Eight Minutes Left and a 6.5 to Find
Chen writes Task 2 in 38 of his 40 minutes and produces 268 words. His position appears only in the conclusion. Both body paragraphs open 'Firstly' and 'Secondly', and each offers a single personal anecdote with no explanation of why the anecdote supports the claim. Grammar shows five errors, all of one type: subject–verb agreement in long noun phrases with a plural head. Vocabulary is precise and varied, with one collocation slip. Paragraphing and linkers are effective. His teacher estimates him at 6.0 overall and he needs 6.5. He habitually finishes with about eight minutes unused and does not know what to do with them.
1. Rank his three weaknesses - delayed position, undeveloped examples, agreement errors - by expected band impact per unit of effort. Justify the ranking.
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1. Delayed position (highest impact, lowest cost). A position that only surfaces in the conclusion reads as unclear throughout, and that judgement is applied to the whole response, not to one paragraph. The fix is a thesis sentence at the end of the introduction - roughly 25 words - plus a topic sentence per body paragraph that states the claim before the example. Cost: minutes. Effect: it can lift the response a full descriptor band on task response.
2. Undeveloped examples (high impact, low cost). An anecdote followed by nothing leaves the idea unsupported. Two sentences of explanation after each example ('This shows X because…') converts illustration into argument. Roughly 60 words of new text.
3. Agreement errors (moderate impact, moderate cost). Five errors of a single, recognisable type is a pattern, not noise, and long noun phrases hide the head noun. But it is one criterion and the errors do not impede understanding. Ten minutes of drilling on complex noun phrases fixes this faster than rewriting essays.
Conclusion: fix 1 and 2 in the writing session; fix 3 in short drills between essays.
2. Specify exactly how Chen should use the eight unused minutes, in order, and explain why that order rather than proofreading for spelling.
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Ordered checklist (stop at the end of the eight minutes regardless):
- Read the introduction only. Is there a sentence that states the position? If not, insert one. (2 min)
- Read the first sentence of each body paragraph. Does each state a claim that supports that position? If a paragraph only narrates, add a topic sentence above it. (2 min)
- Read the sentence after each example. If it does not explain the link to the claim, add one clause: 'which suggests that…'. (2 min)
- Scan only for the agreement pattern - find each long noun phrase, underline the head noun, check its verb. (2 min)
Why this order: the first three items address the criteria where he is losing most, and all are additive - he can insert a sentence without disturbing what is already written. Spelling and general proofreading have low expected return here because his vocabulary is already precise and the sloppiness risk of last-minute edits on a clean script is real. Step 4 is included but placed last because it is the one item that requires a different reading mode.
3. Chen asks whether he should simply write a longer essay to be safe. Answer him using his own data.
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No - length is not his constraint.
At 268 words he is already comfortably above any minimum, and his paragraphing and linkers are effective. Adding 40 words of the same kind of content would add another anecdote with no explanation, which strengthens the second weakness rather than fixing it.
The diagnosis is that his words are spent on narration rather than argument. The right move is to redirect roughly 60 existing words - convert part of each anecdote into an explanation of the link - and add at most one sentence to the introduction. That keeps him near 270 words and changes what the examiner can score.
If he wants a safety margin, the margin should be in argument density, not word count: every body paragraph should be checkable against the question, sentence by sentence. That is also what makes the eight-minute checklist above usable.