IELTS Writing task 2 - The excessive use of smartphones in free time

Many people nowadays spend a large part of their free time using a smartphone.

What do you think are the reasons for this? Do you think it is a positive or negative development?

Smartphone usage is a favourite pastime of numerous people. It is quite common to witness this trend when more and more people can easily own a smartphone without having to pay much of the cost.

There are likely to be two reasons resulting in the increasing use of smartphones in free time. First and foremost, users tend to spend a large amount of time communicating with others online. To be clear, smartphones nowadays offer a variety of applications that can be of convenience for people to contact with one another such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat. These modes of online communication help connect everyone from diverse places together and maintain relationships between families and friends. Another reason for this trend is that the content shared online has been growing rapidly in quality and in quantity. This inevitably attracts viewers' and consumers' attention as they are often curious about the outside world and want to be consistently updated with the news and information regardless of their credibility.

In my view, this excessive use of smartphones can have negative impacts on individuals. Firstly, their health might suffer as a consequence of looking at the screen for too long. In fact, spending hours on your smartphones is believed to harm your eyesight and decrease your concentration over time. Furthermore, people tend to be less sociable in terms of real-life interactions. For example, children in the past used to spend time on social activities, sports, or outdoor activities which could develop their skills and relationships. However, they are more commonly seen with a smartphone these days in their spare time, causing an absence of real communication among them.

To conclude, I believe that the amount of time spent on smartphones should be controlled to minimise the detrimental effects on communities.

The summary paraphrase and writer's opinion are unacceptable. The writer does not meet the passing preliminary TA score requirements because he failed to establish a clear thesis statement with supporting summary of opinions. Without that in the paraphrasing paragraph, there is no way to judge whether you actually understood the writing prompt or not. That is why you are asked to repeat the topic and give a summary response in that paragraph.


This was an unnecessary statement. Having said this, you opened up a new and unrelated discussion focus. You should have left that out of the statement to avoid a prompt deviation.

The concluding summary does not work either since it does not do a proper recap of the previous discussion points. It also does not meet the 40 word or 2 sentence requirement for that paragraph.