Children should be taught to collaborate rather than trying to show who's better - IELTS writing

IELTS Writing

Some people think that a sense of competition in children should be encouraged. Others believe that children who are taught to cooperate become more useful adults. Discuss both these views and give your own opinion.

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Compete or cooperate?

How to effectively guide children's behavior is becoming a hot topic in our society. Some people regard that arousing the sense of competition of children will benefit them a lot. Others think children who tends to collaborate with others would become more useful adults. Views from both sides are discussed and I consider it is necessary to enhance their cooperation awareness.

Generally speaking, coexisting with honors brought by competition is serious diseases. Being taught to compete with their friends or classmates by their parents or teachers, the children may succeed in exams, win many awards, and even when they are older, they are more likely to be admitted into ideal university and get a satisfying job offer. But we fail to take into consideration the sacrifice behind so many honors these children make. The more competition they participate in, the more pressure competitions brings to them. In addition, when tremendous pressure comes into being, diseases of body and mind ensue.

By contrast, cultivating a sense of cooperation of children enable them to be more useful to their company, and even their country. There is no doubt that cooperation awareness is the most important quality of an employee. An entrepreneur is usually at risk of closing down when some staffs only care for their own interests. As for a country, only all the people stick together to fight against the aggression of foreign enemy and take efforts to develop economic, culture and political, can the nation become more powerful. Apparently, the cooperative consciousness needs to be nurtured at a young age.

Based on views clearly expressed above, I consider that children should be taught to cooperate rather than compete. If one thing, like learning to cooperate, enable us to be a useful person, it is worth doing. (296 words)

Shirely, avoid sensationalizing the topic for discussion in your paraphrasing. Keep it simple and as close to the original prompt as possible. In your version of the prompt, you said that the topic is a "hot" discussion, which it is not because that was not indicated in the original prompt. That is a prompt deviation that alters the actual discussion topic. While the rest of that paragraph is alright, you forgot that you are not to provide your actual opinion at the end of the opening statement. This is only meant to be an outline for the discussion. All actual presentations should be within the body of paragraphs to follow it. You could have indicated that as the subject sentence in any of the remaining 3 body paragraph opening sentences and then proceeded with a developed discussion within the paragraph for it.

Another thing you have to do is learn how to use proper English descriptive terms. The topic is not a "serious disease". It is not contagious, nor is it an illness. It is a mere state of being in a person. Either he is competitive or cooperative. There is no illness involved. In the actual test, you would have taken a severe hit in the LR and GRA scoring sections due to this wrong word usage.

Your second paragraph is also one long run on sentence. Always try to break up your statements into short sentences. That was you have a better chance of developing proper simple or complex English sentences. Right now, your GRA is the biggest concern that I have. You are making so many mistakes that I doubt this essay would even get passing consideration in an actual setting.

Please remember that you must use the conclusion to properly summarize the essay in 3-5 sentences. Since GRA is already your problem, limiting your statements to only one sentence or two will not help because the C&C guidelines indicate that all paragraphs need to be fully developed. That is only done using the 3-5 sentence discussion format.

@Holt
Your advice is very helful to me. As for the mistake "diseases" you mentioned, what I mean is that overpressure may lead to some diseases of body and mind, such as insomnia and depression.

I need your help. Could you give me some advice about my second essay "IELTS Task2 Protecting the variety of languagesgrade" and grade it from TR, CC, LR, GRA?

Looking forward to your reply. Thank you very much. I will continue to work hard.

@Shirely Fu
Hello, miss Fu. Holt is a contributor, who is not allowed to review your essay twice or more (please consult the rules of the forum). So it's for me to answer your question about "diseases".

As a native Chinese, I perhaps have a better understanding of what my fellows intend to write. Now let me assume:

When conceiving the essay, you set your brain in motion, generating many ideas. But you didn't fully developed them in you written material. You left examiners "too much room for imagination". Perhaps you thought they would reason out the "underly" meaning. The expectation would be reasonable if examiners were native Chinese, like me and you. Yet that is not the case. They are native English speakers, whose thinking is different from ours. They wouldn't bother to and simply couldn't mentally complete what you intended to express in a couple of minutes, in which they have to seal an essay's fate.

So you have to make your writing clearer and plainer, easier for examiners to follow. You are writing an academic essay, not a scientific fiction. And as Holt said, there is no evident link between "a sense of competition" and "serious diseases". You should have explained it in detail so as to convince your examiners. Sadly, in an actual test with limited time, the task of proving an anti-common-sense proposition is too formidable to be fulfilled. That's why the sensationalizing should be avoided.

Instead of "serious diseases", I'd like to recommend milder terms including "worry", "uneasiness", "anxiety", "annoyed", etc. "horror" goes too far. After all, it's just "a sense of competition". There is no horrible scenes that, say, a terrorist mugs a little boy at knifepoint.