Writing
Commas, apostrophes and capitals, marked under Grammatical Range and Accuracy. With a practice exercise.
Punctuation in IELTS writing is marked under Grammatical Range and Accuracy, alongside your grammar. Candidates often assume it is a minor presentational matter. It is not, and repeated errors hold otherwise good writing at Band 6.
The good news is that the rules involved are few. Most marks lost to punctuation come from four or five recurring mistakes rather than from anything subtle.
What costs marks
Six that examiners see constantly.
Joining two complete sentences with a comma. Cars pollute, they also cause congestion. Use a full stop, a semicolon, or add and.
However, therefore, moreover and furthermore take a comma when they open a sentence. Missing it is a small but repeated error.
Although it was expensive, the scheme was approved. Without the comma the sentence is harder to read and the error is visible.
Governments, not government's. The apostrophe shows possession or omission, never a plural. This is one of the most noticeable errors.
Sentence beginnings, proper nouns, I. Missing capitals look careless and they accumulate quickly across 250 words.
Do not use them in Task 2. They are informal, and they count as one word rather than two, so they cost you length as well.
Method
Six practical habits.
Can each half stand alone as a sentence? If yes, a comma is not enough. This one rule fixes the commonest error.
A short accurate sentence scores better than a long one held together with commas. Range matters, but not at the cost of accuracy.
It is correct in few places and wrong in many. A full stop does the same job with no risk.
They have no place in a formal essay, and they signal an informal register immediately.
Both tend to be used to rescue a sentence that should have been rewritten. Neither is needed in a Task 2 essay.
Read for capitals, apostrophes and comma splices specifically. Looking for one thing at a time is faster than reading for everything.
Practice
Choose the correctly punctuated version.
Each pair below contains one of the errors described on this page.
Ask first whether each half of the sentence could stand alone, then check the apostrophes and capitals.
1Which is correct?
B. Both halves are complete sentences, so a comma is not enough. A is a comma splice, the commonest punctuation error in IELTS writing.
2Which is correct?
B. A linking word opening a sentence takes a comma after it, and the sentence starts with a capital.
3Which is correct?
B. A plural takes no apostrophe. Government is also not a proper noun, so no capital.
4Which is correct?
B. An opening subordinate clause is followed by a comma. C puts the comma in the wrong place and D uses a semicolon where a comma is needed.
5Which is appropriate for Task 2?
B. No contractions in formal writing, and no exclamation mark. Writing the words out also gains you two words towards the count.
Punctuation errors cluster: most candidates have two or three they make constantly and cannot see. Being told which two yours are is usually worth half a band.
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These sentences were isolated. Spotting the same errors inside your own 250 words, under time, is considerably harder.
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Yes. It is assessed under Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and repeated errors hold otherwise good writing at Band 6.
Joining two complete sentences with a comma. Use a full stop instead, or join them with a word such as and, but or because.
Not in Task 2, which is a formal essay. They are also counted as one word rather than two, so they reduce your word count.
You do not need to. A full stop does the same job with no risk of using it wrongly, and semicolons are misused far more often than they help.
Yes. Missing capitals at the start of sentences and on proper nouns look careless and accumulate quickly over 250 words.
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You read your essay knowing what you meant. An examiner reads what is on the page, which is why the same mistakes survive every self-check.
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