we're going to look at words you can include to improve your IELTS essays and

then we're going to look at formulas for improving the words in your IELTS essays

and the reason why I want to look at the formulas is

because if you know the formula then you can quickly improve any essay but if

you've only got three four five words then okay you've got those extra words

but you have to wait for the ideal opportunity to insert them into your

essay and sometimes the ideal opportunity does not always arise which

can cause you to force the word into the essay which makes it sound unnatural and

that's definitely what we do not want to do so first in this tutorial we're going

to look at three good words that we can use and I will explain why they are

useful valuable words and then I'll give you two strategies that you can use to

improve any essay to improve the words in any essay that you write let's get

started so the first word is ascertain now the reason why I chose ascertain was

because it's not very common in everyday spoken English or even that common in

written English so if you show the examiner that you can use these fancy

words or words that are less common you're going to help impress her or him

so let's see what does ascertain mean well it means to determine okay so we

could say it is increasingly difficult to ascertain the reasons for more

regulations in the workplace okay more often than not more red tape makes it

increasingly difficult for employers to employ so ascertain here we could

just interchange it with determine but ascertain like I said is slightly less

common shows the examiner you've got a wide lexical resource or helps to

persuade the examiner that you've got a wide lexical extensive lexical resource

next one beget now if you've had beget before that's fantastic if you

haven't it basically means to cause to bring about so in this instance we could

say government regulations often beget more bureaucracy red tape and

inefficiencies and once again what we're doing is we're changing something that's

quite common or widespread often cause bureaucracy and we're upgrading it for

something that's less frequent that's used less often and once again we're

showing the examiner we've got a more extensive lexical resource than our

students than our colleagues who are also competing with us

okay next one tantamount what does tantamount mean well it basically

means virtually the same as okay and another reason actually I've just

remembered another reason why we should consider improving our

vocabularies not because we're going to show the examiner that we know how to

use less common words it's just that these less common words often can only be used

in certain circumstances and often have specific grammar rules in this case

it's tantamount to so we're not only going to improve our lexical resource but

we want to slightly improve a grammatical range and accuracy

okay so I'll give you an example to place a modern McDonalds-style

restaurant in one of these areas would be tantamount to architectural

architectural vandalism or would be almost the same as

architectural vandalism and I don't need to explain which sounds better in that

instance hopefully it's clear now let's move on to some of the formulas that you

can use to improve your academic English and I want to be specific here we're

looking at improving academic English because if we do this with messaging

our friends we'll look a bit weird or like a little bit odd so first one

topic-specific vocabulary this is probably one of my favorites because I

think it's the easiest and the quickest to improve your score and I mean

I won't go into how we get topic-specific vocabulary but if you can

see here I've marked it in green and it basically means these are the words that

you would only find when we're talking about a specific topic topicspecificso

you can see we've got performers promoters for the questions about sports

events spending money that's roughly the idea okay so performers promoters

entertainment spectacle not only was that an example of topic-specific

vocabulary it's also a collocation collocations help your language sound

more natural and it's less likely to make a mistake using a collocation

because they come together so you can't really mess it up so we've got to

entertainment spectacle performers promoters and also you'll see as well

that there are lots of other words underlined in this paragraph

beget aspire to cultural wealth monetary considerable wealth can you see

this is sort of like slightly more advanced

vocabulary that you're not going to find on the street or talking especially in

the spoken English most likely not in spoken English but this is

what we're aiming for if you want to get a band 7 or above a good control

solid control of vocabulary that shows like a higher ability and

topic-specific vocabulary uses slightly less frequent common words

that's the way to go so that's one example the next example is once you've

finished finished writing your essay what you do is you go through it okay

and you look for opportunities to improve it hopefully you'll be looking

for opportunities to correct it as well but at the same time why not look for

opportunities to improve that vocabulary so a good place to start is to look for

words like good bad nice verbs like to be to have to get and we can upgrade

them okay we can upgrade and we can show the examiner that we know how to use

words slightly less common and more specialized and more specific I'll give

you an example so in the paragraph before we said entertainment

spending is definitely a good development if we say entertainment

spending is a positive development or is definitely a positive development

then we're using vocabulary that's less common and positive and good in this

instance are interchangeable okay and then I've gone on to improve the rest of

the paragraph slightly changing the meaning in some cases but either way

it's definitely better so when they have access to these events okay I changed

that from upon purchasing access for such events

it sounds more academic it sounds more advanced

when they have access is very basic okay and then once again in the basic

paragraph I've said they have the opportunity to spend some nice time with

their family and friends brah how basic does that sound fair enough it's easy

to write it's simple and it's clear but it's basic it's terribly basic

it's almost criminal so the upgraded version would be I will just start

with the second part they gained the opportunity to spend quality time

quality time another collocation I've substituted

gained for have and I've also elaborated the sentence and make memorable

experiences with their friends and family and it means you know when

you're spending a nice time probably you're going to be making memorable

experiences but here I was a little bit more specific and I just

wanted to emphasize that so those are the ways that you can improve your

writing okay you can improve your writing by improving the words and if we

look at the last two sort of like tips I gave you these are

formulas and adopting formulas is much more powerful than just learning the

specific words so if you can adopt these formulas and go through your paragraph

look for opportunities to change the vocabulary from generic and normal and

standard to topic-specific and at the same time look for opportunities to

upgrade your language okay my name is Ben Worthington

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial if you want more help or if you're in a hurry

and you really just want to get IELTS out of the way then have a look at the

online course we're getting lots of success at the moment

they're like how I explained before you get some feedback it's a very fast way to

improve and yeah basically makes IELTS a lot easier so have a look at that

it's at ieltspodcast.com my name is Ben Worthington and have a great day and

good luck with your IELTS preparation