IELTS language bank: Task 1 Processes and Diagrams

Academic Task 1 occasionally sets a process diagram or a flowchart instead of a chart of figures — how paper is manufactured, how a piece of fruit ripens and rots, how a water treatment plant purifies its intake, how a household appliance is assembled on a production line. The task shares almost nothing in common with a line graph or a bar chart, and treating it the same way is the single biggest reason candidates score poorly on it. There is no trend to trace and no data to compare; there is a sequence of stages that happens the same way every time the process runs, and your job is to walk a reader through that sequence clearly enough that they could redraw the diagram from your description alone. That means two things matter far more here than anywhere else in Task 1: getting the order of stages exactly right, and choosing a grammatical form — the passive voice, almost always in the present simple — that suits a process which repeats identically rather than an event that happened once.

Sequencing language for a process needs to do more precise work than the general-purpose markers used for essay structure, because a diagram often shows stages that branch, feed back into each other, or happen partly out of strict order. Useful stage-openers beyond the most basic markers: "at the initial stage," "the first step in the process is," "prior to any further treatment," "before the material can proceed to the next stage." For the middle of a sequence: "the following step involves," "this is immediately followed by," "at this point in the process," "once this step has been carried out," "having been treated in this way," "the process then moves on to." For a stage that depends directly on the one before it succeeding: "provided this stage has been completed successfully," "only once this has occurred does the process continue." For the end of a sequence: "the process is brought to a close by," "the final step sees," "at the concluding stage." Notice how many of these are built around nominalisations — "step," "stage," "point" — rather than bare time adverbs, which lets you attach detail (which step, what kind of stage) that a one-word connector cannot carry on its own.

The passive voice deserves its own separate attention, because it is not simply a stylistic preference for process descriptions — it is the grammatically correct default, since the diagram almost never names an agent performing each action, and inventing one ("workers heat the mixture") adds information the diagram doesn't actually show. The pattern is consistently "is/are + past participle," in the present simple, regardless of how many stages the process has: "the raw material is sorted," "the mixture is then heated to a controlled temperature," "impurities are filtered out at this stage," "the resulting liquid is cooled rapidly," "the finished sheets are cut to size and packaged for distribution." Precise verbs matter as much here as the passive structure itself: "sorted," "filtered," "compressed," "moulded," "dyed," "inspected," "assembled," "sterilised," and "packaged" each name a distinct physical action, whereas a generic "processed" or "treated" repeated at every stage tells a reader nothing about what specifically happens to the material at that point. A genuinely strong response varies its verb precisely as often as the diagram itself shows a genuinely distinct action, and no more often than that.