How to benefit from sample essaysYes, the Internet has allowed students access to enormous amount of information, including all sample essays for the IELTS.

However, I do not recommend this to everyone, especially those who have just started studying for this exam.

These are a few reasons why:

1. It causes confusion and anxiety for many students: they are lost in the information ocean, unable to tell whether one essay is written by reliable teachers/ students.
2. Each essay may represent one method of writing, which means that the more they read, the more confused they are about the essay structure.\
3. Many sample essays uploaded on the Internet are informative, band – 9 quality, yet it doesn’t reflect the any practical technique for the IELTS exam as most of the essays were carefully edited before publication.

Let’s me tell you the truth: I have read thousands of sample essays online and most of them are too complicated for a high school student to achieve within 40 minutes.

Yes, sample essays are valuable source for improving your scores but please follow the steps below to avoid the traps:

1. Take out a piece of pen and paper.
2. Read the essay questions and spend at least 5 minutes thinking about your own ideas and essay structure.
3. Really think about the areas where you find difficult to develop into a paragraph: are you having problems with paraphrasing or vocabulary or finding supporting examples?
4. Now read the sample essay carefully word by word and take notes about:
   • The way they paraphrase.
   • The number of sentences and paragraphs.
   • How many ideas are presented in each paragraph.
   • New vocabulary or expression you noticed.
5. Close the essay and try to spend 5 minutes rewriting the outline of the essay and compare it to your original ideas.

I hope you make use of these tips and apply them to your essay writing to see the best possible progress!