The only way to cut the crime rate is building more prisons and make prison sentences longer. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion?
Sample Response
As we see nowadays the crime rate has increased comparatively and many people think that building more prisons and putting people inside for a long time will help to reduce the crime rate but actually this is not the solution in my opinion.
The first thing we need to do is to control the crime rate in societyin the society by raising public awarenessraising awareness in people and through positive media. The media playshas a very important role in raising awareness among the general populationin common population through television and the Internet. The young generation is deeply influenced by the violence based movies and such movies should not me made instead positive messages should be given to the innocent minds so that tomorrow they become the useful citizens.
Another important issue is the increased use of unlicensed weapons openly in society as it is seen commonly now that on small issues people lose their tempers and don't hesitate in using guns. At the same time, security should be increased at the community levelat society level particularlylike in small towns and other neglected places and the number of security vehiclessecurity automobiles number should also be increased.
The idea of increasing the number of prisonsincreasing the prison number and holding criminals inside for a long timeholding the criminals long time inside is not a very sensible idea because it is observed that people form organised gangsstart making organised gangs in prisoninside the jails and sometimes become more serious criminals thanbecome big criminals than they were ever before. Instead of wasting this money on extending the prison system, the government should investprison system Government should invest this money on beneficial national programmesbeneficial plans for a nation like constructing modern hospitals, improving the pre-existing health sector and raising education standardsgiving better education standards.
To sum up, raising awareness can make a remarkable difference in people's attitudesattitude and can reduce crime ratesdecline the crime rates. This is a far better approachthis is a far better approach than increasing the number of prisons and lengthening prison sentencesprolonging the punishment period.
Why this response received Band 6.0
The essay clearly rejects prison expansion as the sole solution and proposes public awareness, weapons control, stronger security, and alternative social investment. Its strongest feature is the consistent position and paragraph-level organisation, but several proposed measures have weak or unexplained links to crime reduction, while frequent grammatical and collocational errors reduce precision. The highest priority is to choose two credible alternatives and develop their causal effects through specific, controlled examples.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Response
The response maintains a clear disagreement and offers several alternatives, but their relevance and effectiveness are often asserted rather than convincingly explained.
Develop two measures, such as weapons enforcement and education, showing step by step how each would prevent particular forms of crime.
Coherence and Cohesion
The five-paragraph structure gives the argument clear overall progression, although long sentences and loosely connected details sometimes weaken flow within paragraphs.
Keep each body paragraph centred on one prevention strategy and use shorter cause-and-effect sequences to link evidence to the main claim.
Lexical Resource
There is adequate vocabulary for crime, media, security, and public spending, but frequent inaccurate collocations and word forms reduce naturalness.
Use precise phrases such as 'raise public awareness', 'violent films', 'increase police patrols', and 'reduce the crime rate'.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
The response attempts varied sentence structures, but frequent errors in sentence boundaries, articles, verb forms, agreement, and comparison weaken control.
Split run-on sentences into complete units and check comparative forms, passive verbs, and capitalisation during proofreading.
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IELTS Writing Task 2
The only way to cut the crime rate is building more prisons and make prison sentences longer. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion?
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.