“Developing Writing Skills for IELTS: A Researched-Based Approach” is a surprisingly weak IELTS text, considering the reputation of Rutledge, the publisher of the book.
The title calls it a “research based approach” but there isn’t much of what I would call “research” in the book.
What you get here is a description of the IELTS scoring rubrics, and a collection of sample paragraphs taken from student essays. Each sample is followed by a question like “what is the topic sentence?” or “Is the topic sentence focused and clear?” The same questions are repeated again and again, following a series of samples. Each chapter contains different questions.
And that’s the bulk of the book. It is pretty basic stuff. There isn’t much in here about HOW to write a topic sentence, or HOW to make a topic sentence focused and clear. Indeed, there is very little instruction in the book at all. Students merely read sample paragraphs (and sometimes complete essays) and answer questions about them. Students are hungry for information about how to actually put together their essays – the more specific the better. But that specificity isn’t really found here.
On the plus side, there are a few sample essays with scores attached to them, which is something that all students like to have. There is also a decent “question bank.” I like that, but since the IELTS people are really generous with sample questions I don’t think there is a great need for more samples.
It must be noted that while the book is 276 pages, a lot of that is duplicated content. The aforementioned samples and questions are on page 21 to 110, while pages 181 to 272 seem to have the exact same content, but with answers inserted into the text.