Common mistakes in Academic Task 1

Six of them, and they are not equally expensive. The first costs more than the other five put together, so it gets most of this page.

1. No overview

Task Achievement is capped without one. Not reduced, capped. You can describe every value on the chart correctly, in clean English, and still not get past the middle bands, because the criterion asks you to identify main features and overall trends — and listing numbers is not identifying anything.

An overview is one or two sentences saying what is striking when you stand back: the highest and lowest, the general direction, the biggest change. It carries no specific figures, because figures are detail and this is the opposite of detail.

Both sentences describe the same data. One is transcription, one is an observation, and only the observation is what the task asked for.

Write it second, straight after the paraphrase, before you have decided which details to include. Left until the end it gets rushed or lost, and this is the last thing in Task 1 you can afford to lose.

2. Describing every data point

You are marked on selection. A chart with twenty values does not want twenty sentences; it wants the two or three groupings that make the twenty values mean something. What moves together, what is the outlier, where the biggest gap sits.

The exception is a small table or a chart with four or five values. There is nothing to select, and covering all of it is correct.

3. Explaining why

Task 1 asks what the data shows. Speculating about causes earns nothing and spends words that could have earned something, so "this is probably due to the economic crisis" is worse than silence.

4. Misreading the chart

Easy under time pressure and expensive when it happens: reading a percentage as an absolute number, missing an axis that does not start at zero, missing that a map has a before and an after.

Spend the first minute on axes, units and dates. Nothing else in that minute pays as well.

5. Copying the prompt

Copied text counts toward neither your word count nor your Lexical Resource. An introduction lifted from the question is words you wrote for nothing. Paraphrase it instead — the paraphrase is itself assessed.

6. The wrong tense

Past dates take past tenses. A process diagram usually takes present simple, often passive. A projection takes future forms. Mixing them is visible, and it is marked as an accuracy error.

The structure this implies

1. Paraphrase the prompt. One sentence.
2. Overview. One or two sentences, no figures.
3. First group of detail, with selected figures.
4. The rest, plus any comparison worth making.

No conclusion. Task 1 has no argument to conclude, and a paragraph restating the overview in weaker words is not free: it is time taken from Task 2, which is worth twice as much.