for finalizing your writing.  
  
In the first paragraph, I have found a large number of redundant sentences. Focus on your prompts and avoid including statements which you are not able to explain in the first paragraph. Like this  
  
I have to admit that luck is an important factor for the success of the successful man or celebrities  
Besides that, don't place the idiom in the formal writing. Unfortunately, your idiom was hardly linked to your statement. Following this, I have not found your position clearly in that matter. You have missed the crucial point in the indicator. Please, you create a thesis statement obviously in the next term.  
  
Honestly, when I have read your body paragraph, I have not found answers entirely from the prompts given. After that, you stand out in the vague position in the conclusion. The question asks you to decide your opinion whether you agree or disagree with the statement. However, you have tended to explain which is more advantageous or more affected.  
  
I believe you can master this if you wanna practice more. I suggest for the first step that you read many examples for recognizing the flow in the writing.  
  
GOOD LUCK*
@Holt  
Thank you for your advises and encouragement. Now I have a better cognize about my weakness on the writing. I don't know how to improve my writing skill since I am not a native speaker and my native language are totally different from english. That's also the reason that I can't pick up the idiomatic problems or grammar problems which in my articles. Can you give more advise on how to improve sentence-making competence?  
  
@foyuliu  
Thank you for your advises!! I'll take care of these problems.  
  
@akbarmappiare  
Thank you for your advises!! I'll firstly define my statement in the future writing.
Jan, the best way to practice sentence formation is to read more English based material. I do not mean articles written in English by your countrymen. What I mean is, you actually need to read English newspapers written by native speakers. So for American newspapers online, I suggest that you read the New York Observer, Lifezette, Time Magazine, National Geographic, and other online newspapers or magazines.The ones I mentioned are published in the United States and can be easily found online. These should help you become more familiar with the American way of writing and should help you develop your sentence structure skills and also become more familiar with idioms. If you want to practice using idioms and you want to learn the meaning, you can do a simple search for "American idioms", the results will lead you to websites that explain the most common ones and should help you to better understand the meaning behind the idiom so that you can use the most common ones properly next time.
## The aim of study and a help from employer

  
  
The first given chart demonstrates the variation with age in two prominent study reasons namely career and interest while the second shows how much the amount of employer support affect their students.  
  
Overall, a steady decrease of the career reason is revealed in the first graph. The survey found that 80% of under 26 years olds strongly focus on their future professions. It seems that the older people are, the more experience they gain and the less they are impacted by the career purposes. This figure, therefore, continuously declines and there is only 18% of people over 49 study for career as young generations.  
  
In contrast, the interest reason increases stably with age. Only 10% of students under 26 assert interest as their main reason to study. Nevertheless, the percentage incessantly increases up to 40% when people reach at the age of 40 and surprisingly rocket by 70% in their late adulthood.  
  
As for the employer support, the second graph shows noticeable differences in receiving employers' support among five groups. Approximately 60% of under 26 years olds, which is also the maximum rate, are assisted with time and fees by their employers. This rate gradually drops to 32% when people are 30-39 years old before rise up to about 44% in the late adulthood.  
  
*
Hai @yennhihoang2712  
  
I have several comments about your writing task 1.  
  
In overall, you should not mention the clear data (in this case are number or percentage). You are only allowed to compare and contrast the trend in general statement. (I assume that your second paragraph is your overall). Because there are two charts, then you must mention the two charts into an overall precisely and properly.  
  
I hope it can be useful! Thanks.
Hoang, I think you have misinterpret the meaning of 'overview' sentence. If you take a closer look on the IELTS public writing band descriptors, you will see that you are not supposed to give the details (percentage) in an overview sentence. An overview sentence should only describes the general trend of the given chart. For instance, it is better for you to write the first sentence without mentioning further about the percentage. Also, it will be much better if you combine the first sentence and the overview. You need to remember that a strong paragraph consists of at least three sentences and not less than that.  
  
The good thing is that your grammatical range and accuracy looks fine. I only see a minor flaws regarding to the use of gerund, singular-plural, or subject-verb agreement. It is fortunate that the mistakes that you make do not disturb either the clarity or the meaning. Thus, it is more likely that you will get an acceptable score for this part.  
  
Hope this helps :)
The prompt (word limit: 200-300)  
  
***It is usually foolish to get married before completing your studies and getting established in a good job. Do you agree or disagree?***  
  
I am trying to practice essay writing for PTE, please kindly help review. Thank you!  
  
## marriage vs diploma

  
  
With the rapid development of the society more and more people are getting married before finishing studies and settling good job. Some are in favor of getting married before finishing studies is foolish, considering that there is no stable income source and the young students are not mature enough. But I disagree with that, in my opinion, by getting married in college the two people can benefit a lot from a range of measures, for example take responsibility, get closer and so on.  
  
It is usually true that students do not have good income source and depend on parents financially, but this should not be an issue for getting married in college. The marriage is more about live together happily instead of money. Students have a lot of time to study together, build common interests and so on, all these will help them to strengthen the connection.  
  
Moreover, getting married means the two people will take responsibility for each other and behave differently from before. Such change will get the couple to think and plan their future life and career more carefully, they can get mature during the process. The earlier the couple learn taking responsibility the better will they behave in the community, this in turn will benefit the society. And it is obvious nice having the two people study and discuss questions together, that can boost the efficiency of studying.  
  
Taking considered measures, getting married in college should be supported and encouraged by the society, since it can benefit not only the two students but also the whole society. With more happy and good marriages in college were our life and the society to be better.
You need to remember that in academic writing / essay, you are not supposed to write 'but' in the beginning of the sentence. This would make your essay becomes less academic and it is possible for the examiner to reduce your score. I am not an expert of PTE essay, but I am sure that this kind of essay is similar to IELTS writing essay task 2. Thus, my advice would be pretty much the same. Alternatively, you can write 'However/Nevertheless/On the other hand'/many more instead of 'but'.  
  
With regard to the content, I might say that giving examples in the introduction paragraph is inappropriate. You just need to give clear main ideas about what the essay will be developed in the body paragraphs. Thus, you can say that the main possible discussion that is more likely to be described in the following paragraphs. For instance,  
  
~~But I disagree with that, in my opinion, (...), for example take responsibility, get closer and so on.~~  
  
*However, I disagree with the notion, because in my opinion, a couple can gain benefits that cannot be obtained by a single man/woman. This essay will discuss the increasing responsibility and the additional powerful support from his/her partner as the advantages of marriage.*  
  
Hope this helps :)
Hi Ethan, I have to point out something in your essay before I go to the detailed scoring of your work. The opening statement has a particular section that is confusing to read. It is the second sentence that seems to not have decided upon which aspect of the prompt you wish to side with in your essay. You say that "*Some are in favor of getting married before finishing studies is foolish, "*. If the person speaking is in favor of getting married before graduating, then it should not be foolish. He supports the act, therefore, it is not foolish. However, those who oppose the idea can believe that such an act is foolish. Do you see the difference? Now on to the scoring.  
  
Content - 2  
Formal Requirement - 2  
Development, Structure, and Coherence - 1  
Grammar - 1  
General Linguistic Range - 0  
Vocabulary Range - 1  
Spelling - 2  
  
The reason for the 0 score in GRL is based upon the word foolish that was used in the wrong manner in the essay. Unfortunately, that really affected the overall precision by which you presented your ideas and had to be scored accordingly. You also used the word "But" to start a sentence which is academically unacceptable in formal writing.
***Hi Etha***, I am gonna try checking your writing for finalizing. This moment I only concentrate on your content because you have been free of major errors grammatically.  
  
for example take responsibility, get closer and so on.  
Avoid using the word "so on". It's better if you include two examples because only those you would explain the body paragraph. That is the thesis statement which you have to review in the body paragraph. It will seem redundant words on condition that those are included there. Following this, you should afford distinguishing between a conjunction and transition word.  
  
But I disagree with that,  
However, I disagree....  
It is able to your score because that will broke your flow. As far as we know, readers can understand well your writing when your flow is good. The flow can lead the readers to get the points your writing. You can find this sense quickly while you frequently read examples of writing.  
  
Turning to your conclusion, you presented the new topic. I only remind you that the conclusion is extracted from the thesis statement. To create the conclusion, you only paraphrase your thesis statement by using your own. I said that as you display the effect on the society. Well, you mentioned influence for the society, but it was not strong. You have needed the supporting sentence to strengthen your opinion. When you make listing the opinion without its explanation, it seems as layman's opinion.  
  
Hopefully, these can improve your writing and become considerations for your step to write.  
Happy writing, good luck