Writing can quickly become a rather daunting and stressful task for your IELTS essay. This is mainly because not only do you have to successfully discuss your essay, you have to do so with convincing and relevant vocabulary. Yes, vocabulary is extremely vital in producing a high-quality essay that will yield a good grade.
The importance of relevant vocabulary during essay writing
We guess the question you want answered now is “Why is vocabulary so important in essay writing?”
When you are tasked with writing an essay, whether it is for academic purposes or creative purposes, what you’re really doing is telling a story. Your essay is your story, it tells the essay evaluator your point of view, your opinion, and essentially your answer to the essay question.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the words you choose to use should be relevant to your story. Relevant vocabulary will tell your essay story in the most authentic, captivating, interesting, and optimized way. To get the best out of your IELTS essay, you will need to go vocabulary hunting.
We will take a look at some of the ways in which you can ensure you find and use the most relevant vocabulary to optimize your IELTS essay.
Analyzing your essay topic
Before you can determine the best vocabulary to optimize your essay, you need to first understand what your essay topic is asking you to do. IELTS essay topics can vary widely: some topics require a discussion, others require you to offer an opinion for or against the topic, others require you to analyze a particular subject matter and reach conclusions, while others require you to simply answer the essay question. The essay topics are also spread across various disciplines including art, communication and personality, business and finance, government, family and children, tourism, technology and many more. This means not only are you addressing an essay topic but you are also delving into a niche environment to do so. This means that your vocabulary needs to not just be relevant but specific.
We are going to look at five different types of vocabulary that you can apply to your IELTS essay to ensure it is optimized and tells the story you want to tell, correctly.
Descriptive Vocabulary
When you are writing an essay, you are looking for the best adjectives to articulately describe the message you are trying to get across. This message can be your opinion, a fact, or your perspective. The purpose of descriptive vocabulary is to add meat to the bone, color to your painting, or seasoning to your food. You are basically taking your words and making them brighter, clearer, and visible. Descriptive vocabulary allows you to paint a visual image using words. This is especially helpful when you are writing a discussion essay, where you have to describe a character’s personality or appearance. It is also a powerful way of adding nuance to your essay. We would suggest that you write out your essay and then revise it by adding words that highlight your message.
One great example of using descriptive vocabulary to optimize your essay is to look for words in your essay that could be improved to tell a better story. Let us take the word “abuse.” On its own this word has meaning; it means a form of mistreatment. However, if you are writing an essay on sexual misconduct, then using the word “abuse” on its own isn’t the most descriptive choice. It tells you there has been a mistreatment, but it doesn’t tell you what kind of mistreatment. Adding a descriptive word “sexual” to the word “abuse” paints a clearer narrative of what you are trying to say. Therefore, not only do your readers know that you are talking about a mistreatment, they also know what kind of mistreatment you are referring to.
Reported Speech Vocabulary
Writing essays often requires you to cite a third party or a secondary source. This is imperative to showing your reader (the essay evaluator) that you have consulted previous studies and that you are well versed in your understanding of what you are writing about. Reported speech vocabulary is essential to conveying this. Phrases and vocabulary such as “according to,” "based on the assumption made by,” “it can be said,” and so on all help to strengthen and optimize your essay narrative.
Conjunctive Adverbs Vocabulary
Conjunctive adverbs are critical for forming coherent thoughts throughout your essay. Think of them as thought processors. Conjunctive adverbs thread together your entire argument or discussion. They help your reader to understand when you are making a specific point, reaching a verdict, or highlighting a point or conclusion. The most popular conjunctive adverbs include: “therefore,” “however,” “thereafter,” or “nonetheless.” I myself have used a few in this article, and I have put them in bold for you to see how I have incorporated them.
Argumentative Vocabulary
Familiarizing yourself with argumentative vocabulary can prove to be an awesome ace up your sleeves when writing your IELTS essay. These words will help you argue a point of view and perspective in a way that is relevant to your essay topic. Words such as “bias,” “credibility,” “insurance,” “facts," “generalizations,” “hypocrisy,” “rhetoric,” “statistic,” and many more all show an argumentative writing position or style.
Jargon Vocabulary
Remember earlier when we mentioned that IELTS essay topics tend to come from a variety of disciplines? Well, this is the time when you can optimize your essay by knowing which vocabulary is specific to your essay topic. During the essay topic analysis, you will have determined the requirements of your topic but also which industry or discipline you are focusing on. Thereafter, you will need to look up relevant jargon that applies to your topic. You want the evaluator to know that you are familiar with terms and words relevant to your topic. A great example would be if you wrote on a customer relationship management (CRM) topic, to optimize your essay you will need to incorporate CRM specific terminology such as “retention," “database management," “demographics,” or “customer loyalty.” We call these jargon, but they are specific to your topic or discipline.
We hope this has been helpful to you! If you would like to find out more on how to use vocabulary and also find a list of helpful essay vocabulary then check out our vocab guide.
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