IELTS Writing Task 1 vs Task 2: where bands are really won

Most people preparing for IELTS Writing spend their energy evenly across the two tasks. That feels fair. It isn't. Task 2 carries roughly double the weight of Task 1 in your Writing band, which means an hour polishing a Task 1 chart description while your essay stays shaky is an hour spent in the wrong place. Understanding how the two tasks are scored is the fastest way to stop leaking marks.

Why Task 2 is where bands are won

Your Writing band is a weighted combination of the two tasks, with Task 2 counting for roughly twice as much as Task 1. The maths is unforgiving. A brilliant Task 1 and a mediocre Task 2 lands you lower than a solid Task 1 and a strong Task 2. If your time is limited — and in the exam it always is — the essay is where the return on effort is highest.

This doesn't mean abandoning Task 1. It means being honest about the order in which you fix things. Get Task 2 to a reliable band first, then lift Task 1 to match.

The four criteria, and what they actually measure

Both tasks are marked on the same four criteria, each contributing a quarter of that task's score. The first criterion changes name by task, but the other three are identical:

• Task Achievement (Task 1) / Task Response (Task 2): did you do the job the question set — cover the key features of the graph, or actually answer the question and develop a position?
• Coherence & Cohesion: does your writing flow, with clear paragraphing and linking that guides the reader rather than announcing itself?
• Lexical Resource: is your vocabulary precise and varied, or the same handful of words stretched thin?
• Grammatical Range & Accuracy:can you handle complex sentences, and how often do slips get in the reader's way?

Notice what separates the bands: not effort, but the descriptors. The difference between a 6 and a 7 in Coherence is whether cohesion is "generally" managed or managed "well" — a real, observable feature of your paragraphs, not a vibe. If you want the band-by-band detail, our guide to the IELTS Writing band descriptors walks through the verbs that move you up.

Where the two tasks trip people up differently

Task 1 rewards selection. You are not describing everything on the chart — you are choosing the significant features, grouping them, and reporting the overview clearly. Most Task 1 marks are lost by listing every number with no shape, or by forgetting the overview altogether.

Task 2 rewards a sustained position. The most common Task Response failure is not answering the actual question — drifting to a related topic, or sitting on the fence when the prompt asks you to agree or disagree. A well-written essay that quietly dodges the question caps your band no matter how tidy the grammar.

The candidates who jump a band aren't writing more essays. They're getting each essay scored against all four criteria, then fixing the lowest one before writing the next.

How to practise so the marks actually move

Useful practice returns per-criterion information. "Band 6, keep going" tells you nothing you can act on. "Task Response 6, Grammar 5 — complex sentences attempted but errors in three of them, see paragraph two" tells you exactly what tomorrow's redraft is for. That's the loop: mark, fix the lowest criterion, re-mark.

That's what Mark's IELTS Writing feedback was built to do — upload your task and your response, and he returns a band per criterion with the quoted line as evidence, weighting the two tasks the way the real exam does. If you're still deciding between tests, our overview of TOEFL Writing shows how a different rubric would score the same skills.

Split your prep the way the marks are split: most of it on Task 2, the rest on making Task 1 clean and shapely. Then let the criteria, not your gut, tell you which one to fix next.