Having a gap-year is more and more common in recent years. IELTS Writing Task 2

Question :
In some countries, young people are encouraged to work or travel for a year between finishing high school and starting university studies. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages for young people who decide to do this.

My answer :

break from a school - positives and negatives

Having a gap-year is more and more common in recent years. High school graduates are looking for a vacancy for work purpose or relaxation. In this essay, the benefits of gap-year will be explained,but also the drawbacks will be elaborated.

To start with, it is widely acknowledged that gap-year is the perfect time to earn pocket money.Since they finish their studies, they can work and get more income than before. For example, many companies, such as Hungry Jacks, KFC,they are keen on to hire youngsters due to public images. As a result, youngsters can get a paid-job easily.

Likewise, traveling in gap year can activate their knowledge exploration attitude in the future. Traveling is an incredible experience as approaching new things.For instance, when youngsters visit Great Barrier Reef, they will think about water pollution and global warming.They might be interested in environmental-protection issues after get in to university.

Nevertheless,the concern is, young people might give up the post graduate study after a gap-year. No doubt, it is a lost for young people in regard to giving up an opportunity to get more knowledge; higher income in the future because of short term benefits. For instance, teens may prefer to be a fast food take away shop cashier instead of spending few years to take a security engineering degree to be an engineer in the future.

From what have been discussed above.There are benefit and drawback of gap-year. Teenagers should be responsible for their decision.

ChiLim, your essay requires the comparison of the given information, which you did in an acceptable, but flawed manner. There needs to be a consistency in your statement, specially when referring to the graduates. Always say either "secondary school" or "high school graduates" because that clarifies the type of educational attainment being discussed in the essay. To merely say "graduate" is a general term that could refer to a number of educational levels of study completion. Since the essay implies a specific graduate level, mention it in the overall presentation whenever possible to remind the reader about the main focus of the essay. Another slight mistake in your presentation is how you delivered additional information in the conclusion of the essay and also, tried to influence the reader towards a certain decision regarding the topic. As a rule, no new information should be presented in the conclusion because that is only meant to close the discussion. Also, the prompt doesn't require you to persuade the reader so saying that "Teenagers need to be responsible..." is not only additional information but also, a method of influencing the reader, which is not required in the discussion. Everything said and considered, I think that this essay is still worth a band width score of 5 though.

@Holt
Thank you for taking time to review my essay and give me advice. You are appreciated.

Dear@benz0127

I would like to give some suggestion to improve your writing.

Introduction is not properly paraphrase. you can paraphrase it changing word and sentence structures.

always use clear one topic sentence in each paragraph, then develop the paragraph with range of complex or compound sentences.

need to write a conclusion containing at least three sentences.

I hope it help you your next writing

keep writing :)

Hi, I think I have learned so much from your writing.
Just a few things I believe you need to notice next time:
1. loss vs. lost: we use loss as a noun
2. benefits and drawbacks, advantages and disadvantages. All are plural countable nouns
3. Repetition. I agree with Holt that you should be specific with graduates (which are secondary or high schools) besides that use synonyms to avoid repetition, e.g. the youth = youngsters = young people...

Keep it forward! Good luck!

@benz0127
I would like to say that you present information with lack of coherence, and there is no clear progression. You should arrange your ideas with good paragraphing. I think you present some main ideas but these are limited and not sufficiently developed since there are irrelevant ideas, and you should pay attention with punctuation.