The key information that you need to write while describing a Bar graph could always be found in the question of the task 1.
Main parts of a Task 1 answer:
- Introduction.
- Overview.
- Body paragraph 1.
- Body paragraph 2.
Introduction: The first paragraph that you will need to right in your answer is “introduction”. To start writing the introduction, you need to paraphrase the information given in the question. Take the following question as an example:
The graph show information of employment rates across 6 countries in 1995 and 2005.
Summarize the information by choosing and describe the main idea, and make comparisons where appropriate.
So, you need to right it in your own words for the introduction. This is called paraphrasing.
You need not to paraphrase the all words. Because not all the words can be successfully paraphrased in English.
As you are writing the introduction, you should introduce the categories because you need to introduce information given in your question and graph. It’s very good to mention the categories as a list if only it’s not too long. You can give category list and compact them in a bracket. Bracket is very useful in the academic writing task 1 as you can put the information and data in them and it is perfectly normal to use them when needed.
Always look at the bar graph whether there is any other significant information that can be introduced in you introduction. If you find any interesting units, for example different currency or measurements, then you should put those units in your introduction.
You should complete your introduction in between one or two sentences and it should not be longer than three sentences. Write ‘six’ instead of ‘6′, for example, in your writing task 1 answer.
Sample Introduction:
The bar graph illustrates the employment rates in six different countries (Australia, Switzerland, Iceland, UK New Zealand and the USA) for both men and women in two different years (1995 and 2005).
Overview: The overview is the most important part of your paragraph in IELTS writing task 1. This is the paragraph where you collect all the key features and put them together in the overview statement. If your paragraph have no overview section you will not get the band score above 5 for task achievement. This section bears 25% of your marks. Your band score will go up or down depending on this overview section.
Before you start writing overview you should point out the key features from the given graph. Key features is the highest points and the lowest point of the given chat. You will usually be looking for 2-3 key features and occasionally you would get up to 5. It’s very rare to have only one key feature. It will depend only on your given graph type in your question.
Sample Overview:
Overall, the men had better employment rates than that of women in all of the six countries. Female empowerment in 2005 was far better than it was 1995.
Body paragraph: You must divide your body paragraph. You cannot have one body paragraph. For body paragraph 25% of marks is preserved. If you have only one body paragraph, it will be hard to get good result. To organize your boy paragraph, you should find the logical relations between your given data.
Body paragraph 1: You can describe about the highest and the lowest points or most significant parts of the given data in the body paragraph 1.
Body paragraph 2: Describe the data that you have not covered in body paragraph in this section. When you use comparison, you still you need to give numbers to support the data. If your sentences are in body paragraphs are not supported by the data you might get a poor score. So, always support you sentences with the numbers or the data. It is fine to use symbols while you are describing different currency or percentage and may other things.
In summary, while writing about a bar graph, first write introduction that should be a nice paraphrase of the given questions and graph information. Then white the overview section that should highlight the main feature of the bar graph. In body paragraph 1 and 2 you should mention the most important information of the given bar graph and the comparisons should be supported with figures and numbers.