In my opinion key to scoring 7 is to make sure your Task Response is good and unambiguous. If you read my past reviews I have always harped on this point in almost all my reviews. My logic is as follows. As all of you know the 4 criteria for scoring are Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resources and Grammatical range.
Out of the 4 .. If you nail Task response you will likely score good in the second criteria as well. It is very difficult to write a good task response without being coherent. They generally go hand in hand.
The other two criteria are very difficult to improve in short time period. You may learn lot of new words to score in lexical resources. But in exam conditions under pressure chances are you may not use a word correctly or you may forget the correct spelling.
The last one Grammatical range is the most difficult to fix in the short term. The best you can do is to make sure you are not committing really basic grammar mistakes.
Now coming back to Task Response. Many candidates here on the forum have questioned me is IELTS really looking at validity of the arguments or just testing English. My guess is this question stems from many websites where they say that IELTS is a test of English and not really logic. But I think in most places this is said about the speaking test and many people wrongly apply the same logic to the writing task as well. If logic didn't matter they would not have Task Response as one of the criteria. The biggest challenge is this looks like a subjective criteria and difficult to figure out what is a good task response.
My suggestion is keep it very simple and logical. Now what does that mean. If you (meaning anyone on this thread for advice) read many previous essay and reviews you will see a common pattern - People are trying too hard to "sound intelligent" and in the process complicating simple essays. It is a very natural thing to do. There was a time that in almost every essay people were writing "This has profound impact on society and economics" so much so that I had to write this in my summary post
https://www.canadavisa.com/canada-immigration-discussion-board/threads/ielts-writing-for-band-7-or-above.540392/page-90#post-7568485 point 2.4
Please remember the people who read and evaluate your essays are probably high school English teachers. With no disrespect to them but it is almost impossible for any human being to know everything about everything. Hence, it is good to keep things simple. When you are writing an essay think how would you explain and justify your stand to a layman. Do not complicate things.
Also, work on the logic progression of your argument. One common technique that is being taught everywhere including reviews here on this thread is to present one idea per paragraph and start with main idea, then supporting idea and then example. It is not necessary that if you follow this technique you are writing something convincing or logical.
Let me give an example. Let's say topic is something like "Many countries are spending lots of money on space exploration. Some people think it is good to spend on space programs while others argue money should be spent on other things. What do you think?"
Now let's say you agree in your essay that money should be spent on space programs and now you are writing BP1 following the technique
BP1 Example: Space exploration spending is an imperative in this day and age where the threat from extra terrestrial elements has been proven to be a reality.
(main argument) It is important that governments safeguard the interests of their citizens and their security by building space armies.
(supporting line ) In the recent NASA publication on extra terrestrial life it was proven that number of UFO sighting have increased 50 times in last decade and war with aliens is a possibility in next decade.
(example/evidence line)
So, technically the above paragraph follows the "structure" and I would guess the English is also not so bad but is it a good paragraph for IELTS task 2?
