Irina Lutsenko

When I was on holiday this summer, I went to my hometown to visit my parents. They asked me to sort out my old papers and books and get rid of the ones that I didn’t use any more. As I was doing that, I found one great picture illustrating the core of essay writing. It’s from a writing workshop I took part in about 10 years ago when I was working at school.  Here it is: This picture called “ The Beast ” shows the structure and the essential parts of an essay in a very simple way. Now, this cute beast has 3 parts – the head, the body, and the tail. Similarly, any essay has 3 parts – the introduction , the main body and the conclusion .  The  introduction leads the reader into the topic and has a clear thesis statement . A thesis is the main idea or opinion that the writer is going to argue. Just like this cute beast has a very visible blue horn, your introduction must have a very clear and direct statement of what you are going to talk about in your essa...

Have you ever wondered why international exams in English are the way they are? Well, the answer is simple - they imitate the real-life situations, conditions, tasks, and material you will encounter if you go to study, live, or work abroad. Each assessment criterion and task requirement is based on real life. Some students have their doubts about it, but it’s complete and utter truth.  I mostly teach IELTS (Academic) and TOEFL. They have become such an intrinsic part of my life that whatever I watch or read in English I mentally   match it to this or that exam task or requirement. In this post I’m going to talk about citing in integrated tasks in TOEFL. In these tasks you have to report other people’s ideas, and therefore cite information, or indicate who the ideas belong to or where the information comes from.   Naturally, verbs of reporting are vital for such tasks. Students are perfectly happy with “ say ”. However, I’m not. I usually have to fight to get stu...