5 sentence-level fixes that raise your Writing band fast

Grammatical Range and Accuracy and Lexical Resource are scored on patterns across an entire response, which means a single error type that repeats five times costs far more than five unrelated one-off slips — an examiner reading a script mentally tallies whether an error is isolated or systematic, and a systematic error signals a genuine gap in control rather than a slip under time pressure. The five fixes below are the specific error categories that recur most often across submissions at Band 5-6.5, and because each one is mechanical and rule-based rather than a matter of general fluency, each is fixable through targeted proofreading in the final minutes of an exam, without needing to rewrite anything.

Article errors — missing, extra, or wrong use of "a," "an," and "the" — are the single most common recurring error category across submissions at these bands, and they are also among the most fixable, because English articles follow a checkable rule rather than requiring a large vocabulary. Before submitting, scan every noun phrase and ask three questions in order: is this a specific thing the reader can already identify (use "the" — "the report I mentioned earlier"), is this one unspecified member of a countable category, most often on first mention (use "a"/"an" — "a recent study found..."), or is this general, plural, or uncountable (use no article — "pollution is a growing concern," not "the pollution is a growing concern" unless a specific instance of pollution has already been established). A sentence like "Government should invest more in education" is missing "The" before "Government" if referring to a specific country's government already established by context, or needs no article at all if speaking generally about governments as a category — the fix always depends on specificity, not on memorising which nouns "need" an article.

Run-on sentences and comma splices — joining two complete, independently standalone ideas with only a comma and no conjunction — register as a Grammar error even when every individual word inside the sentence is spelled and used correctly, because the sentence-level structure itself is faulty. "Remote work has become common, many employees now prefer it" splices two complete sentences together with just a comma. The fix has three equally valid forms depending on the relationship between the ideas: split into two sentences ("Remote work has become common. Many employees now prefer it."), join with a semicolon if the ideas are closely related ("Remote work has become common; many employees now prefer it."), or join with a coordinating or subordinating conjunction that makes the relationship explicit ("Remote work has become common, and many employees now prefer it" or "As remote work has become common, many employees now prefer it") — the third option is usually strongest for Coherence and Cohesion because it also signals the logical relationship between the two ideas, not just their grammatical separation.

Subject-verb agreement breaks down most often not in short simple sentences, where it's easy to get right, but in longer sentences where the true subject and its verb are separated by an inserted clause or phrase, and the writer's ear matches the verb to the nearest noun instead of the actual subject. "The reasons for this trend, despite the government's repeated efforts to address it, remains unclear" is wrong: "remains" should be "remain," because the sentence's actual subject is the plural "reasons," not the singular "efforts" that happens to sit closer to the verb inside the inserted clause. The reliable fix is to mentally delete every inserted clause set off by commas and check subject-verb agreement on the stripped-down sentence alone — "The reasons... remain unclear" makes the plural verb obviously correct once the distracting middle clause is removed.