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Why "Utilise" and "Plethora" Won't Get You Band 7

Every week, I read the same essay.

Not literally. But close enough. Candidates and topics change; the vocabulary does not. A plethora of factors. In this modern era. Delve into. Utilise a myriad of resources.

If you use any of that language in your Writing Task 2, this post is for you. Because the words you spent time and energy memorising are the same words capping you at Band 6.

The lie you have been told

Somewhere along the way, an IELTS teacher or a YouTube video told you that bigger words score higher bands. That is why the Top 20 Advanced IELTS Words lists exist. That is why the memorisation happens.

The advice is wrong.

Bigger words do not score higher. Precise words do. And precise words are, more often than not, the small ones you already know.

The three traps

Session 7 of the Writing Masterclass covered three vocabulary traps every Band 6 candidate falls into.

Trap 1: Memorised. Sophisticated single words dropped into places they do not belong. Utilise for use. Plethora for many. Delve into for examine. Individually, none of these words is banned. Stack them together in one paragraph and an examiner reads memorisation, not mastery.

Trap 2: Collocation. Word pairs that break in English. Do a mistake instead of make a mistake. Strong rain instead of heavy rain. Do a suggestion instead of make a suggestion. Collocations are the invisible fabric of the language. When one breaks, a fluent reader feels it before they name it.

Trap 3: Register. Informal words in a formal essay. Kids for children. A lot of for many. Huge for substantial. Stuff for factors. Task 2 is academic writing. Casual vocabulary tells the examiner the candidate cannot shift register.

What Cambridge actually teaches

Here is where the folk wisdom collapses.

The Official Cambridge Guide to IELTS, page 125, has a section titled Lexical Resource – avoiding repetition. Cambridge's own instruction on scoring high on Writing Task 2 vocabulary. It lists three moves:

1. Use a synonym
2. Use a pronoun to refer back to an idea (This + noun / These + plural noun)
3. Use a group noun (this approach, these methods)

Now look at the synonyms Cambridge picks in their own exercise. Words like system, facilities, funding, technology. Nothing fancy about any of them. Cambridge does not use utilise or plethora anywhere in that section.

Cambridge is teaching a working vocabulary. Not a costume.

The move that does two jobs at once

There is a bonus buried in the synonym move. It lifts two IELTS scores simultaneously.

The official band descriptors for Writing Task 2 count reference chains - this shift, these methods - as cohesive devices under Coherence and Cohesion, and as vocabulary flexibility under Lexical Resource. One swap, two boxes on the mark sheet.

That is why the fix scales. You are not memorising another list. You are learning one move that lifts a quarter of your Writing score.

Where real vocabulary comes from

Memorised lists never make it into fluent writing because they were never absorbed in context. Real vocabulary is built the way children build it. Through repeated exposure in real sentences.

The habit is simple. One article a day on IELTS-adjacent topics: education, environment, technology, health, urbanisation, work. Sources that repay the time: BBC News long reads, The Guardian, TED talk transcripts, The Economist's Espresso briefing.

Three collocations from each article, noted by topic in a notebook. One sentence of your own using each collocation before the week ends. That is the whole method.

Do it for a month and your writing shifts. Do it for three months and examiners stop capping you.

What to do next

If you attended the Masterclass live, the recordings are yours until 5 October. All seven sessions, free. Rewatch the ones that landed hardest and do the exercises again.

After 5 October, the full replay bundle moves to €39.

Everyone gets the 27-page Complete Checklist. Every rule from every session in one document, ready to sit next to your practice notebook.

Download it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bCyeF6cnKw0ylc3P81IZdfOh5QNsCzzW/view?usp=drive_link

Teacher Ivan

Coherence and Cohesion: The IELTS Writing Criterion That's Often Not Properly Explained

Every IELTS candidate has heard the words "Coherence and Cohesion." Ahh, yes, the linking words. Well, it's much more than that.

Coherence and Cohesion is one of the four criteria the examiner uses to mark your Writing, and it decides a quarter of your Writing band. Task Response is another quarter. Lexical Resource is the third. Grammatical Range and Accuracy is the fourth. Coherence and Cohesion, though, is the one where candidates lose the most marks without understanding why, because it's often overlooked by teachers. 

Here is what it actually measures:

Coherence is what happens at the paragraph level, while cohesion is what happens between sentences within a paragraph. When an examiner scans your essay from a distance, they are checking coherence. When they read line by line, they are checking cohesion. You need both, and the fixes are different for each.

Coherence: three things the examiner reads for before they read a word

The first is paragraphs. Each idea group gets its own paragraph, not one long block and not one sentence per line. The second is balance. Both sides of the argument get real space, and a one-sided essay caps Coherence at Band 5, no matter how well you write. The third is progression. Ideas build on each other, and later paragraphs connect back to earlier ones and to your thesis.

None of these depend on your vocabulary. They are all about the shape of the essay. Which brings us to the most common trap.

Why "firstly, secondly, finally" is a Band 5 signature

If you have ever written an IELTS essay body that reads "Firstly, cars cause pollution. Secondly, they cause traffic. Thirdly, they are expensive. Finally, they need parking," you are in very common company. It is the single most common structural pattern I see from candidates studying for their first attempt.

The problem is not that ordinals are grammatically wrong. The problem is that they are a substitute for structure, not structure itself. When an examiner reads those four sentences, they see four disconnected claims stacked on top of each other. The candidate feels organised, but the examiner sees a Band 5 essay body.

Here is what a Band 7 candidate writes instead.

"Cars cause pollution, which in turn worsens urban air quality. This problem is compounded by traffic congestion, which costs commuters hours each week."

The ideas are the same. The claims are the same. What has changed is that "which in turn" and "This problem" now carry the reader from one idea to the next. Each sentence builds on the previous one. That is coherence at the sentence level, and it is what earns the marks.

Cohesion: the three-level linker ladder

Now to the visible layer. Linking words are divided into seven categories, and each category has three levels: basic, intermediate, and advanced.

Take addition, for instance.

At the basic level, you write "and", "also", "too."

At the intermediate level, you write "furthermore", "moreover."

At the advanced level, you reach for "to further elaborate", "in the same vein."

Each level pushes your Lexical Resource score up one notch.

Contrast follows the same pattern.

Basic linkers include "but" and "however."

Intermediate ones include "on the other hand" and "in contrast."

Advanced ones include "conversely," "notwithstanding," and "whereas."

Cause and effect moves from

"so" and "because" through "therefore"

and "as a result" to

"hence," "thus," and "accordingly."

The other four categories work the same way, from sequencing and exemplification through emphasis and summarising (check out the full list in the video). What the examiner rewards is not exclusive use of advanced linkers, which reads unnatural. What they reward is range. If you rotate all three levels across a Task 2 essay and place at least one advanced linker per body paragraph, you have cleared the Band 7 threshold for cohesion vocabulary.

The invisible layer: reference chains

There is a second half of cohesion that most IELTS teaching skips entirely. Reference chains.

Read this sentence: "Governments have raised fuel taxes across most of Europe. This policy has cut urban emissions but raised rural transport costs sharply."

The word "This" carries the whole previous sentence forward, without a linker in sight. That is a reference chain, made from a pronoun.

Reference chains also come as group nouns, which name the previous idea explicitly. Something like: "Many students memorise sample answers before the exam. This approach rarely works, because examiners recognise pre-learned material immediately."

"This approach" names the idea, and the reference to the previous sentence becomes unmistakable. Examiners at Band 7 and above actively look for these constructions. They are the sign that a candidate can carry an idea across multiple sentences without repeating themselves.

The rule that follows all of this

Plan your paragraphs before you write. Rotate your linkers across all three levels. Use pronouns and group nouns to link ideas across sentences instead of ordinals. Those three moves make up the whole shape of Coherence and Cohesion at Band 7, and anything else you learn about the criterion sits on top of them.

The recording of Sunday's Coherence and Cohesion session is now on the site with the rest of the series. All Writing Masterclass recordings are free while the series is live. They move to the paid archive on October 5, so if you have not already worked through the earlier sessions, this is your last window.

In next Sunday's final session, I turn from structure to vocabulary. Session 7 is The Vocabulary Holding You Back, the series closer. The words candidates over-rely on, the ones they never think to use, and why the vocabulary you have is holding your score down. Every attendee also gets a downloadable PDF checklist covering the whole seven-session Masterclass.

Sunday, September 20, at 11:00 AM Dubai and 9:00 AM Serbia. Free to attend while the series is live.

Ivan