IELTS task 2 - opinion: whether the personality we re born with or life experience matter more

experience versus personality

The root of persona has always been a mystery since human began to study about ourselves. There are researches suggesting that our original personality has more impact on our life than any the experiences that we have endured. Personally, I believe that life experience plays a more important role in crafting our personality than the one that we are born with, and this essay will further outlined my opinion.

The first reason is experiences can make changes in human psyche. Humans have a tendency to create or alter a personality trait after overcoming circumstances they have experienced before. When encountering a situation in life, the emotions that a person felt in similar circumstances have been memorized and become a natural response, also known as characteristic. In 1990, the American Psychiatric Association has carried out a research on 50000 US soldiers that had joined the war in Viet Nam to see how impactful a traumatic experience is to human personality. The results supported their prediction, as 78% of the participants were diagnosed to have PTSD and other relating symptoms, the most common symptom recorded was changes in personality.

Furthermore, not only the feeling relating to events, but also the lesson that we collected from those events can cause severe transformation in personality. Past experiences teach us many valuable lessons and sometimes are able to completely alter our ideal and perspective which result in changes in characteristic. For example, if an individual met a very good and influential mentor in the past, he or she will adopt some of the beneficial personality traits from the mentor. The mentor helps that person to change the way of thinking, by teaching both academic knowledge and knowledge about basic savoir vivre in life. As the result, a lot of the habits that make up the traits of personality are replaced by the learned traits.

To sum up, experiences in life contributes lately to the making of personality than the ones we were born with, because of its severe psychological and perspective alteration. Therefore, being aware of the change and their negative effects is crucial, as preventions should be made to cause no further damage to ourselves and others.

The writer has written an opinion article instead of a task 2 response essay. The essay is clearly over-witten at 364 words, a number that cannot be completed within 40 minutes diving the actual test. The writer is advised to use a timer set to 40 minutes during his next practice test. The writer must be able to explain himself clearly within 3-5 sentences per paragraph.No more, no less to limit scoring errors and forced deductions.

The writer, after presenting his opinion in the last sentence of the introduction should have stated his 1 supporting reasons to clarify his , rather than simply repeating a general discussion instruction. The former increases the score while the latter, has no scoring consideration at all since it fails to add clarity to the presented opinion.

The writer presented evidence of not being able to follow information source instructions by providing data from the APA, along with statistics. This type of information does not fall under personal knowledge, personal experience, or public knowledge. Made up information is acceptable provided it does not refer to any source material.

Research will not be available to the student at the LAN locked computers of the testing center. The writer should not get used to researching during the practice rounds because of this reason.