In my last two posts Best IELTS essay planning – Introductions and Best IELTS essay planning – The Body Text, I looked at a simple formula I tell students to use for writing introductions.
Let’s re-cap the structure of an IELTS essay. It is divided into three parts:
• The introduction
• The body text
• The conclusion
When planning your essay, you need to be aware of what points you will put into each of these sections.
In this post, I’d like to look at the conclusion of your IELTS essay in greater detail.
The Conclusion
In the final paragraph of your essay, you should summarise the main points discussed in the body of your essay.
When you write a conclusion, you must make sure you link it to the rest of the essay and we usually use a concluding phrase to do this:
- Finally
- To sum up
- In general
- In conclusion
- In summary
- To conclude
As well as summarising the main points of the essay, you should also include statements that offer
- a solution
- a prediction
- a result
- a recommendation
IELTS Writing Task 2 is only a short essay (250 words) and so the conclusion only needs to be one or two sentences long. You do not need to add new information but it is a good place to include your point of view.
Here is my conclusion to the introductory conclusion in my post on IELTS essay introductions:
(Introduction…………………Globalisation has meant that technology is developing very quickly all over the world. Some people believe that these technological developments will result in a loss of traditional cultures as technology and tradition cannot co-exist. It is my belief that with sensitivity and careful planning, humankind can enjoy the benefits of technology without sacrificing our traditional cultures.)
Conclusion…………..To sum up, we live in a rapidly changing world and it is important that the whole world can benefit from technological advances. We must, however, ensure that traditional cultures are not sacrificed in the process. If we do not learn to balance technology and tradition, this will result in a loss of traditional cultures and that would be an enormous loss for humankind.
Notice how my final sentence contains conditionals. Conditionals are very common and very effective in the conclusion as they show what might happen as a result of your recommendations or suggestions and this of course makes your argument so much more powerful.
That concludes my short series of posts on IELTS essay planning. Knowledge of the structure of an essay and careful planning will help you enormously in getting the IELTS Writing Test Band Score you need.
Here’s to the best IELTS score possible!