Grammatical Range and Accuracy in IELTS Writing: The Two Halves, on Real Sentences

Grammatical Range and Accuracy is the fourth of the four IELTS writing criteria, and it is worth a quarter of your writing band. The name says there are two halves to it, and most advice about it covers one.

The half everybody covers is range: use complex structures. The half that decides most answers in the middle of the scale is accuracy, and it turns on faults so ordinary that candidates stop seeing them. This post shows bands 5, 6 and 7 on real sentences, then counts which faults actually appear in the marked evidence.

What the criterion measures

Two questions, asked separately.

• Range. Can you build more than one kind of sentence? Simple, compound and complex forms, subordinate clauses, relative clauses, conditionals, passives where they fit.
• Accuracy. Are those sentences correct, and is the punctuation correct? This covers agreement between subject and verb, articles, prepositions, verb forms, plurals and full stops.

Three terms the descriptors use.

• A simple sentence has one clause. "Tourism grew quickly."
• A complex sentence has a main clause and at least one subordinate clause. "Tourism grew quickly because flights became cheap."
• An error-free sentence is one with no grammar or punctuation fault anywhere in it. The band 7 and band 8 wording counts these, so one small slip removes the whole sentence from the count.

The other three criteria are Task Response or Task Achievement, Coherence and Cohesion, and Lexical Resource. There is a separate page on what Task Response asks for and one on what Lexical Resource looks like band by band, and the two grammar criteria are independent of them: an answer can be a clear, well organised response that still sits at 5 here.

The published wording, band by band

These are the public band descriptors for this criterion. Read the band 7 line twice, because it is the one most candidates are aiming at.

Two things in that table are worth more than any tip.

First, the ladder from 6 to 8 is counted in sentences, not in errors. Band 7 asks for frequent error-free sentences and band 8 asks for a majority of them. So the useful question is not how many mistakes you made, it is how many of your sentences are completely clean. Four long sentences with one fault each can score lower than six short ones that are correct.

Second, band 5 says complex sentences "tend to be less accurate than simple sentences". That is the trap in the usual advice. Reaching for a harder structure you cannot control moves you down, not up.

Band 5, on a real sentence

The Bandly sample library publishes full answers with a separate band estimate for each criterion and the sentences behind each estimate. These are machine estimates, not examiner marks. One published General Training letter carries a Grammatical Range and Accuracy estimate of 5, and the note on it reads: frequent grammatical errors and faulty punctuation which cause some difficulty for the reader.

Four of its sentences, as written.

I am writing this letter for saying thank you for having me in your home last month. Your family was so kind of me. I really enjoyed to eat the traditional dinners. The foods you cooked was delicious every night.

Look at what is actually wrong. "For saying" should be "to say". "Kind of me" should be "kind to me". "Enjoyed to eat" should be "enjoyed eating". "The foods you cooked was" should be "the food you cooked was". Not one of those four faults is a failed complex structure. Three are prepositions or verb patterns and one is agreement, and all four are in sentences the writer could have built correctly.

That letter does attempt range. It has a conditional, "If you will come to my country, I will show you around", which is itself slightly wrong, since the condition takes the present simple: "If you come to my country". That is the band 5 bullet in action, a complex form attempted and less accurate than the simple ones.

Band 6, on a real sentence

Another published answer, a Task 2 essay on tourism, carries an estimate of 6. Its own note reads: a mix of simple and complex sentences are used, but frequent errors in subject-verb agreement and verb form limit the score.

In the recent years, tourism have grown very fast in many developing countries who need money to improve their economy. For example, in Thailand, tourism is a major industry and many local peoples depend of tourism for their daily life.

The range is there. There is a relative clause, a compound sentence and prepositional phrases. The faults are "tourism have" for "tourism has", "peoples" for "people", "depend of" for "depend on", and "In the recent years" for "In recent years". Elsewhere in the same answer, "This money can spent by the government" drops the "be" out of a passive.

The gap between this and band 5 is not a new structure. It is that these errors rarely stop you understanding the sentence, which is exactly what the band 6 bullet says.

Band 7, on a real sentence

Now the rung most readers want. A published Task 2 essay on free university education carries an estimate of 7, and the note reads: a variety of complex structures and frequent error-free sentences, but a few errors in grammar and punctuation prevent a higher score.

While there are valid arguments for making students bear the full cost of their studies, I believe that providing free university education is ultimately more beneficial for both individuals and society. A highly educated workforce also drives innovation and economic growth, which eventually benefits taxpayers through increased tax revenues.

Both of those are error-free, and both carry a subordinate or relative clause without strain. Here are the two faults that held the same answer at 7.

When universities charge high fees, the burden of paying tuition fees prevent many talented individuals from pursuing their academic goals. This depends of the student's family background.

An agreement error and a preposition error. Compare them with the band 6 answer above: "tourism have grown" and "depend of tourism". The faults are the same two faults. What separates 6 from 7 in these answers is how many sentences are free of them, not which structures appear. That is the single most useful thing on this page, and it is why "learn more complex sentences" is often the wrong instruction.

What 83 marked sentences say about which faults cost most

We read every piece of negative Grammatical Range and Accuracy evidence across all 25 published answers in the library. There are 83 notes. We sorted them by the fault each one names. Some notes name more than one fault, so the counts below add up to more than 83.

Subject and verb agreement is named three times as often as anything else, and more often than range and punctuation put together. The ten error types that keep answers at band 6 describe the same pattern from a different direction, and the four punctuation errors inside this criterion cover the comma faults in the third row.

Two cautions, because a number with no caveat is worse than no number.

These are Bandly's own estimates and its own notes. The scoring has never been checked against a qualified human examiner, so this counts what one estimator noticed, not what an examiner would mark. And the 25 answers were written to sit between band 6 and band 8, so the table says nothing about what happens below band 5.

What it does show is that in this body of marked writing, the faults flagged under a criterion named for range are overwhelmingly accuracy faults, and the most common one is a rule most candidates learned in their first year of English.

Range without risk

You do not need many structures. Four, used correctly, satisfy "a variety of complex structures". There is a full walk through in four complex sentence patterns worth memorising, and the short version is this.

1. A subordinate clause of cause or time. "Because flights became cheaper, more people travelled." One idea, two clauses.
2. A relative clause that adds information. "Tourism, which employs millions, is vulnerable to recession."
3. A concession. "While tourism creates jobs, those jobs are often seasonal."
4. A conditional. "If governments taxed arrivals, revenue would rise." Keep the two halves in the right tenses.

Write each of the four twice on your own topic and check them. Four correct patterns beat eight attempted ones, because the band 5 bullet penalises exactly the attempt you cannot control.

The accuracy pass that takes four minutes

Do this on the answer you have already written, in this order. It is a reading pass, not a rewriting pass.

1. Find every main verb and point at its subject. Say the pair out loud: tourism has, people spend, the burden prevents. This single check covers the largest row in the table above.
2. Look at the word after each verb. Depend on. Result in. Lead to. Enjoy doing. Prepositions and verb patterns are the second largest row.
3. Read every sentence that has a comma in it. Ask whether the comma joins two complete sentences. If it does, it should be a full stop or a conjunction.
4. Count your clean sentences. Mark each sentence you are sure has no fault. If fewer than half are marked, the next band is an accuracy problem, not a range problem.
5. Shorten one long sentence. Take the longest sentence in the answer and split it into two. If both halves are clean, you have gained two error-free sentences from one faulty one.

What to do today

Take your last answer and run steps 1 and 4 only. Point at the subject of every verb, then count the sentences you are confident are clean. Write both numbers down. Most candidates who believe they need harder grammar discover their clean sentence count is the thing holding the band, and that is a correction you can make in minutes rather than months.

If you want a second opinion on where this criterion sits in your writing, Bandly estimates Grammatical Range and Accuracy separately from the other three and shows the sentences behind the estimate, so you can see whether yours is a range problem or an agreement problem before you spend a month on the wrong one.