Writing Task 2: Advantages & Disadvantages Essay: Question 10
Syllabus W.task2
An increasing number of young professionals choose to spend the first few years after graduating working in a country other than their own, rather than beginning their career at home.
Do the advantages of spending several years working abroad early in your career outweigh the disadvantages?
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience. Write at least 250 words.
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Worked solution
Examiner notes: why this is a band 9 response
Task Response
The introduction paraphrases the prompt and states an unambiguous verdict (“I believe the advantages… outweigh the disadvantages”) that is sustained throughout without contradiction. Each body paragraph develops one genuinely distinct, fully extended point (accelerated professional development, then the personal costs of time away) each anchored in a specific example rather than a vague assertion, and the conclusion weighs the two sides explicitly (“accelerated skills… typically outlast the temporary personal costs”) rather than merely repeating the introduction.
Coherence & Cohesion
The essay moves logically from the professional case for working abroad to a fair acknowledgement of its personal costs, signposted by “The strongest advantage is…” and “The disadvantages are mainly personal rather than professional.”. Reference chains (“this kind of adaptability”, “all of which”, “the domestic job market”) tie sentences together smoothly, and the classmate’s example is integrated directly into the paragraph’s argument rather than appended afterward.
Lexical Resource
Register is consistently formal and precise: “accumulation of a stable social network”, “reintegrating into the domestic job market”, “internationally connected industry”. The essay avoids repeating “good” or “hard” by instead varying the evaluation through collocations such as “builds resilience and initiative”, “delay the accumulation” and “temporary personal costs”.
Grammatical Range & Accuracy
A wide range of structures is used with full control: a non-defining relative clause (“a former classmate of mine who spent three years working… returned home not only fluent… but also confident…”), a correlative structure (“not only… but also”), and varied sentence openings across all four paragraphs. There are no errors of tense, agreement or article use anywhere in the response.
Common pitfalls specific to this task
See commonMistakes above: the most damaging band 6 error on this prompt is writing only about the general benefits of travel or cultural exposure without ever engaging with the genuine personal costs of an extended period working abroad, which leaves the “outweigh” judgement unsupported by any real weighing of both sides.