I'm Michael, hence the name of the channel, and I have some exciting news to share with you today.

After months of hard work, I managed to obtain a score of 8.5 on the IELTS exam. I am thrilled to say that I have learned so much throughout this entire experience, and I want to share everything I've gained with each and every one of you.

From crucial study materials to tips and tricks that can help achieve similar or even higher scores, I have got your back. Whether it's for study, work, or travel purposes, IELTS is an essential gateway to the world.

I'm aiming to aid you throughout your learning journey and share every single thing to uplift and empower you guys!

Stay tuned, we're only getting started!

Soo... let's start off with the results 😁.

I've taken the test twice in my life, both attempts took place this year.

The first one was on 17th January, and it went very smoothly. I managed to get a band 8.0 with L 9.0 R 8.5 W 7.0 and S 7.5. It was very close to 8.5, and I wasn't satisfied with my writing score so I decided to go for the second attempt.

I did it roughly 3 weeks ago, on 9th of April. I solely focused on writing and speaking, since those sections only could secure an overall 8.5, and they did! This time I got 7.5 for writing and 8.0 for speaking. I'm still not satisfied with writing though, I should've exerted the same amount of effort into my task 1 as I did into task 2. The very next day after getting my results I requested a breakdown of the score and... turns out task 1 got 6.0 while task 2 got a solid 8.0

I'm not sure if there'll be a third attempt, but I for sure will be working on my writing.

Came across this in one of my friends' IG stories.

When they try hack.

And only a few know that nmap just sends multiple requests to the specified DNS to access public information.

The keyword is public.

Here's what I wrote on my real test, it is a verified band 8.0 essay, so have a look at it and attempt your own!

@xm446

Programmers (me) have a paradigm called "KISS".
It stands for Keep It Super Simple (not the kiss you thought of).

It is a design principle which states that systems should be as simple as possible. Wherever possible, complexity should be avoided in a system — as simplicity guarantees the greatest levels of user acceptance and interaction.

Same is true for Writing Task 2. Avoid using any words, structures or phrases which you're not 100% confident of. You'll just decrease your own score since if you don't know the correct usage, you're most likely going to mess the things up.

My advice is to play it safe and not to try to insert any "high-level" words and keep it down to what you know for sure.


#writing

Yet another important thing in writing is paragraphing and coherence.

Logical flow of your ideas and proper usage of paragraphing can significantly affect your CC score. Make sure every single one of your sentences make sense both individually and as a part of your essay.

Most probably you're familiar with the "topic sentence => explain => example" type of structuring a paragraph.

That's when you:
- state the idea without explaining it as a first sentence
- in the next 2-3 sentences you explain and expand that idea
- and the last 1-2 sentences showcase an example to prove the idea.

What many candidates do, and quite frankly, what I did when I was just learning task 2 is that I would just keep paraphrasing the main point without really diving deep and explaining it. Make sure you're not just repeating yourself in the explanation part, explain your points.

We gon' have another interesting programming principle in the next post 😁)

#writing

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments

The principle is DRY.

I don't mean it literally. we call it so. It stands for Don't Repeat Yourself.

The DRY principle is stated as "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system" [1]

It basically teaches developers to reduce repetition of some basic patterns and to replace those with abstractions to avoid redundancy.

And of course I managed to apply it to writing because... why not? What I see in many people's essays is repetition of ideas without really explaining them.

So they'll basically write "there are several negative impacts that smarter computers may have on humans" as a topic sentence and proceed to paraphrase it a hundred times for an explanation.

You should NOT be doing this. As soon as you finish a sentence, read your entire paragraph and ensure everything is reasonable. Statements and explanations are two different things and they're not interchangeable in any circumstances.

[1] - wikipedia

#writing

From tomorrow I'll be posting #dailyvideo s by very well-known internet figures. You'll like it, trust me.

When you've finished your essay and find out you've written only 248 words:

https://youtu.be/wbVIBmoUdUs

Here's the first #dailyvideo . It appears very interesting to me, so you gotta check it out. The guy is 100% British so you might want to use subtitles, they're written down by the author and not auto-generated.

Guess I'm the only one without a MacBook.

#brokevibes

By the way, this is the task 1 table I got a flipped 9.0 for.

https://youtu.be/pTn6Ewhb27k

The next #dailyvideo . It's by Derek Muller, and it is indeed the most controversial one out of all his videos.

📝I'm considering starting a series called "2 a.m. essays." You'll provide me with task 2 questions, and I'll write and publish essays on them at night.

🌃Why the night, you might ask? It's simply because that's when I used to write essays during my own test preparations. I want to create the same atmosphere for you.

💭I will also share my thought process and the planning I undertake before writing. However, because of the considerable time commitment required, I can only produce 2-3 samples every week.

If this idea interests you, please let me know. All you need to do is submit task 2 questions and spread the word about the channel.

#series #2amessays

https://youtu.be/fRed0Xmc2Wg

Here's the 3rd and the most "learning related" #dailyvideo of all. Before watching I strongly recommend installing the game "Wordle" and playing it for some time to get familiar with the theory.