How to Write an IELTS Advantages/Disadvantages Essay Without Repeating Yourself (Part 1 of 3): Check the Question Type, and Stop Writing One Thing as Two Sides

IELTS · Task 2 Structure中文版　Updated 2026/11/09

In this post: How to tell the three advantages/disadvantages question types apart, and the most common way to lose marks: writing one thing once as an advantage and once as a disadvantage.

Advantages/disadvantages questions look like the easiest type to write: think of two advantages and two disadvantages, and four paragraphs are done. But when I look back at my own advantages/disadvantages essays, my scores were often held back not by having too few points but by repeated points. An advantage and a disadvantage were really the same thing, told once from the positive side and once from the negative side.

The clearest case is Essay 15 (Cambridge 16 Test 4, driverless vehicles). My advantage was “companies save on drivers’ wages and training costs”, and my disadvantage was “drivers will lose their jobs”. Both paragraphs seemed to have content, but look closely and the two points come from one fact: there is no need for a driver in the vehicle. For the company it saves money, for the driver it means losing a job. One positive, one negative: two of my four points were the same thing.

I have already covered how to recognise the question type and how to “weigh” the two sides in an Outweigh conclusion in IELTS Outweigh Essays, so this post only touches on that briefly. This post deals with a different problem: how to think of advantages and disadvantages that are complete and do not repeat each other, and how to develop each point deeply enough.

“Essay N” refers to the order in which I submitted my essays for marking. The scores are the four criterion scores (TR / CC / LR / GRA) and overall band given by the marker; the reasons behind the scores are my own analysis against the public IELTS band descriptors.

1. Check the question type first: pure pros and cons, pros and cons + opinion, or Outweigh

Spend ten seconds checking whether you need to give an opinion and how many points to write. The differences between these three question types affect which points you choose at the planning stage:

Essay 43 (Cambridge 15 Test 4) is a good reminder. The question is about adults often telling children that they can achieve anything if they try hard enough. At first glance it looks as if you have to judge whether that statement is true, or which side is greater. But the question itself is only What are the advantages and disadvantages of giving children this message? There is no outweigh and no give your opinion. So my second sentence in the introduction only previewed “analysing the advantages and disadvantages”, and the conclusion summarised each side once without forcing in a position. This essay got TR 8, CC 8, LR 8 and GRA 7, 7.5 overall.

2. The most common way to lose marks: writing one thing as two sides

I call this problem “mirror repetition”: the advantage and the disadvantage reflect each other like a mirror and are really two sides of one point. It hurts your score in two ways:

• You do not actually have enough points. Four paragraph slots hold only three, or even two, ideas. Task Response looks at whether ideas are extended and supported, and repeated points make an essay look thin on ideas.
• The two points cancel each other out. The advantage says A will happen; the disadvantage says A will not happen. The reader finishes and asks, “So will it happen or not?” The argument looks contradictory, which also affects Coherence.

Example 1: Essay 15, driverless vehicles (6.5): one fact split into an advantage and a disadvantage

The first point in the advantages paragraph:

The first point in the disadvantages paragraph:

Put side by side, it is obvious: “companies do not pay drivers’ wages” and “drivers lose their jobs” are the same thing. This was an Outweigh question, and I wrote it as a 2 + 2 list, so these two points simply sat apart without forming a comparison. The rewrite in the sample post (the Band 6.5 driverless vehicles sample) puts these two points into one paragraph and links them with “the money saved can pay for retraining”, turning them into material for weighing.

In other words, two points from the same source can still be used, but they cannot each take a slot as two independent points.

Example 2: Trial Essay (26A), gap year (6.5): symmetrical topics that fight each other

This was a pros and cons + opinion question. Putting the four points into a table reveals a very neat but risky structure:

The two points in the “work” column directly contradict each other. The advantages paragraph says:

But the disadvantages paragraph says:

One says work lets students learn real-world knowledge; the other says students cannot find suitable work at all. Each sentence makes sense on its own, but in the same essay the reader feels that the writer has not thought it through.

By contrast, the two points in the “travel” column are fine: the advantage is about health (mental relaxation) and the disadvantage is about money (the cost of travel). It is the same activity, but approached from two different angles, so they do not cancel each other out. So the test is not “can the topic be the same?” but “are they the positive and negative of the same thing?”

Three kinds of relationship in one table

To catch mirror repetition, I use two quick tests:

1. The opposite test: turn a disadvantage into its opposite and see whether it becomes one of your advantages. The opposite of “cannot find suitable work” is “can find work and learn from it”, which is exactly advantage one, so it is a repeat.
2. The same-source test: ask yourself, “Are these two points caused by the same fact?” “No driver needed” leads to both saving money and job losses, so they share a source.