How do you write a conclusion for an IELTS academic part 1? There is no one answer to that question but I am going to give you some ideas to think about. I am also going to give you an exercise based on a piece of writing sent into me by one of my subscribers.
Length
You don’t have to write too much. A sentence is enough. It can even be quite a short sentence.
Ideas
The danger is you put your own ideas into the conclusion as this is one of the things that you do in academic essays. This is a reporting/summarising task though, so it is a mistake to do this or to interpret the data.
Content
The usual rule is that you should not put any new detail into a conclusion, but only summarise your main content paragraphs.
How to do it
Here’s the trick. When you write the conclusion, don’t look at the graph or what you have already written. If you do that, you may write too much or write something too complex. The conclusion should be simple.
Try this. Look away. See what you remember about the graph. There should be 2 or 3 main points.
A student sample
This is a sample task and answer sent in by one of my subscribers. I have corrected some of the English (which was good anyway). The one “mistake” was to leave out the fact that more women than men were employed in two sectors by 1995. The organisation of the report is very sensible with one paragraph for men and one for women.
Your task
Here is my corrected version of the report. It isn’t perfect, it isn’t meant to be. I have deleted the conclusion I wrote and added it as a comment to this post. Your task is to decide what you would write as a conclusion. If you like you can post it as a comment and I’ll try to comment back:
The graph describes the difference between the number of men and women employed in 6 employment sectors of Freedonia between 1975 and 1995.
Generally, the highest amount of men worker in both surveyed years recorded at about 850,000 in non-defense, whereas the lowest amount was in defense which fell from 250000 to 225,000. No major change can be seen in the number of male workers in the other sectors (manufacturing: 650,000; communication: about 250,000, wholesale and retail trade: 700,000) , although finance-banking increased by 8000 to more or less 500000.
It can be clearly seen that more women started to work in most sectors except for manufacturing and non-defense where there was no significant change In order, the increases were 250,000 to 600,000 in communication, then 150,000 to close to 475,000 in finance-banking, 575,000 to less than 800,000 in wholesale and retail trade and around 25,000 (bottom of graph) to over 100,000 defense. We should also note that there were more women than men were employed in communications and trade in 1995.
Here is my version. Yours may be better.
In conclusion, we can see that more women were employed in Freedonia in 1995, but this depended on the sector.
Mr Dominic.
once one of my ielts teacher said that in academic task 1, we do not have to put a conclusion on it because what we do are find the general trends, find the keywords from the data given then write all of them. report the task, finish. no need conclusion bcz the task itself is not asking us to make it.
So, do you agree? and what suppose i do?
In many ways I agree with your teacher. In fact, most of my models used to be written without conclusions. However, if you look at the official practice books most of the models do have a conclusion. As do most textbook models. So I have changed my mind – slightly.
I suggest you do use a conclusion – it is safer. But you must make sure that you don’t use your own opinions – that is the danger of writing a conclusion.
In any event, you shouldn’t worry about making your conclusion a work of art and spend much time on it. All it needs to be is a short, simple sentence.
I would add this: if you do not use a conclusion, you need to write your introduction much more carefully and put the information from the conclusion giving the general patterns in the introduction. You do still need to include this information, it’s just a question of where you put it.
Part of my reason for changing my model is that I believe it is easier to do this in the conclusion than in the introduction – particularly in exam circumstances.
My conclusion: In my opinion, my women entered the work force in Freedonia in 1995. Probably more women received education over the years from 1975. (Do you think my last sentence is unnecessary? Like you said we shouldn’t use our own opinions or deduce the reasons behind the trend?)
Definitely do not include the bit about women getting more education. There is nothing shown in the graph about this. Also the “in my opinion” is wrong too. There is no opinion involved in this exercise: it is just to describe what you see.
It is for just this reason that I used to teach people not to write a conclusion – you want (and it is quite natural) to make intelligent deductions about the chart/graph but it is not part of the task.