Many people use social media every day to get in touch with other people and news events. Do you think the advantages of this outweigh the disadvantages?
Sample Response
Beyond daily communication, social media has also been used as a platform for sharing newsplatform of spreading news events. Owing to this development, many people now have instant access to current issues. Despite the convenience and efficiency, I personally believe there are more disadvantages to this excessive usein such excessive use of social media.
It is true that current technology and social mediathe current technology and social media make news available to the public sooner than any conventional media like newspapers. This not only enables a faster coverage of news, but also reducesbut reduces the use of printed materials to some extent. What also needs to be acknowledged is the significance of social media in promoting interpersonal communication and information exchange. In extreme cases, like during coronavirusCorona virus prevention and control, social media has proved its valueliability as an alternative for offline activities, such as family gatherings and school orientations.
However, many people are so tied up with social networksnetwork that they tend to overlook the long-term side effects. The major problem with using social media in news reporting is that there tends to be a lack of fact-checkingfact verification before content is sharedbefore the sharing process happens. People are easily overwhelmed by political argumentsthe political arguments, posted selfies, shared links, and brand videos that enter the average news feed every day. When reading current events on social media, many people simply scrollmany people are found just scrolling past headlines and not wanting to read them, either because of information overload or the suspicion of fake news.
The notion that social media improves communication also tends to be simplistic and idealized. Very often, the quality of an online conversation is unfavorable because one cannot sense the other person’s emotionssense the emotion from the other person. Reliance on social media could hurt a person’s ability to have a face-to-face conversation, since it is unusual to convey a thoughtful message through speech or instant messagesthrough spoken word or instant texting. Thus, the dependence on social networksnetwork has in fact reduced communication quality.
To conclude, my view is that the benefits of using social media as a meansmean of daily contact and access to newsdaily contact and news events are minor compared withare tiny, compared with the negative repercussions in the long run. The excessive use has caused an unhealthy environment in society.
Why this response received Band 7.5
The response takes a clear position and develops both the benefits and the longer-term drawbacks of social media in a logical, well-paragraphed argument. Its main weakness is imprecise language, with several unnatural or incorrect collocations weakening otherwise sophisticated points; the highest-priority improvement is to choose natural noun-preposition combinations and verify that advanced vocabulary conveys the intended meaning.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Response
The essay directly evaluates the relative advantages and disadvantages and sustains a clear view with relevant development on communication and news.
Strengthen the final judgement by briefly weighing the most important benefit against the most serious drawback rather than describing the benefits as simply tiny.
Coherence and Cohesion
The argument is logically sequenced, with focused paragraphs and cohesive links that make the progression easy to follow.
Use slightly less formulaic opening transitions so the connections between claims arise more naturally from the reasoning.
Lexical Resource
The response shows a broad vocabulary, but recurrent collocational problems such as platform of spreading and proved its liability reduce precision.
Prioritise accurate, natural collocations over ambitious substitutions, especially with prepositions and abstract nouns.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
Complex structures are varied and mostly controlled, though article, number, and noun-form errors recur without obscuring the message.
Proofread noun phrases systematically for articles, singular-plural agreement, and correct forms such as means rather than mean.
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IELTS Writing Task 2
Many people use social media every day to get in touch with other people and news events. Do you think the advantages of this outweigh the disadvantages?
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.