In this guide8 sections
- IELTS Writing band 6 vs band 7: what a 6.5 is actually made of
- Task Response: a position that survives to the last line
- Coherence and Cohesion: your linking words are probably the problem
- Lexical Resource: precision beats rarity
- Grammatical Range and Accuracy: complex sentences that survive contact with accuracy
- Two scripts, one prompt
- Why you can't mark this yourself at exactly this half band
- What to do before your next attempt
A 6.5 in IELTS Writing can mean two quite different things, and your Test Report Form won't tell you which one you got. The difference between band 6 and band 7 is never one thing you're doing wrong. It's two.
Behind the Writing score sit eight criterion scores — four for Task 1, four for Task 2 — and nobody shows them to you. So you go home and work on "writing", generally, which is like taking the whole medicine cabinet because nobody told you what's wrong.
This piece is about Task 2, which carries twice the weight of Task 1 and is usually where the leak is. Words in quotation marks below are the published descriptors, not my paraphrase.
IELTS Writing band 6 vs band 7: what a 6.5 is actually made of
Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Four criteria, weighted equally. Your Task 2 band is the average of those four, reported to the nearest half band, and a quarter rounds up. Do the arithmetic.
| Your four criteria | Mean | Reported |
|---|---|---|
| 6, 6, 6, 6 | 6.00 | 6.0 |
| 7, 6, 6, 6 | 6.25 | 6.5 |
| 7, 7, 6, 6 | 6.50 | 6.5 |
| 7, 7, 7, 6 | 6.75 | 7.0 |
| 7, 7, 7, 7 | 7.00 | 7.0 |
Look at the fourth row. One criterion at 6 costs you nothing — the rounding absorbs it.
Two criteria at 6 costs you the band. That's the row you're on.
The candidate who has sat this three times and collected three 6.5s isn't making four different mistakes. They're making two. The same two, every attempt, because nothing in the result told them which.
Task Response: a position that survives to the last line
At band 6 you "address all parts of the task although some parts may be more fully covered than others", and you present "a relevant position although the conclusions may become unclear or repetitive".
At band 7 you "address all parts of the task", full stop, and you present "a clear position throughout the response".
That word throughout is doing more work than any other word in the Task 2 descriptors. Here's a forty-second test for an essay you've already written. Cover the body. Read the last sentence of your introduction and the last sentence of your conclusion side by side. Are they the same claim at the same strength?
Band 6 scripts drift. The introduction says "I completely agree". Body two concedes so much ground that it reads as a counter-argument the writer forgot to answer. The conclusion arrives at "both sides have their merits, but balance is needed". Nothing there is wrong. It just isn't one position held to the end.
The second half of the gap is extension. Band 6 "presents relevant main ideas but some may be inadequately developed"; band 7 "presents, extends and supports main ideas". A band 6 paragraph lists three reasons. A band 7 paragraph takes one and pushes it until it can't go further.
Listing: Public transport reduces pollution. It also saves money. It reduces traffic too.
Extending: Public transport reduces pollution mainly by taking the marginal driver off the road — the person who could have taken a bus and didn't. That's why a new bus route in a dense area cuts emissions faster than the same money spent on cleaner engines: it changes how many car trips happen at all.
Same idea. One of those is a sentence, the other is a paragraph.
On the "discuss both views and give your own opinion" prompt, the third clause is the one candidates half-answer. If your opinion turns up only in the last two lines, you've covered one part "less fully than others" — the band 6 wording, almost verbatim.
Coherence and Cohesion: your linking words are probably the problem
Adding connectives to a band 6 essay usually keeps it at band 6. Sometimes it pushes it down. Most preparation advice has this exactly backwards.
The descriptors say so plainly. Band 6: cohesive devices used "effectively, but cohesion within and/or between sentences may be faulty or mechanical". Band 7: "uses a range of cohesive devices appropriately although there may be some under-/over-use". Over-use is named at band 7 as a limitation on the band — what keeps a 7 from being an 8. It is not a route into 7.
Mechanical means the connective is bolted on rather than describing a real relation between the ideas. Moreover between two sentences that aren't additive. Therefore where nothing was concluded.
Before and after, same content:
Before (28 words). Firstly, home working is convenient. Moreover, employees save travelling time. This is also good for their family life. Therefore, this is why many people prefer this option nowadays.
After (49 words). Home working removes the commute. In Dhaka that commute is often three hours a day, and those hours go back to the household instead of to a bus. What people call convenience is really that recovered time, which is why the preference holds even after offices reopen.
The second version has one connective — and. It is more cohesive than the first, not less. The cohesion comes from that commute pointing back, those hours pointing back again, and that recovered time standing in for a whole idea rather than repeating it. That is the "referencing and substitution" the descriptors mention, and it's what band 6 scripts miss when they either repeat the full noun phrase every time or write a bare this with no noun attached.
The other half of band 7 Coherence is "a clear central topic within each paragraph". Write the topic of each body paragraph in the margin in four words. If you can't, the paragraph holds two topics and neither is developed.
Most band 6 Task 2 essays I read lose more marks here than on grammar. Candidates find that hard to believe, because Coherence feels like the soft criterion and grammar the strict one. It's the other way round at this level.
Lexical Resource: precision beats rarity
Band 6 "attempts to use less common vocabulary but with some inaccuracy". Band 7 "uses less common lexical items with some awareness of style and collocation".
The advice "use advanced vocabulary" is, at this band, actively harmful, and the descriptor explains why. You aren't marked for owning a rare word. You're marked for putting it where a competent user of English would put it. Swap important for paramount in a sentence that doesn't take paramount and you've moved from a correct band-6 word to an incorrect band-7 one. That's a downgrade dressed as an upgrade.
In scripts from Bangladeshi candidates, rare vocabulary barely comes into it. What fills the page is an ordinary word in the wrong shape:
- economical growth for economic growth
- a significance improvement for a significant improvement
- advices, informations, researches, equipments — uncountables given plurals
- do a mistake for make a mistake
Every one of those is a word you already know, in the wrong form or the wrong pairing. Band 6 allows "some errors in spelling and/or word formation"; band 7 allows only "occasional errors". Fixing twelve familiar words gets you to 7 faster than learning eighty unfamiliar ones, and more safely.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy: complex sentences that survive contact with accuracy
Band 6 "uses a mix of simple and complex sentence forms" and "makes some errors in grammar and punctuation but they rarely reduce communication". Band 7 "uses a variety of complex structures", has "good control of grammar and punctuation", and — the phrase that matters — "produces frequent error-free sentences".
That's a counting criterion, effectively — not range on its own. A script full of relative clauses, conditionals and participle openings that each carry one small error is a band 6 script with band 7 ambitions.
I'll admit a limit here, because plenty of articles won't. Nobody outside examiner training knows the proportion of error-free sentences that tips 6 into 7, and there's no published figure. If you see a site printing "70% of sentences must be error-free", it was invented. What I can tell you is what the counting does to your own writing: mark every sentence in a script that carries zero errors of any kind, then count. Candidates at 6 are shocked by how few survive, and almost always for tiny reasons.
For a Bangla first language, the same three keep appearing:
- Missing articles. Government should invest in public transport. Bangla has no definite article working the way the does, so it drops out exactly where English demands it.
- Present perfect for a finished past. I have visited Cox's Bazar last winter. With last winter on the sentence it must be visited.
- Present continuous for a general truth. People are preferring private cars because they are wanting comfort. Stative verbs don't take the continuous.
Those three probably account for more lost accuracy in Bangladeshi Task 2 scripts than everything else combined. They're also boring to fix, which is why nobody fixes them. Half a band sits inside them.
Two scripts, one prompt
The prompt: Some people believe governments should spend money on improving public transport rather than on building new roads. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
Both scripts were written for this article and ran just over 260 words. I'm showing the opening, first body paragraph and closing line — where the bands separate.
Script A
Nowadays transportation is a big problem in every big city. Some people are thinking that government should spend the money for public transport and other people are thinking new roads are more important. In my opinion I agree with the first view because of some reasons which I will discuss below.
Firstly, public transport is cheaper than private car. Moreover, it can carry many passengers at one time. For example, in my city there are many buses and people are using them daily. Therefore public transport is beneficial for everybody. [...] To conclude, I strongly agree that government should spend on public transport, as it has many advantages which I have discussed above.
| Criterion | Band | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Task Response | 6 | The position is relevant, but reasons are named rather than developed and the conclusion only repeats the introduction. |
| Coherence and Cohesion | 6 | Mechanical cohesion: four connectives in five sentences, and Therefore introduces no conclusion. |
| Lexical Resource | 6 | Adequate range. Spend the money for, private car uncountable, at one time — collocation errors throughout. |
| Grammatical Range and Accuracy | 6 | Forms are mixed, but articles go missing repeatedly and are thinking / are using misapply the continuous. Few error-free sentences. |
Mean 6.0.
Script B
Traffic in Dhaka has not improved after two decades of road building, and I share the view that public transport deserves the larger share of state money. New roads treat a symptom; buses and trains treat the cause.
The argument for roads assumes congestion is a shortage of space. It isn't. Each new lane lowers the cost of driving for a while, so more people drive, and within a few years that lane is full again. Money spent on a bus corridor works in the opposite direction, because the same width of road that shifts a few thousand cars an hour can shift several times that number of people once buses run on a schedule. [...] Roads will still be needed where none exist. But in a city already built, each taka buys more movement when it is spent on the vehicles that carry people rather than the surfaces that carry cars.
| Criterion | Band | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Task Response | 7 | A clear position stated in line two and held to the last sentence, extended through a causal chain rather than listed. |
| Coherence and Cohesion | 7 | One central topic per paragraph, cohesion carried by reference — that lane, the opposite direction — with almost no connectives. |
| Lexical Resource | 7 | Treat a symptom, shortage of space, run on a schedule — ordinary words in accurate collocations. |
| Grammatical Range and Accuracy | 7 | Variety of complex structures, and most sentences carry no error at all. |
Mean 7.0.
Notice what Script B does not do. No rare vocabulary. No Furthermore. No template opening. The distance between the two isn't sophistication — it's control.
Why you can't mark this yourself at exactly this half band
You've just read the difference in somebody else's writing. You'll still fail to see it in your own, and trying harder won't fix that.
When you reread your own essay you reread your intention. The idea you meant to extend feels extended, because the extension exists in your head. The referencing feels clear because you know what this pointed at. The article you left out is invisible because your eye supplies it. Self-marking works at the extremes. At the 6/7 boundary, what you need to notice is precisely what you cannot.
This won't help you if your Task 2 comes in under 250 words, or if you run out of time before the conclusion. Fix that first. No amount of criterion analysis touches it.
What to do before your next attempt
Take one Task 2 you've already written. Run the four checks in order: cover the body and compare intro to conclusion; write each paragraph's topic in four words; check your noun phrases against the four error shapes above; count the error-free sentences. Then have the same script read by somebody who marks against the descriptors rather than their taste, and see how far apart the two readings are. That gap is what's been costing you the half band.
The Task 1 half of your Writing score works differently, and a 6 there will hold down a Task 2 that is genuinely at 7 — what an overview really is covers the one paragraph that decides most of it. If the problem is Task 2 itself, it is usually either the shape of the essay or the ideas inside it: the structure, with a sample answer and how to develop an idea rather than just state it.
Our Writing papers are read by a human instructor who scores all four criteria separately and writes a line on each — the same shape as the tables above, and every Cambridge paper is free. We're still writing the breakdown for the 7 to 8 gap, which is less about what you can do than how consistently you do it. Leave an address and we'll send it when it's up.
