It has been said, "Not everything that is learned is contained in books." Compare and contrast knowledge gained from experience with knowledge gained from books. In your opinion, which source is more important? Why?
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Sample Response
"Experience is the best teacher" is a familiar clichéan old cliché, but I agree with it. We can learn a lot of important things from books, but the most important lessons in life come from our own experiences. Throughout different stages of lifeThroughout the different stages of life, from primary school to university to adulthood, experience teaches us many skills we need infor life.
As children in primary school, we learn facts and information from books, but that is not all we learn in school. On the playground we learn how to make friends. Through our classworkIn our class work, we learn how it feels to succeed and how to respond when we failwhat we do when we fail. We start to learn about the activities we enjoy and those we dislikethe things we like to do and the things we don't. We don't learn these things from books, but from our experiences with friends and classmatesour experiences with our friends and classmates.
In our university classes, we learn a lot of information and skills we will need for our future careers, but we also learn a lot that is not in our textbooks. In daily life, both inside and outside classIn our daily lives both in class and out of class, we learn to make decisions for ourselves. We learn to take on responsibilities. We learn to get along with our classmates, our roommates, and our colleaguesworkmates. Our successes and failures help us develop skills we will need in our adult lives. They are skills that no book can teach us.
Throughout our adulthood, experience remains a constant teacher. We may continue to read or take classes for professional development. However, our experiences at work, at home, and with our friends teach us more. Our successes and setbacksThe triumphs and disasters of our lives teach us how to improve our careers and also how to improve our relationships and how to be the person each one of us wants to be.
Books teach us a lot, but there is a limit to what they teach. They can give us information or expose us to other people's experiencesshow us another person's experiences. These are valuable things, but the lessons we learn from our own experiences, from childhood through adulthood, are the most important ones we learn.
Why this response received Band 8.0
The response’s strongest feature is its clear, sustained position, developed through a logical progression from childhood to adulthood and supported by relevant examples. Its main limitation is that book-based knowledge is treated rather briefly, so the comparison is less fully balanced than the argument for experience. The highest-priority improvement is to analyse the distinctive benefits and limits of books in comparable depth before reaffirming the conclusion.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Response
The response fully addresses the question with a clear preference for experience and relevant development across life stages, although book-based knowledge receives less analysis.
Develop the benefits and limitations of learning from books in greater depth to make the comparison more comprehensive.
Coherence and Cohesion
Ideas progress logically through clearly focused paragraphs organised by life stage, with cohesive links that rarely draw attention to themselves.
Refine the progression further by varying recurring sentence openings and linking the contrasts between the two sources more explicitly.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is varied, accurate, and appropriate, with effective expressions such as “constant teacher” and “triumphs and disasters,” despite some repetition of key words.
Use a wider range of precise terms for different kinds of knowledge and learning to reduce repetition of “learn,” “skills,” and “experiences.”
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A wide range of simple and complex structures is used accurately, and the response is virtually free from grammatical errors.
Vary clause patterns and sentence openings more deliberately to make the repeated subject-verb structures less noticeable.