Describing Trends in IELTS Task 1: Two Patterns, and the Grammar That Costs the Marks

Describing a trend in IELTS Academic Writing Task 1 means saying which way a figure moved, how fast, and between which points in time. Every one of those movements can be written in two ways, as a verb with an adverb or as an adjective with a noun, and using both is part of what the marking criteria call range.

Most pages on this topic answer it with a longer vocabulary list. The list is the easy part. In answers that have actually been scored, the trend words are usually fine and the marks are lost in the grammar attached to them.

The two patterns

Take one movement: household electricity use in Australia went from 7,400 kWh in 2000 to 5,200 kWh in 2020. Here is the same fact, written both ways.

That is the whole mechanism. A verb pattern becomes a noun pattern by turning the verb into its noun (fell becomes a fall) and the adverb into the matching adjective (steadily becomes steady).

Alternating the two patterns does two things at once. It stops the paragraph reading as one sentence repeated, which is a Coherence and Cohesion matter, and it shows you can build both a verb phrase and a noun phrase from the same idea, which is what Grammatical Range and Accuracy reads as range. You do not need more words than the table above. You need both columns of them.

The degree word has to be true

An adverb is a measurement, not decoration. "Plunged" for a fall of three percentage points is not strong vocabulary; it is a wrong statement about the data, and Task Achievement asks you to report the key features accurately. Keep the intensity tied to the size of the move.

• Very large move, most of the range: plummeted, soared, a dramatic fall, a sharp rise.
• Clear but moderate move: fell steadily, rose gradually, a steady decline.
• Small move: edged down, rose slightly, a slight increase, a marginal rise.
• Flat: remained stable, held steady at, levelled off.

The safest habit is to pair the word with the number so the reader can check you: "rose slightly, from 31% to 32%". If the number contradicts the adverb, the examiner sees the contradiction immediately. The language for numbers and approximation page goes through the rest of that, including the difference between percent and percentage points.

The four errors that actually appear

The Bandly sample library has four Task 1 Academic answers published with their four criterion estimates on the page: a bar chart, a line graph, a table and a process diagram. I read every Lexical Resource comment the engine left on them, fifteen negative comments in total, and sorted them by what they were about.

• Two concerned the choice of a change word itself: "heavily dominated", where a plainer collocation was more natural, and "usage", where "use" was the more precise noun.
• Two were about repeating the same frame twice in a paragraph.
• One was a general remark that the vocabulary was adequate but not consistently precise.
• Ten were word form, plural agreement, preposition or spelling errors in the words around the number.

Not one of the fifteen said the writer lacked trend vocabulary.

Three of the four answers received a Lexical Resource estimate of band 6. The one that reached band 7 had no word form, plural or preposition error at all; its three comments were the collocation above and two about repetition. So in this small set, what separated 6 from 7 was accuracy in the words around the trend, not the range of the trend words themselves. Four answers is far too small a set to be a rule, and the bands on them are estimates from a scoring engine rather than marks from a qualified examiner, so take it as a direction to look in rather than a finding.

These are the four error types, with the real sentences they came from:

1. The preposition after the verb. "Average household electricity consumption in Germany decreased in 4,100 to 3,000 kWh per year." The fix is structural, not lexical:

• from X to Y for the two endpoints: decreased from 4,100 to 3,000.
• by Z for the size of the change: decreased by 1,100.
• at for a level that does not move: remained stable at 3,000.

Mixing them up ("increased with 18%", "decreased in 4,100") is the single most common error in this set.

2. The word form. "India experienced a steady grow from a very low base." After "a steady" the noun is required: a steady rise, a steady growth. Grow is a verb and cannot follow an article. The same error appears as "a significant increased" or "the figure was decrease".

3. The plural and the agreement. From the table answer: "in all the five country", "in both year", "a significant rise of 15 percents". Countable nouns take the plural after a number, and percent has no plural; a change of 15 in a percentage figure is 15 percentage points. The verb has to agree too: "the table compare" should be compares, and "the figures shows" should be show.

4. The repeated frame. The bar chart answer used "accounting for", "which stood at" and "which each accounted for" in two sentences, and the comment called it a lack of flexibility. This is what the two patterns above are for: when you notice a frame appearing twice, rewrite the second one with the other pattern.

A real paragraph, rewritten

This is the Germany and India section of the published line graph answer, which received a Lexical Resource estimate of 6 and an overall estimate of 7.

Similarly, Germany also saw a gradual reduction in electricity use. Average household electricity consumption in Germany decreased in 4100 to 3000 kWh per year between 2000 and 2020, which was the second lowest throughout the period. Meanwhile, India experienced a steady grow from a very low base.

Rewritten, with the reason for each change:

Germany followed a similar path, with consumption declining gradually from 4,100 to 3,000 kWh a year between 2000 and 2020, the second lowest figure in the period. India, by contrast, rose steadily from a very low base.

• "decreased in 4100 to 3000" became "declining gradually from 4,100 to 3,000". The preposition is now correct, which is Lexical Resource: the original comment on that span called the wrong preposition an inaccuracy in word choice.
• "a steady grow" became "rose steadily". Turning the broken noun phrase into a verb phrase removes the word form error and, because the sentence before it now uses a noun style, it also varies the pattern. That is Lexical Resource for the form and Grammatical Range and Accuracy for the variation.
• "Similarly, Germany also saw" lost its "also". Similarly and also do the same job, so one of them is repetition: Coherence and Cohesion.
• "which was the second lowest throughout the period" became an appositive phrase, "the second lowest figure in the period". The original answer used "which" clauses repeatedly, and a comment on another sentence flagged exactly that. Grammatical Range and Accuracy rewards more than one way of adding information.
• Nothing was added about the shape of the lines, because the original selection of facts was right. Task Achievement on that answer was estimated at 8, and the rewrite is not trying to fix what was already working.

Tense comes from the dates, not from the chart

A trend is normally described in the past simple, because most Task 1 charts cover a finished period: between 2000 and 2020, in 2005 and 2020. Three cases change that.

• A date in the future. Projected figures take will or is expected to: consumption is expected to rise to 4,000 kWh by 2030.
• No date at all. A static chart with no time period takes the present simple. Our page on the static chart covers how different that answer is.
• A period that reaches the present. Use the present perfect: use has fallen since 2000.

The tenses in Task 1 page works through the mixed cases, including a chart with past data and a forecast on the same axes.

Select, then describe

A trend only needs describing if it is a main feature. A twenty-year line with small wobbles in it has one trend, not nine, and describing every wobble is how answers run to 280 words and still miss the overview. Choose the one or two movements that a reader would notice from across a room, give each a sentence, and group the rest. The graph answer checklist goes through that selection step in more detail.

Do this today

Take any line graph. Write one sentence for its biggest movement using the verb pattern, then rewrite the same sentence using the noun pattern. Then check three things in both versions: is the preposition from, to, by or at; is every word after an article a noun; does the adverb match the size of the number.

Ten minutes of that is worth more than another vocabulary list. When you want to see which of the four criteria your own Task 1 answer is leaking marks to, paste it into Bandly and read the Lexical Resource comments span by span. The bands it returns are estimates from a scoring engine and not marks from a qualified examiner, so use them the way the four answers above were used here: as a way of finding the exact words that cost you something.