Comments on: IELTS writing – academic task 1 – conclusions

By: Dominic Cole

Dominic Cole — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:48:29 +0000

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.

By: Loke

Loke — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:27:19 +0000

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?)

By: Dominic Cole

Dominic Cole — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 05:11:54 +0000

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.

By: arman

arman — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 13:04:14 +0000

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?

By: Dominic Cole

Dominic Cole — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 17:17:48 +0000

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.