Without capital punishment (the death penalty) our lives are less secure and crimes of violence increase. Capital punishment in essential to control violence in society. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion?
Sample Response
Before talking about the essential role of the death penaltythe essential role of death penalty, you have to think about the meaning and purposethe meaning, and the purpose, of any kind of punishment. If you consider that the purpose is to prevent offenders from committing crimes againprevent the guilty from being nasty again, you can be persuaded by an argumentseduced by an argumentation in favour of the abolitionsuppression of capital punishment. But you have to think about another aspect of the problem: a punishment is also useful to impress people, to make them fear the law. In fact, let's take the example of a young misfit, whowhich has grown in a violent atmosphere, influenced by older offendersdelinquents, and other negative influences.etc... He lives onin the streets, he has no goal beyond survivalhe's got no aim but to survive. This is the kind of person who could possibly kill someone for money, or even for fun... Why would he fear prison? Life would be easier for him there. In addition, in many cases, when prisoners behave wellwhen you behave normally, you can benefit from sentencepenalty reductions. This young misfit needs to be impressed, he needs to know that the law is a frontier. When you cross it, you can lose your life. That is why capital punishment helps maintain a distinction between robbery and murderhelps keeping a distance between robbery and murder. If you abolish it, you erase the distinctionsuppress the difference between these two types of crime, which are completely different. But there is also a limit to establishdefine: even if the death penalty is considered necessaryeven if death penalty is unavoidable, it would be a crime to apply it to inappropriateinadequate cases. If there is no premeditation or past facts which can justify such a punishment, it is far too strict to apply death penalty. That is why the lawmakers have to establish precisely the context in which capital punishment can be imposedcar be pronounced. That is the price to pay to limit violence without using excessive violence.
Why this response received Band 6.5
The response develops a recognisable, qualified argument for retaining capital punishment and sustains a logical line of reasoning through a concrete hypothetical example. However, the position emerges indirectly, the single-block organisation weakens progression, and several collocations sound unnatural; the highest-priority improvement is to state the thesis early, divide the reasoning into purposeful paragraphs, and use more precise formal vocabulary.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Response
A relevant position in favour of capital punishment is developed and qualified by the need to restrict its application, although some claims are overgeneralised.
State the degree of agreement at the outset and support the deterrence claim with more balanced reasoning rather than relying mainly on one hypothetical offender.
Coherence and Cohesion
The reasoning moves from punishment's purpose to deterrence and legal safeguards, but the absence of paragraph divisions and several loose links reduce clarity.
Separate the deterrence argument, the example, and the safeguards into distinct paragraphs with explicit logical connections.
Lexical Resource
There is enough vocabulary to discuss punishment and law in some detail, but recurrent unnatural choices reduce precision and formality.
Use established expressions such as abolition, deterrence, repeat offending, and sentence reduction in place of awkward or informal wording.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
The response attempts varied complex structures, but article, agreement, relative-pronoun, verb-pattern, and punctuation errors recur throughout.
Prioritise accurate clause boundaries and verb patterns, then check articles and agreement in every complex sentence.
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IELTS Writing Task 2
Without capital punishment (the death penalty) our lives are less secure and crimes of violence increase. Capital punishment in essential to control violence in society. 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.