IELTS Grammar Mistakes That Lower Your Band (With Fixes)

The eight IELTS grammar mistakes that cost the most

• Missing or wrong articles. "Government should invest in education system." Fix: "The government should invest in the education system." Rule of thumb: a singular countable noun almost always needs an article or a determiner.
• Subject–verb agreement. "The number of students have increased." Fix: "The number of students has increased." The verb agrees with "number", not "students".
• Run-on sentences. "Cities are growing fast this causes pollution." Fix: "Cities are growing fast, and this causes pollution." Two clauses need a conjunction or a full stop.
• Comma splices. "Some people prefer cars, others choose public transport." Fix: use a semicolon, a full stop, or "while". A comma alone cannot join two complete sentences.
• Tense shifts. "In the past people walked to work, and now they are driving." Fix: "In the past people walked to work; now they drive." Keep the time frame consistent within an idea.
• Wrong preposition after a verb. "Depend of", "discuss about", "emphasise on". Fix: "depend on", "discuss", "emphasise". Learn the verb with its preposition as one unit.
• Uncountable nouns made plural. "Advices", "researches", "informations", "equipments". Fix: "advice", "research", "information", "equipment", with "a piece of" if you need a unit.
• Broken conditionals. "If the government will raise taxes, people would protest." Fix: "If the government raised taxes, people would protest." Match the tenses: present + will, past + would.

Most candidates make three or four of these consistently and the others rarely. Your correction history, not a grammar book, tells you which. A useful exercise is to take your last three essays, mark every error with one of the eight labels above, and count. The two labels with the highest counts are your targets for the next month. Candidates are usually surprised: the error they worry about, such as conditionals, often appears twice, while the one they never think about, such as articles, appears fifteen times.

How examiners count errors

The Grammatical Range and Accuracy descriptor at band 6 allows "some errors" that "rarely reduce communication"; at band 7 it asks for "frequent error-free sentences" and "good control"; at band 8 "the majority of sentences are error-free". The examiner is effectively asking two questions about every sentence: is it completely correct, and if not, does the error obscure the meaning?

This has two consequences. First, frequency matters more than severity for the 6-to-7 step. Ten missing articles across an essay keep you at band 6 even though each one is trivial. Second, errors that obscure meaning, such as a run-on that leaves the reader unsure which clause the "because" belongs to, are weighted more heavily because they also damage Coherence. Fixing the two or three error types you repeat most is the fastest route from 6 to 7; the exotic structures can wait.

Range still matters

Accuracy alone does not reach band 7. An essay of short, correct, simple sentences caps at band 6 because the descriptors ask for "a variety of complex structures". The goal is a mix: one or two complex sentences per paragraph (a relative clause, a conditional, a concession with "although") that you can control, surrounded by simpler sentences that are definitely correct. Writing every sentence as a complex one multiplies the errors and lowers both criteria. For the structures that reliably appear in band 7 essays, see the grammar guide for IELTS and TOEFL.

A self-check routine for the last three minutes

Leave three minutes at the end of Task 2 and check for your own top three errors, not for everything. A candidate whose history shows articles, agreement and comma splices runs these passes:

1. Articles (60 seconds): scan every singular noun; if it has no "a", "the" or determiner, decide whether it needs one.
2. Agreement (60 seconds): find every "number of", "majority of", "one of", and check the verb.
3. Commas (60 seconds): at every comma, ask whether both sides could stand alone as sentences. If yes, change the comma.

Three focused passes find more than one general read-through, because you know what you are looking for. Update the three targets each month as your correction reports change.

What a correction should tell you about grammar

Useful grammar feedback names the error type, quotes the sentence, gives the corrected form and counts how often that type appeared. "Grammar: 6" on its own is not feedback. Nor is a rewritten essay, which fixes the problem for you without showing which rule you broke. Our guide to what examiners look for in IELTS essay correction explains how grammar interacts with the other three criteria, and why a run-on sentence can cost you twice.

Practise with Langujet

Langujet's IELTS writing correction tags every grammar error by type and sentence, so after three essays you can see your own top three. Pick prompts by essay type from the IELTS Writing Task 2 guide, write under the 40-minute limit, and run the three-minute self-check before submitting so you can measure how many errors you now catch yourself.