The problem that this student has is they are using what I call ‘loose synonyms’. This student has changed the following words using synonyms, but not all are correct:Īrt, drama and music- extracurricular activities Paraphrase: It is important that young people are taught extracurricular activities, alongside serious subjects like mathematics, biology and chemistry. Question: It is important that young children are taught art, drama and music, alongside more traditional subjects like maths and science. I do not encourage students to use synonyms that mean ‘nearly the same’ because it often leads to mistakes. When using a synonym we first need to think about the meaning. The dangerous thing about synonyms is that people use them incorrectly or try too hard and force them into their essays. If you repeat the same keywords many times, it indicates to the examiner that you don’t know any other ways of expressing those words and that you have a narrow vocabulary. Click the link above for more information on paraphrasing.įinally, we can use synonyms to show the examiner that we have a wide-ranging vocabulary. We should also paraphrase the question in our very first sentence when answering an IELTS Writing task and synonyms are one of the key ways of doing this.
We could use the words ‘I.T.’, ‘laptops’ or ‘iPads’ instead of just repeating the word ‘computers’ over and over again. Do you agree?’ we would have to use the words ‘computers’ and ‘education’ many times in our answer. So to make our writing sound better we use synonyms.įor example, if the question asked us ‘Computers are being used more and more in education. When we get an IELTS Writing Task there will be certain keywords in the question and our writing would sound very repetitive if we simply wrote the same words over and over again. This article will look at some real essays that used synonyms incorrectly to show you how dangerous they can be. However, synonyms are also very dangerous because if used incorrectly, it can not only lower your mark for vocabulary, but also for task response, and coherence. Synonyms help us to vary our language and show the examiner that we have a wide-ranging vocabulary. Lots of IELTS teachers, myself included, stress the importance of using synonyms in your writing. Synonyms are different words that have exactly the same or nearly the same meaning, such as male and man or third-level education and university.
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