Free IELTS study resources
300+ short, practical vocabulary, grammar, and strategy guides for Reading, Listening, Writing, and Speaking — not another question bank.
IELTS grammar: Relative Clauses
Relative clauses turn short, simple sentences into the complex structures Grammatical Range rewards — here's how to choose who, which, that, and whose correctly, and the punctuation rule that changes what a sentence actually means.
9 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Modal Verbs
Modals express certainty, obligation, and possibility with precision, and choosing the right one is a genuine hedging skill IELTS rewards directly — here's how to calibrate them instead of defaulting to the bluntest option.
9 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Gerunds vs. Infinitives
A genuinely tricky area of English with no reliable shortcut rule, since which form follows a given verb has to be learned case by case — here's how to handle the specific verbs that trip candidates up most often, including the ones that change meaning depending on the choice.
9 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Linking Words for Cohesion
Coherence & Cohesion is scored on ideas connecting naturally, not on how many linking words appear on the page — here's how to choose the right category of connector, avoid the stacking error that undoes it, and use cohesion tools beyond linking words entirely.
9 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Punctuation Rules
Punctuation errors are graded as Grammar mistakes, not style issues — the four patterns behind most of them, and a fast self-editing pass that catches them.
12 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Building Complex Sentences
Grammatical Range rewards genuine subordination, not just length — the difference between real complexity and long strings of "and," and how to vary it.
11 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Subject-Verb Agreement
The rule itself is simple — the errors happen at a distance. Where agreement actually breaks down in longer sentences, and how to check for it fast.
10 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Countable vs. Uncountable Nouns
One miscategorised noun triggers three errors at once (plural, article, quantifier) — the high-frequency list, the dual-sense nouns, and how to self-check fast.
10 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Comparatives and Superlatives
Task 1 is built on comparison, so this error repeats itself across a script — form, the two-vs-three-item rule, and scaling a difference with precision.
10 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Prepositions of Time and Place
Part memorisable pattern, part pure memorisation — the in/on/at scale for time and place, movement and duration prepositions, and fixed verb pairs.
10 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Collocations
Grammatically perfect but instantly flagged as unnatural — verb-noun, adjective-noun, and academic collocations, plus the near-synonym traps that break them.
10 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Word Formation
Wrong word form is often not stylistic but genuinely ungrammatical — the suffix families, prefix patterns, and academic word families worth drilling.
10 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Commonly Confused Words
A specific, memorisable list of word pairs that even advanced learners mix up in Writing — here's the actual distinction behind each one, not just a warning to "be careful."
14 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Parallel Structure
A subtle but real error that makes lists and comparisons feel awkward even when every individual word is correct — here's the actual rule for keeping grammatical form consistent, and why examiners notice when it breaks.
10 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Cleft Sentences for Emphasis
A higher-band structure for putting deliberate, precise emphasis on one part of your argument — the actual mechanics of it-clefts and what-clefts, and the agreement errors that trip candidates up when they attempt them.
10 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Inversion for Emphasis
An advanced, higher-band structure that reverses normal subject-verb order for dramatic emphasis — the exact trigger patterns for negative-adverbial and conditional inversion, and the specific way candidates get the word order wrong.
10 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Hedging Language
Overly confident, absolute claims are easier to disprove and often read as less credible — the actual grammar of hedging (modals, lexical hedges, quantifiers), the overhedging trap, and how hedging works completely differently in speech than in writing.
11 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Formal vs. Informal Register
Register mismatches quietly cap your score even when nothing is technically wrong — the specific markers that make writing read as formal or informal, the three-tier GT letter system most candidates never learn properly, and why Speaking sits in a register of its own.
11 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Common Spelling Mistakes
Spelling errors count against Lexical Resource even when the word choice itself is excellent — the actual British/American spelling systems, the specific high-frequency academic words that get misspelled under pressure, and the suffix rules that cause most of the damage.
10 min readWritingIELTS grammar: Apostrophes and Possessives
A small but persistent error category that shows up even in otherwise strong scripts — the actual singular/plural possessive rules, joint versus individual possession, the its/it's exception, and the specific overcorrection errors that give the mistake away.
10 min read