IELTS Writing Task 2 about historical subjects

Question:

It is more important for school children to learn about local history than world history.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Building an efficient study program is always a challenging issue. For the history subject, someone states that local history is more vital than world history. I partly agree with this opinion due to the following reasons.

On the one hand, studying local history events can help children to understand how their resident place is built and grown, such knowledge makes them love and contributes to their regions. Some children feel very proud of their local heritages after knowing extremely brave wars to protect the region of ancient people. In addition, many children recognize their responsibility to keep and preserve local heritages after local history lessons. For example, they participate in activities to clean the environment around heritage places. Some others play as a volunteer tour guide to lead tourists in order to avoid destroying heritages.

On the other hand, local history is often related to global history. Without studying world history might make students have a narrow view or difficulties to understand local phenomenons. For example, children feel difficult to understand why Quebecers speak French if they do not study the world story related to a beautiful period of French. In addition, world history contains a huge knowledge compared to local history. When learning about world history, a child can study not only historical events but also other aspects such as the climate in the world or theories about marketing or wars. Such useful knowledge might be too difficult to be found in local history.

In conclusion, local history is important for children to know about their resident region. However, we should not mitigate the vitality of world history to educate less in school. Instead, children should be encouraged to study in both local and world history.

- Good measured response, lacking a clear thesis presentation though. Rather than "the following reasons", providing 2 topic sentences to show the upcoming flow of discussion in the 2 reasoning paragraphs would have created a clearer preliminary explanation and stronger opinion statement.

I realize that some teachers prefer to have students use memorized phrases to help them write their sentences more easily. However, these useless phrases (On the one hand, on the other hand, In conclusion) do not help to increase any part of your scoring requirements. Which is why a new presentation of the topic sentences, or proper sentence introductions to the topic of the paragraph will always help you score better. Clarity is always better in any part of the essay presentation. That is something you cannot achieve by using memorized phrases.

You forgot to reiterate your opinion in the concluding statement. You could have used that reiteration to effective close the paragraph rather than using the memorized phrase, "In conclusion". You could have instead said something like:

These are the reasons why I can only partly agree with the idea that...

The examiner will know that it is a reference indicative of a concluding summary. Why? The total paragraph will repeat all the required information in short form. That, is all the concluding summary requires and that, is what he should read in the presentation.