IELTS Task 1: Pie charts about Oscar winners by genre in 2003 and 2008

Oscar prize for movies in 2003 and 2008

Task: The pie charts below show the share of Oscar winners by film genre for 2003 and 20008. Summarize the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant.

My writing:
It can be seen from the pie charts the proportions of Oscar winners by genre in 2003 and 2008. There were seven genres mentioned which included: Thriller, Documentary, Romance, Science Fiction, Action, Comedy and Horror.

According two these charts, in both 2003 and 2008, most winners received Oscar prizes for their work in thriller films. However, the proportions of Oscar winners for thriller films in 2003 was quite higher than the one in 2008. In 2003, thriller films accounted for nearly fifty per cent of Oscar winner, the number decreased to about a third in 2008. This meant that there were more winners who won Oscar for projects in other genres in 2008. Action films ranked the second in the top of genres with highest proportions in Oscar winners in 2003 and 2008. Comparing to the data in 2003, in 2008 more films in action genres received Oscar prizes - during the period, the proportion sightly increased from nearly a quarter to nearly a third.

In the both two years, the genre having the least number of Oscar winners was comedy, whose proportion was only less than ten per cent.

There was a quite large decline in the rate of horror genre's Oscar winners from 2003 to 2008, which dropped from about fifteen per cent to about ten per cent. The three other mentioned genres had increased in 2008, in comparison to 2003. They were documentary, science fiction and romance.

To sum up, there was a change in proportion of Oscar winners in the two years 2003 and 2008.

P/S: This is my writing for IELTS Writing Task 1. Hope you can give me some comments and tell me the score I may received. Thank you for any help.

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Hang, the first problem with this essay is the number of words that you have written. During the actual pen and paper test, you will not have a chance to write 259 words. That is not possible due to the time allotment for this writing task which is 20 minutes. The ideal number of words to write, since this is a short analytical essay is between 150-175 words. Don't spend too much time writing this task as you have a total of only 60 minutes to write both tasks. Task 2 is the one that should be longer and more analyzed.

Do not sacrifice your time for editing the essay in favor of writing more words. More words and a longer essay does not guarantee a passing score. What that guarantees is that you will make more writing mistakes than if you wrote a simple 150 word essay instead.

You are not providing a uniform number of sentences per paragraph. The minimum is 3, the maximum is 5 per paragraph covering 4 paragraphs. Your essay sometimes has between 1-6 sentences in every paragraph. Use the 3-5 sentence format in order to get a better GRA assessment score. This can help boost your overall score when you have scoring problems in other areas of consideration.

The essay itself lacks a trending statement as part of the summary overview. The trending statement takes the place of the conclusion in a task 1 essay. The task 1 essay does not require a conclusion as you have written because there are no opinions being discussed. Instead, a trend based on information comparison is required for the proper analysis of the statement. Rather than saying "To sum up" in the last presentation, you could instead say, "Based on the above information, the trend indicates a change..." The trending statement can be placed anywhere in the presentation anyway so you don't have to place it as part of the summary overview if you don't want to. What is required though, is that a trending statement be presented in some manner or form in the essay.

The report also lacks a comparison of the two pie charts. There is one instance where there was an almost similar number of winners in 2003 and 2008 and that is in the horror category. When the instructions indicate a comparison discussion, that is a clue that there is at least 1 similar data presentation in the essay that you can present. Look for that immediately and take note of it so that you don't forget to include it in the analytical report you will be developing. You also failed to use transitional sentences or phrases from one paragraph to another in order to create a connected discussion presentation.

Considering these problems plus the other errors in your LR and C&C presentations, I believe that the score you can get for this essay is a 4.