IELTS Writing- Grammatical Range and Accuracy
Grammatical Range and Accuracy is one of the four criteria in the IELTS Writing and comprises of 25% of your writing band score. This criterion measures your ability to use a variety of grammatical structures and your ability to use it accurately. It is necessary you understand that demonstrating a good control of grammar isn’t enough but, you will also be required to use a variety of structures in your writing. The examiners look for structures that include a mixture of various types of sentences like simple sentences, compound sentences, complex sentences and other grammatical structures with good control of punctuation.
How to improve your score for Grammatical Range and Accuracy?
There are mainly three types of sentences in English language: Simple Sentence, Compound Sentence and Complex Sentence.
Before getting into the details of the types of sentences, you should know there are there are two types of clauses: Independent clause and Dependent clause (subordinate clause).
An independent clause has a subject and verb and the idea in the clause is complete. For instance, ‘The book was on the table’.
A dependent clause or a subordinate clause consists of a subject and a verb but its meaning is incomplete without the main clause. For example, ‘I couldn’t go to school today because I was late.
Simple sentence is a sentence that only has one clause with a subject, verb and an object agreement. A simple sentence has only one independent clause. For instance, ‘People prefer to move to developed cities’.
Compound sentence is a sentence with more than one main clause and usually there is more than just one idea in a sentence. In other words, a compound sentence has two or more independent clauses. Adding two simple sentences with the help of conjunctions (coordinating conjunctions) can help you write a compound sentence. For instance, ‘People prefer to move to developed cities for better employment opportunities and better education’.
Complex sentence is a sentence with more than one main clause and one or more subordinate clauses which coordinates two or more ideas in a sentence. In other words, complex sentence consists of one independent clause and one or more dependent clauses where subordinating conjunctions are used to combine the clauses. For example, ‘People prefer to move to developed cities for better employment opportunities and better education because they want to improve their standard of living’.
One of the biggest misconceptions is that students often confuse complex sentences with long sentences. Writing long sentences that are difficult to understand will only detract your score. You should rather work on using a mixture of the types of sentences mentioned above so that your writing is easy to understand.
Apart from the three types of sentences, there are a various other ways to improve your grammar. No matter what ways you learn, it is also important that you learn to write accurately.
Remember! Using a wide variety of grammar structure isn’t going to be enough unless it is accurate as the band descriptor clearly mentions Grammatical Range and Accuracy.
