IELTS Commentry: IELTS essay, topic: People who read for pleasure develop their imagination more and acquire better language skills compared to people who prefer watching television (agree/disagree)

It is believed that people who read for pleasure develop their imagination more and acquire better language skills compared to people who prefer watching television. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

Sample Band 8 Essay

Some people subscribe to the belief that reading helps enhance language skills and creativity, whereas watching television does very little for these skills. Personally, I support this opinion for several reasons, which will be laid out in this essay.

As we all know, books use text to convey ideas and quite often there are no images or illustrations to picture the scenes described in the book; therefore, we have to use our own imagination while reading. For example, reading a fantasy novel that contains mythical creatures one would normally imagine the appearance of those creatures in their mind in order to follow the plot. In contrast, the creatures on a TV screen are usually created for the viewer by directors and producers of the movie. Watching TV substitutes the need to develop one’s own imagination because the characters and their surroundings are shown on the screen.

Furthermore, it is argued that reading is the best way to expand one’s vocabulary. The reader learns the correct spelling of a word by seeing it printed in a book, and they grasp its meaning from the context, without having to look it up in a dictionary. To illustrate, English teachers in many schools use English novels as teaching materials. Students are asked to read the story and capture the keywords to answer the questions in the exam. Not only new words but also numerous sentence structures can be learnt from books. In comparison, learning new words while watching a TV show isn’t always easy because the viewer’s attention is drawn to what is happening on the screen and if there are no subtitles, they don’t see the words’ spelling. All this makes a book a more effective tool for a language learner compared to TV.

In conclusion, I believe people who love to read tend to have a more active imagination and advanced linguistic comprehension than those who watch television, since readers are required to imagine the story in the book and learn the meaning of new words from the context.

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