Section One - The Introduction Paragraph
Why do we need an introduction?
Your first paragraph needs to do two things. Imagine the reader of your essay cannot see the question paper. First, they need to know the topic you are going to write about. Secondly, the need a good overview of all the data to give them context when you describe it in detail later in the essay.
Part 1 - introduce the topic
Part 2 - summarise all the data
Understanding the question
The topic is given to us in the question, but we don’t want to repeat that language as we want to show that we can use a wide variety of grammar and vocabulary. To do this we need to paraphrase the question.
Task title
Time requirement
The question topic
Task instructions
Word count
First graph
Second graph
Part One - How to paraphrase
“The two graphs below show the land area and population of five different countries.”
The sentence structure is always the same for every task one. The question will always start with how to information is displayed to you. This could be a graph, a table, a map or a diagram.
Any time the question says, 'the graph', we can write 'the chart'.
If the question says 'the chart' you should write 'the graph'.
​
By having only two option in your head, you will always be able to quickly think of a synonym. For different type of question, use the synonyms in the table below:
Graph
Table
Diagram
Map
Chart
Data
Illustration
Illustration
below
The next word in the question is usually ‘below’. The illustration, data or chart will not be below your essay, so we can leave this word out. Don’t paraphrase ‘below’.
Next, we’ll have a verb. The most common is ‘shows’. If the questions says this, we can use ‘details’ and if it says ‘details’ or any other verb, we use ‘shows’. Don't waste any time thinking too hard here.
shows
​
details
​
Be careful with plurals and verb forms here.
If there are two graphs, we need "show", without the final ‘s’. ('The charts show...')
If we only have one graph, then we "shows" with the third person singular ‘s’. ('The chart shows...')
I recommend checking that either the noun or the verb has an ‘s’, but never both! This is the first sentence, so let’s make sure we make a good first impression!
​
For our question, we can say “The two charts detail …” ‘S’ goes on the noun as plural.
After this, each question will differ. There are two steps I shall describe to paraphrase effectively.
Firstly, try to find synonyms (words which mean the same thing) for as many words as you can. This shows the examiner your range of vocabulary.
​
"the land area and population of five different countries."
For the 'land area' we could say 'territory size'.
For 'population' we could say 'populace'.
For 'different' we could say 'separate'.
For 'countries' we could say 'nations'.
​
the territory size and populace of five separate nations.
​
Secondly, once we have done this, we can change the word form of one or two of these words. We could change a noun to a verb, or an adjective to an adverb etc.
For example, we could turn the noun populace into the adjective populous (note: this is a high-level example, don't worry if you do not know these words). We then have to re-write the whole sentence around this new word, completing our paraphrasing.
The two charts detail the territory size of separate nations and how populous they are.
​
This is showing the examiner your grasp of grammar and sentence formation. You need to make sure this new sentence is grammatically correct, but this will get you a higher score.