Essay about the disadvantages and advantages of taking a gap year. (Ielts writing task 2)

a gap year from school

It is becoming increasingly popular to have a year off between finishing school and going to university.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of this?
The idea of taking a gap year before attending college is becoming more and more prevalent among high school graduates. There are many benefits as well as drawbacks of this phenomenon.

Having a year off after high school graduation is advantageous in some certain facets. Firstly, students can have time to relax after a fundamental competition and be more prepared for a completely new environment in university. Some students take this as a chance to travel and get to know more about various fields such as foreign language and culture. They are also be able to acquire useful soft skills from attending temporary courses which are needed for the future but rarely taught in high school. Secondly, due to the inadequate provision of career orientation in high school, sparing another 12 months looking for a job or signing up for a vocational course is considered a remedy for students to figure out their future path. Using this one year's time reasonably can save a lot of time for gap year takers later as it equips them to be more confident, competent and oriented towards future.

From an opposite angle, the disadvantages of a gap year are varied. Initially, compared to the students having a year off, those who go straight to college are likely to have a permanent job earlier. They finish their academic studies one year in advance, have better opportunities to get a job with stable income. Moreover, high school seniors might lose their studying habits as well as discipline. In other words, one year spent on traveling can demotivate them from tertiary education.

In conclusion, despite having many benefits in terms of traveling and working, taking a gap year also has certain shortcomings that people should pay heed to.

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Thank you so much for reading. I would truly appreciate your correction in my essay .

Hoang, the good news is that you have managed to avoid making any grammar or sentence structure errors during the writing of your essay. Expect to be scored highly in terms of your essay's LR and GRA potential. So that means you have delivered an essay that meets the indicated 2 scoring considerations to a great extent. However, with that said, I cannot say that you can score highly in terms of the TA consideration because the presentation of your discussion is under developed and choppy in presentation due to the lack of proper transition sentences or phrases at the end of the paragraphs.

You also lack the minimum 3 sentence requirement for the opening paraphrase and concluding summary at the end. Your opening paraphrase lacks a proper paraphrase which could have been presented as:

High school graduates have shown a trend of skipping their first year of college after high school graduation. Known as a gap year, there are some concerns regarding the advantages and disadvantages of this practice. This essay will discuss the generally known facts regarding the advantage and disadvantage of this growing practice.

Then the concluding statement should have summarized these important points from the reasoning paragraphs over 5 sentences to provide a clear reminder of what the discussion topic was, what the reasons for the discussions are, what the talking points were for each paragraph, then a closing sentence that merely sums up the preceding presentation to close the essay .

Even worse, the second paragraph is more than the maximum 5 sentence requirement due to the second discussion topic you presented at the end of the paragraph, which resulted in an underdeveloped discussion presentation for that topic. That will have a direct effect on the C&C scoring potential of your essay.

Since you have a maximum 5 paragraph allotment for each Task 2 essay, you could have used a transition sentence at the end of the first topic for discussion to help introduce the second topic. The second topic should have been fully developed in discussion content in the next paragraph over a total of 3-5 sentences, a practice that, when you get used to doing, immediately increases your scoring potential due to your ability to clearly explain your opinions or develop public discussions.

In truth the errors you made are what I consider to be unintentional errors since you are not familiar with the proper formatting of the Task 2 essays yet. You should learn how to better present your paragraph discussions as you develop your writing style. Try to read the other task 2 essays at this forum and take note of the advice given to those writers, learning what their mistakes were and how to avoid those same errors on your part should help you polish your writing skills in no time.

I'm truly grateful for your detailed correction. Thank you so much.