How many words in IELTS essays?

How many words do you need to write for IELTS? The short answer is 250 for the essay and 150 for the task 1 report. This is essential information because you can lose a whole band score if you do not write enough words. If you are concerned or new to IELTS, I suggest you read through the following points.

Repeating the question

If you repeat the wording of the question, the examiner may not include those words in the final word count. What this means is that you should not take whole sentences and phrases from the question. You can borrow single words: they may well be the right word to use and it would be pointless looking for another word that was not exactly correct.

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Let’s look at a question to see what you can and can’t do:  ”Some people argue that the government should give every unemployed person a mobile phone and should make sure they have access to the Internet. They believe this is the best way of using public money to reduce the problem of unemployment. To what extent do you agree or disagree?”

Here you could of course repeat the words “government” “unemployed” “the internet” and “mobile phone”: these are simply the correct terms to use. But what you should avoid is writing ” I agree that the government should give every unemployed person a mobile phone and should make sure they have access to the internet”. This is simple copying.

Repeating yourself

In the same way, if you repeat large bits of your essay, the examiner may not count those words. The key point to remember is that it is really quality and not quantity that counts – do not repeat yourself, just to get to the word limit.

All words are words

Sometimes people ask what is a word. Small words like “a” and “is” are still words. A contracted word like “isn’t” is probably going to be counted as one word and not two. Generally speaking, however, you are not going to use contracted words in your IELTS writing – with the exception of a less formal letter in General IELTS.

Do not waste time counting words – count lines

Time is your enemy in IELTS writing. Whatever you do, do not waste time counting all the words you have written, there are far more important things to check. Rather what you should do is to count the number of words you normally write in a line and then multiply that by the number of lines you have written. So if you normally write 12 words to the line, you need to write 23/5 lines in your essay.

Do not write too many words – spend more time planning and checking

Some candidates write 300 words or more in their essay. There is no deduction for this, but it is not a good idea unless you are a very high quality candidate. There are no prizes for quantity, only quality. The time you spent writing the extra 30/40 words would be much better spent either planning your essay or checking and improving its quality.

A sensible target?

It’s quality that quantity that really counts. So my suggestion would be to aim for between 250-275 words in the essay and 150 – 170 words in the report. This means that you have some margin for error.