It’s a usage mistake: a familiar word in the wrong combination. In Reading, you have no trouble understanding has had a significant impact on, yet in your essay you write makes a big influence on. An answer key won’t show you that mistake, and neither will rereading: you wrote the phrase because it seemed right. You need a check from outside, and for both word usage and Writing, LetsWords gives you one: you write a sentence or an answer, and the feedback, explained in your native language, shows what to fix and why.
Where to start today: two free checks in LetsWords
1. A five-minute usage check, no sign-up. Open an exercise in the Collocations section, for example have an impact or raise awareness. Use the expression in a sentence on an essay topic and press “Check”. LetsWords shows the mistake and the correction and explains what went wrong. You’ll see straight away whether you can actually use the expression correctly, not just recognise it.
2. A trial Writing check before you pay.
Try IELTS Writing feedback in LetsWords
First, answer a few questions about your goal and level and choose IELTS preparation. Then try an exercise on one criterion or feedback on a full answer against all four criteria. You’ll see what to fix in your own text, not just the right answer from a key. Examples and the feedback format are on the IELTS Writing in LetsWords page.
Below: how to find what’s pulling your score down in each of the four parts, how to spread your study over 8–12 weeks (or 3–4 if the exam is close) and where LetsWords feedback fits into the plan.
How the test works: what matters for your plan
| Part | Time | What’s in it | How it’s marked |
|---|---|---|---|
| Listening | about 30 minutes | 4 parts, 40 questions. Each recording is played once; accents include British, Australian, New Zealand and North American | 1 mark per correct answer; the total converts to a band |
| Reading | 60 minutes | 3 sections, 40 questions. Academic: texts from books, journals and newspapers on general topics, 2,150–2,750 words in total. General Training: notices, workplace documents and one long text | the same way as Listening |
| Writing | 60 minutes | Task 1: at least 150 words, about 20 minutes (Academic: a graph, table, chart or diagram; General Training: a letter). Task 2: an essay of at least 250 words, about 40 minutes | Task Achievement / Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy |
| Speaking | 11–14 minutes | A three-part conversation with an examiner. In Part 2, one minute to prepare and two minutes to speak | Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, Pronunciation |
Format and criteria are taken from the official Academic and General Training descriptions on ielts.org. For your plan, three facts from the scoring rules matter most:
- Your overall band is the average of the four parts, rounded to the nearest half band. 6.25 becomes 6.5, and 6.125 becomes 6.0. Take Listening 6.5, Reading 6.5, Writing 5.5, Speaking 6: the average is 6.125, so the overall is 6.0. Raise Writing alone to 6, and the overall becomes 6.5. Sometimes you’re just half a band short in a single part.
- In Writing, Task 2 counts twice as much as Task 1. Time spent on the essay pays off more.
- In Listening and Reading, you can work out how many mistakes you can afford. According to ielts.org, on average band 7 in Listening and Academic Reading takes about 30 correct answers out of 40, and band 6 about 23. General Training Reading needs more: about 35 and 30. The exact cut-off depends on the test version.
Step 1. Find out exactly what’s holding you back
A mock test under exam conditions
Start with Writing in LetsWords: set a 40-minute timer, write a Task 2 answer and get feedback against all four criteria. It shows where your text falls short: answering the question, logic, vocabulary or grammar. You don’t have to guess what to rework. The trial check when you sign up is available before you pay.
Then test the other parts under exam conditions. Take tasks from the official IELTS sample questions: do Listening and Reading without pausing or a dictionary and check them against the key, and record your Speaking on your phone. In Part 2, give yourself one minute to prepare and two minutes to speak. Compare the results with your Writing feedback to decide where to spend more time.
By part
Write down your score for each part and your target. Then count how many half-band steps separate your average from the rounding you need. Half a band in any part moves the average by the same amount, 0.125, so invest where that step comes most easily.
Within each part: by mistake type and by criterion
Listening and Reading. Counting mistakes isn’t enough; note the cause of each one:
| What happened | What to practise |
|---|---|
| You didn’t know a word, or didn’t notice the question paraphrases the text | Vocabulary: collocations and paraphrases from the texts you’ve reviewed |
| You understood correctly but misspelled the answer or went over the word limit | Answer accuracy: spelling, word forms, word-limit rules |
| You ran out of time for the third Reading text | Pace: about 20 minutes per text, against the clock |
| You missed several answers in a row in a recording | Reading the questions before the recording, and moving on once an answer has gone by |
Writing and Speaking are marked against criteria. Open the public band descriptors: Writing and Speaking. Some things you can check yourself: whether you have enough words, whether you answered every part of the question, whether you used paragraphs. A clumsy word combination in your own text is hard to spot: you wrote it because it seemed right.
This is where you need a second pair of eyes. In IELTS Writing in LetsWords, you write a Task 1 or Task 2 answer and get feedback against all four criteria. It points to specific phrases in your answer and shows which criterion is lagging behind. What to do about each criterion is covered in our guide to practising the four criteria one at a time.
Listen to your Speaking recordings with a pen in hand. Mark pauses mid-sentence while you searched for a word, the same word repeated, grammar slips you’d catch in writing, and a Part 2 that ended before two minutes. Pauses aren’t only about fluency. The band 7 Speaking descriptor links hesitation mid-sentence directly to “problems with accessing appropriate language”.
Step 2. Plan your time: 8–12 weeks
A realistic workload for self-study is 8–10 hours a week. A baseline week:
| Block | Per week | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Vocabulary | 15–20 minutes a day, about 2 hours | Words from the texts and recordings you’ve reviewed, plus one topic a week from IELTS vocabulary by topic: recall them, write a sentence with them in LetsWords, get feedback, come back to them in review |
| Listening | 2 sessions of 45 minutes | One or two parts of a test, then a second listen with the transcript |
| Reading | 2 sessions of 60 minutes | One or two texts against the clock, then review mistakes by question type |
| Writing | 2–3 sessions of 45–60 minutes | A timed Task 2 or Task 1 in LetsWords, a rewrite based on the feedback, an exercise on your weakest criterion |
| Speaking | 3 sessions of 20 minutes | Record answers to Parts 1–3, listen back, work on pauses |
This is a starting split. After your diagnostic test, hours move to the parts with the biggest gap. If Listening is already at 7 and Writing at 5.5, one Listening session a week is enough, and Writing gets three or four.
Weeks 1–2. A diagnostic test, getting to know every question type, starting daily vocabulary. Begin with common Task 2 topics: education, the environment, technology. For Writing: one Task 2 answer with LetsWords feedback and one rewrite based on it.
Weeks 3–8. The main work. Weak parts and criteria get most of the hours. Every two weeks, do one full timed part of the test to track your progress. Add vocabulary for the topics where you get stuck: health, work and careers, cities and housing, government and society, media and advertising and others from the topic list. In Writing, alternate full answers with short LetsWords exercises on the criterion that’s lagging. How to turn feedback into a better version of your answer is shown in how to revise an IELTS essay after feedback. For worked examples of specific task types, see our breakdowns of an opinion essay and a Task 1 line graph.
The last 2–3 weeks. Exam mode: a full test once a week, ideally at the same time of day as your exam. Less new material, more review. Writing only against the clock.
With eight weeks, shorten the main phase. With twelve, lengthen it, not the exam mode.
If the exam is 3–4 weeks away
- In the first two days, take one diagnostic test.
- Count how many half bands you’re short of your target overall, pick one or two parts where they’re easiest to gain and give them more than half your hours.
- Stop losing marks on the rules: word limits in Listening and Reading, 150 and 250 words in Writing, answering every part of the Task 2 question.
- Writing every other day: one timed task in LetsWords and a rewrite based on the feedback. If a full answer takes too long, do a one-criterion exercise on a passage.
- Learn vocabulary for the topics that come up most in Task 2 and Speaking Part 3, not from a long general list. Topics with collocations and examples are collected in IELTS vocabulary by topic; write a sentence with each collocation and check it in LetsWords.
- Two full tests: at the end of the first week and at the start of the last.
Vocabulary: the foundation of all four parts
In Listening and Reading, vocabulary is about recognition. A question rarely repeats the text word for word: often the same idea is put in different words. Nation (2006) shows how much understanding written and spoken English depends on vocabulary size. And an article on the IELTS website cites research by Milton, Wade and Hopkins (2010) linking vocabulary knowledge to exam results.
Writing and Speaking test something else: use. The Lexical Resource criterion looks at how precisely and flexibly you use words. For band 7 in Writing, the descriptor asks for vocabulary that allows some flexibility and precision, and says that “an awareness of style and collocation is evident”. In Speaking, the ability to paraphrase is added to that.
So recognising a word isn’t enough. Say you come across this sentence in Reading:
Mass tourism has had a significant impact on local communities.
You understand it and answer the question correctly. Two weeks later, in Task 2, you write on the same topic:
Tourism makes a big influence on local people.
You knew influence, but you guessed the verb that goes with it: make doesn’t collocate with influence. In English, you have an influence: have an influence on or have an impact on. And in an essay, big is better replaced with significant:
Tourism has a significant impact on local communities.
In Reading this mistake is invisible, because you only need to understand. In Writing and Speaking, you have to recall the word yourself and fit it into a phrase with the right verb and preposition. Key collocations for tourism essays are collected on the IELTS vocabulary for tourism and travel page.
How to work with words from what you read and hear
- After reviewing a test, pick out 5–8 expressions from the text or transcript. Take whole collocations (have an impact on, raise awareness), not single rare words. Keep the sentence you found them in.
- The next day, recall each expression from its meaning without looking. Write a sentence with it on an essay or Speaking topic.
- Check the verb, the preposition and the form. A mistake in a sentence you wrote yourself is worth more than a dozen words you recognised correctly: it shows exactly what hasn’t stuck.
- Come back to the expression at growing intervals. Retrieving a word from memory again and again helps you keep it (Karpicke & Roediger, 2008).
Common mistakes of this kind are covered in free exercises: have an impact, raise awareness, affect vs effect, opportunity vs possibility. Linking words and vocabulary for charts are collected in our article on IELTS Writing vocabulary, and a general routine for working with words is in our guide on how to learn English words.
Step three is the hardest to do at home: there’s no one to check your sentence. IELTS vocabulary practice in LetsWords takes that job on. You start with the IELTS B1–B2 or C1–C2 set or with academic expressions, and add words from the tests you’ve reviewed to a collection. In review, you see the meaning in your native language, recall the English expression yourself and write a sentence with it. LetsWords points out usage and grammar mistakes, suggests a correction and explains it in your native language, with your exam goal in mind. Spaced repetition brings the expression back in later sessions until it becomes second nature.
Here’s what one session looks like. In review, the prompt shows the meaning “to have an effect on something” in your native language. You recall have an impact on and write about tourism, but it comes out as:
Tourism has big impact to small towns.
The feedback flags two things: in this sense, impact needs an article, a big impact, and the preposition is on, not to. The explanation comes in your native language, and on top of the correction LetsWords suggests a version for an essay:
Tourism has a significant impact on small towns, both economically and culturally.
A few days later, the expression comes back, and you write a new sentence with it, this time on another topic.
What to do in each part, and how LetsWords helps
| Part | What to do yourself | How LetsWords helps |
|---|---|---|
| Listening | A timed part of a test, then a second listen with the transcript; note collocations and paraphrases | You add collocations from transcripts to a collection, then recall them, use them and get feedback |
| Reading | Texts at 20 minutes each, mistakes reviewed by question type | Paraphrases and academic expressions from the texts go into a collection and into usage practice |
| Writing | Write against the clock and rework your answer after feedback | Academic and General Training prompts for Task 1 and Task 2, a task-format guide, one-criterion exercises on a passage, full answers with feedback against all four criteria |
| Speaking | Record answers to Parts 1–3, listen back, redo Part 2 on the same cue card | Words you stumbled over go into recall and usage practice |
Start with a topic where you run out of words: open it in IELTS vocabulary by topic and go through the collocations. Don’t stop at reading the list: write a sentence with an expression in LetsWords and get feedback. In regular practice, words come back in later sessions, and the feedback helps you fix a mistake before it ends up in your exam answer.
When to change the plan
- A part reaches your target on two mock tests in a row. Put it on maintenance, one session a week, and give those hours to the part that’s lagging.
- The cause of your Listening or Reading mistakes hasn’t changed in three weeks. Change the exercise, not the number of tests. Not recognising paraphrases means you need vocabulary. Running out of time means timed texts. Losing marks on the word limit means the word-limit rule.
- Writing feedback flags the same criterion three times in a row. For a week, don’t write full essays: do exercises on that criterion on passages of an answer. Then test it in a full answer.
- In Speaking, you stumble on the same topics. Add vocabulary for those topics to your daily practice: recall and use it, don’t reread lists.
- Your mock score hasn’t moved in a month even though you’ve followed the plan. Go back to diagnosis: you’re probably working on the wrong cause.
- Two weeks in a row, you can’t manage the workload. Cut the plan down to the hours you actually have. Cut volume, not feedback on your mistakes.
A plan won’t fix a mistake you can’t see. In LetsWords, you practise using words and write Task 1 and Task 2 answers, and feedback in your native language shows what to fix and why, long before the exam. Try IELTS practice with feedback on your mistakes: first you answer a few questions about your goal and level, then you try the feedback before you pay.