Five Common Mistakes When Preparing for TOEFL or IELTS

Five Common Mistakes When Preparing for TOEFL or IELTS

When deciding to take TOEFL or IELTS, you'll put in mind that you should practice hard to become very qualified to pass these Tests. That's a good thing indeed, but before walking any step, read with me these five common mistakes in passing TOEFL or IELTS, to avoid them and get the highest score in these TESTS.

1- Trying Too Hard Tasks 

The First One is the most common one "You're trying too hard" by using big words; lots of idioms and very long and complex sentences with many clauses. in fact, most of the time you are hurting yourself because you are using words incorrectly and improperly, many in the wrong context and wrong usage. When you write a very long sentence, quite often you have the wrong sentence, meaning you have two independent clauses in one sentence and no punctuation and no conjunction and the whole sentence means nothing. A lot of people using idioms because actually they are given the actual points but they using them incorrectly or in the wrong context. The short sentence can actually be better, simple is often better than complex. Writing long and complex sentence is a double edged sword, meaning that writing it will give you more points, but every fault decreases your score. If you can use five words, don't use ten. 

2 - No Topic Sentence

The second mistake is that the paragraph has no topic sentence; the topic sentence is the main sentence of the paragraph which is the beginning of it and has the main idea of it

3 - Too Many Ideas

The third mistake is that the paragraph has too many ideas that actually is a big mistake, meaning the paragraph should concentrate on one main idea. Many ideas in the one paragraph is not a bad thing, but you should connect these ideas to express one main idea, meaning to avoid separated ideas. Avoid dis-flowing of ideas 

4 - Good Ideas, No Examples

The Fourth Mistake comes when using more and more ideas with no connection between them and with no support, meaning you should support your ideas with concrete examples.

5 - Repeating I think

That is the Fifth Mistake, to repeat "I think" 1, 2, 3, 4 times in your paragraph; don't use it twice in the introduction and another one in the conclusion, Use it just one. Moreover, don't use words like I, me, my, mine anymore. The only time you can repeat personal pronouns if you have a very personal task question, you can use them, in this case, few times, but even then, you don't need to.