IELTS language bank: Giving Examples

Task Response, one of the four IELTS Writing criteria, explicitly rewards ideas that are "extended and supported," and the single most reliable way to extend and support a claim is to follow it with a specific, well-chosen example. Many candidates know this in principle but default to "for example" every single time, which limits lexical range even when the examples themselves are strong. A second, more serious problem is vagueness: an example that names no specific place, policy, study, or event ("as we can see in many countries") does far less persuasive work than one that does ("as seen in Sweden's approach to parental leave"), even though both sentences are grammatically identical. This bank works through standard example introducers, ways to flag a particularly strong example, phrases for citing more general or hypothetical evidence, and the grammar that keeps each pattern natural.

The most standard introducers are "for example," "for instance," "such as," and "like." "For example" and "for instance" are essentially interchangeable and typically open a new sentence or clause: "Many governments have introduced congestion charges; for instance, London has operated one since 2003." "Such as" and "like" introduce an example within a noun phrase rather than as a separate clause, and "such as" is marginally more formal: "Several major cities, such as Singapore and Stockholm, have implemented similar schemes." A useful grammatical note: "such as" should not be followed by "etc." in formal writing, since "such as" already signals that the list is non-exhaustive; adding "etc." after it is redundant.

For introducing an example you want to flag as particularly strong, representative, or striking, useful phrases include "a clear illustration of this is," "a case in point is," "a particularly telling example is," and "nowhere is this more evident than in." "A case in point is Japan's ageing population, which illustrates the strain that demographic change can place on a pension system." "Nowhere is this more evident than in" is a more emphatic, slightly literary structure that works well when you want to signal that the example about to follow is your strongest piece of evidence, not just one among several: "Nowhere is this more evident than in the collapse of several regional newspapers following the shift to digital advertising."

For introducing evidence that is more general, statistical, or drawn from research rather than a single specific case, useful phrases include "research indicates that," "studies have shown that," "evidence suggests that," and "data from [source] reveals that." These are especially useful in Task 2 when you do not have a single vivid named example but do have a general, defensible claim about a pattern: "Research indicates that employees who work flexible hours report higher job satisfaction." It is worth noting that on a test like IELTS you cannot cite a real study with precision, so these phrases should introduce plausible, general claims rather than invented specific statistics — a fabricated precise figure ("a 2019 study found exactly 73% of workers...") is riskier and less convincing than a defensible general claim phrased with appropriate caution.