5 great ways to improve your band score for IELTS grammar.

5 great ways to improve your band score for IELTS grammar.

1⃣. Use subordinating conjunctions

Join clauses with because, so that, although, while, whereas

2⃣. Use relative clauses

Add information by using relative clauses

So don't write "The cat was sitting on the wall. It was being stroked by a girl." Write:

The cat, which was sitting on the wall, was being stroked by a girl.

3⃣. Use 'there' + 'to be'

This is a simple, yet very underused grammatical structure. It is a very powerful structure because it forces you to change the grammar of the rest of the sentence. It makes you turn verbs into noun phrases and adjective phrases, and it makes you change the word order (the syntax) of your sentence. In other words, "there + to be" makes you widen your grammatical range.

So instead of writing: "A cat was sitting on the wall", you can write:

There was a cat sitting on the wall.

It looks similar, but "sitting on the wall" is now an adjective phrase, not a verb.

Instead of writing: "From 1995 to 2005, sales fluctuated slightly", you can write:

There was a slight fluctuation in sales from 1995 to 2005.

4⃣. Start the sentence with a subordinating conjunction

Instead of "the cat was sitting on the wall because she was tired" write:

Because she was tired, the cat was sitting on the wall.

5⃣. Start the sentence with a prepositional phrase

Common prepositional phrases start with since, at, among, about, throughout, with regards to, in time. For example:

Since the beginning of the afternoon, the cat had been sitting on the wall.

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