IELTS Writing band descriptors, explained (and how to move up a band)

Most people preparing for IELTS write more essays and hope the band goes up. It usually doesn't — because the band isn't a single impression. Each IELTS Writing task is marked on four equally-weighted criteria, and your task band is the average of the four. If one is dragging, writing more of the same just reproduces the same weakness.

The four criteria

For Writing Task 2 (and, with slightly different wording, Task 1), the criteria are:

• Task Response — did you fully answer the question, take a clear position, and develop your ideas with support?
• Coherence & Cohesion — is it logically organised, with clear paragraphs and linking that guides the reader?
• Lexical Resource — the range and accuracy of your vocabulary, used naturally rather than crammed in.
• Grammatical Range & Accuracy — a mix of complex structures with few errors.

Find the one that's capping you

Because the four are averaged, your overall band is usually pulled down by one criterion, not all of them. A candidate with rich vocabulary and strong grammar can still sit at 6.5 because their essay half-answers the prompt (Task Response) or drifts between paragraphs (Coherence). The fastest route up is to identify that single weak criterion and practise against its descriptor — not to write another whole essay and average out the same result.

Practise against the descriptor, not a vibe

The official band descriptors are public, and they read like a checklist: a band 7 Task Response "addresses all parts of the task" and "presents a clear position throughout", where a 6 "addresses all parts of the task although some parts may be more fully covered than others". Marking your own draft against those exact lines — where does mine merely address a part, where does it fully develop it? — is how you turn "write more" into "write better". That's exactly what Mark's IELTS Writing feedback does: a band per criterion with the sentence that earned it, so you can see which one to fix before test day.

One test, or many

If you're weighing up which English test to sit, the same criterion-by-criterion practice works for TOEFL Writing too. And if you'd simply understand your feedback better in your first language, Mark can give it to you in Spanish, French, German, Portuguese or Italian. The method never changes: read the work against the published criteria, and fix the one that's costing you the score.