Some People Prefer to Spend Their Lives Doing the Same Things and Avoiding Change. Others, However, Think That Change Is Always a Good Thing. Discuss Both These Views

As an IELTS writing instructor, I am often asked by my students what the secret is to successful essay writing. When I tell them ‘lots of practice, lots of guidance and lots of patience’, they usually look at me a bit disappointed as though my answer was too obvious.
So I tell them, ‘just follow the 4 Cs.’
‘The 4 Cs?’ they ask with new interest.
Yes, the 4 Cs: conciseness, cohesion, coherence and composition. Each needs to be employed properly if you want to score well on your Task 2 essay. In this short article, which I am writing exclusively for www.ielts-blog.com, I would like to touch on each of the 4 Cs and describe how you can use these powerful ideas to heighten your IELTS score.
So let’s begin with conciseness. Unlike other languages which prize long and very elaborate sentences, proper written English is language that says a lot in few words. Students often falsely believe that the longer a sentence is the more academic it sounds. Writing longer sentences in your response is problematic for 2 reasons. The first is it heightens the chances of errors related to coherence. The second is it makes it more difficult for you to control the grammar of the sentence, leading to silly grammatical mistakes. Too often, students receive disappointing marks on their IELTS essay simply because their long sentences led them to issues with coherence and grammar.
So how long should a sentence be? Including cohesive phrases (the second ‘C’ in our list), typical sentences are somewhere between 8 and 15 words.
Now let’s take a look at how to write these cohesive phrases.
Cohesion refers to words and phrases that help ideas link together. Cohesive phrases include wordings like…
Because of this, …
As this shows, …
As can clearly be seen from this example, …
It is clear that…
Thus, the idea that…
To illustrate this, …
After analyzing both points of view, …
To provide a summary, …
Without a doubt, this causes…
What I always suggest to students is to commit many...