How IELTS Writing Is Scored: The Official Band Descriptors in Plain English, Band 5 to 8 (Part 2 of 4): TR in Task 2, and Coherence and Cohesion

IELTS · Practice Methods中文版　Updated 2026/11/09

In this post: What separates TR bands 5 to 8 in Task 2, and why more linking words do not mean a higher CC score, with my own marked essays as examples.

3. TR (Task 2): the difference between bands 5, 6, 7 and 8

TR was my highest-scoring criterion in Task 2 (an average of 7.37 across 23 essays), and ten essays got an 8. But in my three TR 6 essays, the problem was never the English. It was that I hadn’t answered what the question was really asking.

TR 5: I never got it, but it’s only one step below 6

My lowest TR in Task 2 was 6, so I don’t have a TR 5 of my own. Working down from a 6: if my entertainers’ pay essay had skipped the second question entirely, or if every point had been only one sentence long, it would have fallen into “only part of the question answered, ideas underdeveloped”.

TR 6: three essays, three ways of not answering the question

In accept or improve a bad situation (Essay 1, 20 May, the very first essay I submitted), my position sentence said that the drawbacks of accepting a bad situation outweighed the benefits, but no paragraph in the essay discussed the drawbacks of accepting, so my position and my content didn’t match. In driverless vehicles (Essay 15, 1 June), my position was very clear, but after raising two disadvantages myself (job losses and safety), I simply left them there, and the conclusion just repeated the advantages, which matches band 6’s “conclusion may just be repetitive” exactly. In entertainers’ pay (Essay 25, 14 June), both of my reasons criticised celebrities’ influence rather than arguing that their pay was too high, and for the second question I listed three jobs per category without developing any of them.

TR 7: every part answered, but too many “always”

In the advertising essay (Trial essay 3, 18 June), both views had two reasons each, plus a personal example of me skipping YouTube ads, so TR got a 7. The reason it didn’t reach 8 is very close to what band 7 describes as possible over-generalisation: I used absolute words like undoubtedly and always several times, and claims like “people will definitely buy something after seeing an ad” or “everyone always ignores ads” are easy to argue against.

TR 8: every point has a complete chain of cause and effect

Competition or cooperation (Essay 30, 19 June) was my first Discuss both views essay to get 8 for both TR and CC. Take the second reason for competition: it first says competition makes society progress, then explains that this is because it motivates people to work hard, then describes how much effort it takes before you win, and finally arrives at a rise in overall competitiveness. Claim, reason, process, result: four linked steps, which is what band 8 means by ideas being taken further and backed up. Food from all over the world in supermarkets (Essay 39, 28 June) also got TR 8. One reason was about the environment and the other about local industry; because they didn’t overlap, the paragraphs didn’t compete with each other.

4. CC, Coherence and Cohesion: more linking words doesn’t mean a higher score

CC was the criterion where my Task 2 improved most visibly. In the first two weeks my Task 2 CC averaged about 6.4; in the last two weeks it averaged about 7.9. But what I changed was not “learning more linking words”. Quite the opposite: I used fewer of them, and used them more accurately.

CC 5: I never got it; the closest I came was a topic sentence contradicting its paragraph

My lowest CC was 6 (seven times in Task 2 and three times in Task 1). Working down: the accept-a-bad-situation essay already had one paragraph where the topic sentence talked about drawbacks while the content discussed benefits. If every paragraph were like that, or if a single paragraph crammed in two ideas, it would come very close to band 5’s “not entirely logical”.

CC 6: seven argument sentences, seven template linkers

The species loss environment essay (Essay 3, 23 May) got TR 8 and GRA 8, yet CC was only 6, which pulled the overall score down to 7. When I pulled out the linking words that started each argument sentence, I found First and foremost, In other words, Secondly, To put it another way, Primarily, Furthermore and To be more specific: one per sentence. Worse, some linkers didn’t match the content: what followed To put it another way wasn’t a rephrasing at all, but a jump to solutions. That is band 6’s “mechanical, and may be used wrongly”.

CC 7: one central idea per paragraph, but the linking is too formulaic

Rural people moving to cities (Essay 6, 27 May) was my first Task 2 essay with 7 in all four criteria. The first body paragraph was only about the countryside and the second only about cities, so the paragraphing was very clean. It didn’t reach 8 because the pattern “semicolon + hence / consequently / therefore” appeared three times, and what followed In other words actually added a new inference rather than simply rephrasing.

CC 8: every sentence picks up from the one before

Shorter working week, longer weekend (Essay 32, 20 June) is an Agree/Disagree essay with CC 8. Both body paragraphs follow the same pattern: topic sentence, explanation, inference, example, extension. And their topic sentences tie back to the efficiency and mental health points raised in the introduction. There are actually fewer linking words, and many of them sit inside sentences (let alone, leading to). From 19 June onwards, all eight of my remaining Task 2 essays got CC 8.