Empty words are not mistakes, and that is the problem
Nobody marks you wrong for writing "very". That is why these words survive. They are not errors, so nothing warns you about them. They just sit in your essay taking up space and saying nothing, and the examiner has read them in every paper that day. Cut them and your writing sounds sharper in one minute, with no new vocabulary to learn.
8 words to delete
✕Traffic is a very big problem.
✓Traffic is a serious problem.
"Very" is a word you use when you have not chosen the right one yet. Choose it instead. Very big becomes serious. Very good becomes excellent. Very tired becomes exhausted.
✕A lot of people use cars every day.
✓Most commuters drive every day.
"A lot of" sounds like speaking, not writing. Use many, most, the majority of, or a large number of. Pick one and move on.
✕Social media has many bad things.
✓Social media has several clear drawbacks.
"Thing" means you did not name the idea. Name it: a problem, a benefit, a risk, an effect, a drawback. This is a Lexical Resource win every time.
✕This is a bad effect on children.
✓This has a harmful effect on children.
Good and bad are the first words a learner ever meets, so they carry no information. Try helpful, useful, valuable, harmful, damaging, unfair.
✕Nowadays, technology is everywhere.
✓Technology now reaches almost every home.
Nowadays is not wrong, but it opens roughly half of all IELTS essays. Anything that predictable adds nothing. Start with your real point instead.
✕This is really important for young people.
✓This matters most to young people.
Really is spoken English. In writing it weakens the sentence it was meant to strengthen. Delete it and the sentence is usually already stronger.
✕There is a big difference between the two groups.
✓There is a sharp difference between the two groups.
Big describes size. Most of the time you mean something else: sharp, major, growing, significant, or simply a number.
✕Students get better results when they sleep well.
✓Students achieve better results when they sleep well.
"Get" can mean twenty different things, so it tells the reader almost nothing. Use achieve, receive, become, obtain, or reach.
The rule behind all eight
✓Do not replace an easy word with a rare word. Replace it with an exact word.
✓If you delete the word and the sentence still means the same, it was empty. Leave it out.
✓One strong word beats two weak ones, and it saves space for a real idea.
✓Read your essay and count how many times the same easy word appears. Change half of them.
Do not delete every simple word
This is where students go too far. They delete every easy word and paste in something from a thesaurus, and the essay stops sounding like English. Simple words are not the problem. Repeating the same simple word eight times is. "People" and "important" are perfectly normal, and an examiner will never mark them down. What loses marks is a whole essay built from only those words, or a rare word used in a way nobody says.
Read next
More on the words that quietly cost you marks: 6 IELTS writing myths that lower your score and 5 small changes that take your writing from 6.5 to 7.
See your own empty words
Everybody has their own set of them, and you cannot see yours because they sound normal to you. Write your next essay in VoyaLang and look at the corrections. The words you repeat, the ones that add nothing, and the ones used slightly wrong all show up in one place, with a stronger version to compare against. Create a free account and check your next essay in about a minute.
