Short answer: IELTS Writing is scored on four equally weighted criteria — Task Response, Coherence & Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range & Accuracy. Your Task 2 band is the average of the four; Task 1 is marked the same way and weighted less. Knowing these is what lets you mark your own practice.
✍️ Open Typehush and practise against the four criteria →| Criterion | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Task Response | Did you answer the exact question, take a clear position, and develop it fully over 250+ words? |
| Coherence & Cohesion | Is it logically organised into paragraphs, with ideas that flow and natural linking? |
| Lexical Resource | Is your vocabulary wide, precise and accurate, including spelling and word formation? |
| Grammatical Range & Accuracy | Do you use varied sentence structures with few errors? |
Each contributes 25% of your Writing band for that task. A weakness in one can't be fully hidden by strength in another.
This is where essays most often lose marks. Task Response asks whether you addressed every part of the prompt, took a clear position, and developed your ideas rather than listing them. Under-length answers (below 250 words) are penalised here automatically, because a short essay hasn't had room to develop. So is drifting off the exact question, or answering a slightly different one. If your ideas are strong but you're stuck, this criterion is usually why — read the prompt more precisely and support each idea more fully.
This measures whether your writing is easy to follow: clear paragraphing with one central idea each, logical progression, and cohesion (linking words, reference, sequence) that feels natural rather than bolted on. A key subtlety: overusing linking words lowers this score, it doesn't raise it. Higher bands read smoothly because the ideas are well ordered, not because every sentence starts with "Moreover." Good paragraphing alone does much of the work here. A practical marker examiners use is whether a reader ever has to backtrack: if your sentences follow one another so that each picks up where the last left off, cohesion is working. If the reader has to re-read to see how two sentences connect, no quantity of linking words will rescue it. Order the ideas first, then let cohesion be the light touch that confirms the order rather than the scaffolding that props it up.
Lexical Resource covers vocabulary range, precision, natural collocation, and spelling and word formation — so a misspelled or wrong-form word costs you here. It rewards accurate, natural word choice, not rare words used wrongly. Grammatical Range & Accuracy rewards a mix of sentence structures (simple and complex) with few errors. The consistent theme across both: accuracy matters as much as ambition. Reaching for complexity you can't control lowers your score; using structures and words you command raises it.
For each task, the examiner gives a band for all four criteria and averages them, so a 7-7-6-6 comes out at 6.5. Task 2 counts roughly twice as much as Task 1 toward your overall Writing band, and the final score is rounded to the nearest half band. The practical lesson: your weakest criterion drags the average, so improving a 6 up to a 7 does more than pushing a 7 to an 8. Find your lowest criterion and spend your practice there.
The public band descriptors are free, and they're the exact rubric to self-mark against. After each practice essay, score yourself on all four criteria, honestly, then compare with a same-band model to see the gap. This turns vague practice into targeted improvement. Typing high-band model essays makes the descriptors concrete — you can literally see what "fully developed" or "wide lexical resource" looks like on the page, which is far more useful than reading the wording alone.
Type all 156 Cambridge Band 6–8 model essays with live word count →Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. Each contributes 25% of your Writing band for that task.
The examiner scores all four criteria and averages them for each task. Task 2 counts about twice as much as Task 1, and the result is rounded to the nearest half band.
Yes. Spelling and word formation are assessed under Lexical Resource, so frequent spelling errors lower that criterion.
Your weakest one, because it drags the average. Raising a 6 to a 7 helps your overall band more than pushing a 7 to an 8.
Typehush — practise typing high-band IELTS model essays for the computer-based Writing test. Start practising · Model-essay library · How to get Band 7 · Coherence & cohesion