How to edit your IELTS essay
Hi IELTS students,
In the last 7-10 minutes of your writing task, it is very important that you keep in mind the following to help you achieve Band 7 in Writing.
- If you’re running out of time and you have a lot of ideas that you haven’t expanded on, be brave and make some cuts.
- Only pick the best ideas and expand on those.
- Don’t feel like you have to write down and expand on all of your ideas.
- A shorter paper that is well written and well organised will earn you a better result than a longer paper that is poorly written and poorly organised.
- You must meet the minimum number of words required. You will be penalised for answers shorter than the required minimum limit.
- Don’t keep writing about a subject just to add words and sentences, and certainly don’t start repeating yourself.
- Leave at least seven minutes at the end of your essay to go back and check over grammar, sentence structure and vocabulary usage in your work.
- Re-read the essay to make sure that every sentence is well linked and flows.
- Clean up any spelling or grammar mistakes that you might have made.
- Clean up any other extraneous information that you might have written that doesn’t fit into your paper.
- Check whether there are any fragments or run-ons and delete them.
- Check for sentences that are too short or too long and modify them.
- If a sentence is too short, it is possible that it does not have an identifiable subject and verb.
- Break up long sentences into two smaller separate sentences.
- Be careful when you use any “big” words.
- The priority is to have a correct and well-structured essay, not a long essay with beautiful words. Don’t try to impress the examiners with difficult words and sentence structure, just show them you can develop and explain an idea through your essay.
Na Pham 2012 ©
Some tips to become a good interpreter/translator
Australianism in Interpretation and Translation
Australian delegates sometimes use colloquialisms which are quite difficult to transpose into other languages. These words are often used deliberately to be amusing.
Some expressions such as ‘things are crook’ and ‘scumbags’ are often heard on TV and radio and we often think they are English. However, they are more likely to be Australianisms and may not be completely understood at an international forum.
Therefore, it’s very important for an interpreter at a beginner level to prepare for how to interpret these type of expressions into your native language. Here are some examples:
– To cut off your nose to spite your face.
– You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
– To hook up with.
– To get on the gravy train.
– Rubbery figures.
Preparation of a glossary
For any translator or interpreter, it’s always important to build a glossary of important words in many fields such as banking, tax, finance, construction, government, architecture and medicine . When checking the meaning and putting these words into the glossary, you can prepare yourself and have a rough idea of what terms are likely to come up in the translation or interpreting assignment.
The words in the glossaries can be arranged in alphabetical order so you can sort them and find them easily when you need to. Alternatively, they can be arranged in topic order too.
Keep adding more words to your glossaries as you continue your research in many fields. Glossaries are often more useful than dictionaries as they are more specific and related to the field, while dictionaries often only focus on the more common and general words.
Don’t worry about these words being complex as after two or three times of being used they will become familiar to you.
Dr Na Pham – Sydney Language Solutions – 2012
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