Can You Use 'I' in IELTS Writing? Where First Person Helps and Where It Costs You

Your teacher at school said never write I in an essay. A preparation website said you must write I believe or the examiner cannot find your opinion. Both pieces of advice are about different kinds of writing, and only one of them is about IELTS.

Here is the short answer. First person is allowed in IELTS writing. Task 2 questions ask what you think, and a letter in General Training is written by you to a named reader, so the pronoun is unavoidable there. What costs marks is not the word I. It is using it so often that every claim in the essay sounds like a private feeling rather than an argument.

What the question actually asks for

Read the instruction line of a Task 2 question. The common forms include What is your opinion?, To what extent do you agree or disagree? and Discuss both views and give your own opinion. Each of those asks for a position that belongs to you.

Task Response, the first of the four criteria, measures whether you answered the question that was set. If the question asks for your opinion and your essay never commits to one, Task Response drops no matter how clean the grammar is. So the risk people worry about, that I will be marked down, is smaller than the risk they create by avoiding it: an essay with no visible position at all.

The other three criteria are Coherence and Cohesion, which covers how the ideas are organised and linked, Lexical Resource, which covers vocabulary, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. None of them contains a rule about pronouns.

Where first person is required

In General Training Task 1 you write a letter. The task tells you who the reader is and what you want. You cannot request a refund, apologise for missing a meeting or apply for a job without saying what you did and what you want.

I am writing to apply for the position of weekend receptionist, advertised in the local newspaper on 12 October.

Removing I from that sentence would make it worse, not better. The same is true of the body: I worked for two years in a hotel reception is the natural sentence, and a candidate who writes Two years of hotel reception experience has been obtained has produced something stiff and slightly odd for a letter to a manager.

Where first person is optional, and what overuse looks like

Task 2 is where candidates get into trouble, because the pronoun is allowed and they then use it in every sentence. Compare these two paragraphs on the same idea.

Version A.

I think that cars cause a lot of pollution. I believe this is bad for people in cities. In my opinion, I feel the government should do something about it. I personally think public transport is the answer. I believe that if buses were cheaper, I think more people would use them.

Version B.

Private cars are the largest single source of urban air pollution, and the health costs fall on the people least able to avoid them. In my view, the most effective response is to make public transport cheaper than driving. When bus fares in a city drop below the daily cost of parking, commuters switch, because the decision is made on cost rather than on principle.

Version B uses first person once. It still has a clear position, and the position is clearer than in Version A, because the claims around it are stated as claims about the world rather than as reports of the writer's feelings.

Version A has a second problem that is easier to score than the first. I think, I believe, in my opinion and I feel all mean the same thing, and repeating four versions of one phrase is exactly what Lexical Resource measures. The paragraph has a vocabulary of about thirty words doing the work of a hundred.

A rewrite, phrase by phrase

These are the swaps that do the most work. The left column is not wrong. It is just something you should do once in an essay, not six times.

Notice that the right column has not removed your opinion. The stronger case is for government regulation is a position. It is simply stated the way an argument is stated.

How many times is safe

There is no published number, and anyone who gives you one has invented it. A practical habit that works: use first person where it marks your position, which usually means once in the introduction and once in the conclusion, and let the body paragraphs argue in the third person.

That gives you two uses in a 270 word essay. If you find a third place where in my view genuinely signals a shift from reporting an idea to judging it, use it there. What you are avoiding is the pattern in Version A, where the phrase has become filler that starts every sentence.

The two things to stop doing

**Stop writing I in Task 1 Academic.** A chart description has no opinion in it. Task 1 Academic asks you to summarise what the data shows, and a sentence like I think the graph shows an increase adds four words and a hedge to a sentence that should read Car ownership rose steadily between 1990 and 2010. Hedging a number that is printed on the chart in front of you reads as uncertainty about reading a chart.

**Stop using we for people in general.** We should protect the environment sounds natural in speech, but in an essay the reader cannot tell who we is: your country, your generation, or everyone alive. Name the group. Governments should, parents should, employers should. This one is worth more than the I question, because it affects whether your sentence has a subject the reader can identify.

Do this today

Take an essay you have already written and count every instance of I think, I believe, in my opinion and I feel. If the total is above two, rewrite all but two of them using the right hand column of the table above. Keep the two that mark your position, in the introduction and the conclusion.

Then read the essay again and check that your position is still obvious to someone reading quickly. If it is not, you removed the wrong one. You can paste the rewritten version into Bandly for an estimate of where each of the four criteria sits, which is a useful way to see whether the edit moved Lexical Resource without damaging Task Response.