Vocabulitis
It is a common condition that many IELTS candidates from all over the world have. I first ran into an advanced case of this about a year ago on the Facebook IELTS Tips and Tricks group. At the time, I’d been an IELTS instructor for five years, but always with local students only in a classroom in Yangon, Myanmar. I remember it well because it was one of my first engaged efforts in providing feedback on Facebook. I was helping a very nice lady doctor whose English level was quite good but she kept failing in the writing portion of the test. Sound familiar? I think she was from Rawalpindi or maybe it was Hyderabad… It didn’t matter. Vocabulitis is rampant throughout all of South Asia.
Two factors lead to this epidemic: First, English is widely used as a 2nd language throughout the region, thus there’s a lot of high-level users out there. Second, I’ve heard your teachers tell you to do this. Always look for a more advanced, less common synonym and you’ll earn high marks in LR. I’m sorry, that’s simply mistaken.
If you talk to candidates who’ve done well on the test after multiple attempts of failure and and many of them will tell you that success finally came when they learned to keep it simple. When they stopped looking for the magic words and instead focused on writing clearly, they finally beat the 7.0 barrier.
it strikes vietnam
This was the first sprinkle of this current wave of Vocabulitis came a couple days after Christmasn. I know I said it was a South Asian thing, but Quan proves me wrong. His (hers?) quote below about technology. I re-write the gobbledygook in the video.
SHe had it all - vocabulitis first
For instance, despite the fact the subordinates are on holidays, innumerable working categories with multiple critical situations ranging from doctors to treat the emergency patients, police officers to investigate the street felonies or the engineers to complete the presentation tasks beforehand, corresponds to few cases where it becomes compulsory to keep in touch with the former. [JM1]
[JM1]One sentence – 56 words
SO How to get a high band in lr?
Precision and collocation
Precision means the words express the exact variation of meaning that the writer was intending to make their point clearer and more concise.
Collocation is knowing which words go with other words. Using a nice bit of precise vocab won't mean much if you don't know verbs or prepositions go with it.
I stayed up too late
My title for the video review was "Everything is fine except for most of your words. "
"School going individuals" will go down as a classic example of Vocabulitis
i'll match your incoherence
This essay had several problems, as did the review,which kind of wandered back and forth as I was determined to finish it before bedtime.
are you getting the picture?
loading up your writing with inaccurate "high-level" vocabulary is not a strategy... it's a problem.
Some of the language in our last example is so wonderful, it gets two sentences...
Secondly, publishing the forensics report of a crime scene to the public without any authorization also yields a lot of revenue to the media agencies since it interests many people. Also, sharing such bloody visuals and reports could obnoxiously disturb some people and pushes them to distress
So it’s a common problem. There’s hundreds of other blogs out there that are saying the same thing that I am right now.. I want to bring it to your attention because by chance at the moment there seems to be quite a lot of you in the group suffering from this condition.
Hopefully you’ll accept this idea, simplify your terminology and only use words for which you're certain you know it means and how it collocates. Then, you will do well. And then you’ll move on. Another cohort of students will fill up this group and they will bring their fresh cases of Vocabulitis in with them, and we'll be trying to teach them this lesson all over again.
But for you, here and now, if you've got this problem it may take you some time to break your old habits. I was somewhat dismayed that one of the 4 writers above wrote another blog that had all the same problems.
Don't Believe Me?
Check out what these other IELTS Gurus have to say about Lexical Resource and the danger of Vocabulitis!
Safwan Izruna at IELTS Writing Prep begins an interesting blog with: "
A common mistake made by students is the overuse and incorrect use of formal vocabulary. Most seem to think that the more formal vocabulary in their writing, the higher the mark for LR. This is a misconception, to say the least.
Shelly Cormick at MyIELTSclassroom.com writes about 5 common Lexical Resource Mistakes.
This is a common misconception and why many students think that it is a good idea to use a thesaurus to find the most difficult version of a word that they can (as I explain later, this is never a good idea).
Christopher Pell addresses "high level language" among South Asians in particular in his video "Why Indian students fail the IELTS test".. It starts at the 10:00 minute mark