What Is New?

October 7, 2026

Ten more translations: six books in Polish, four in Spanish

Six more books are now in Polish: The 7-Day Emergency Plan, The 9 Wrong Speaking Habits, The 21-Day System, The 14-Day Polish, The Band 8.0 Blueprint and Writing 7.0: The Four Criteria, Decoded Sentence by Sentence. Fifteen of the eighteen books on this site are now in Polish.

Four more are now in Spanish: The Minimum-Effort Path to 7.0, Listening 7.0: The 30-Correct-Answers Playbook, Reading 7.0: The 30/40 Question-Type Priority Map and The 7-Day Emergency Plan. That makes ten of the eighteen in Spanish.

As in every translation on this site, the teaching is translated and the sample answers stay in English, because a translated model answer cannot show what band 7 English sounds like. Where a book points to another book that is not yet in your language, the link goes to the English edition and says so. Each book's page lists the languages it comes in.

Free to download, no sign-up.

October 2, 2026

The last half band in thirty days: a plan that ends in a decision

A new book is live: The 6.5 → 7.0 Sprint: A 30-Day Correction Plan. It is a day-by-day plan for the last half band, built on one rule: practise what holds you at 6.5, and use full tests only to measure it. Week 1 finds that wall from a full test and turns it into one sentence with a count. The next three weeks are mostly drill days of about an hour, each drill taken from the skill book on this site that teaches it, with a checkpoint on new material every seven days.

Day 30 is a decision, not a prize. Two checkpoints on target in a row, on different tests, and you choose between a One Skill Retake and a full resit. If the count moved but the mark did not, or nothing moved, the plan says what to run next. The book does not promise 7.0 in thirty days. Four candidates go through the same month and end in four different places, and a sprint sheet at the back holds your own evidence. The candidates and their results are invented; the test facts come from ielts.org.

English only for now, free to download, no sign-up.

October 2, 2026

Writing stuck at 6.5? Three fixes, and a way to count each one

A new book is live: Why You Keep Getting 6.5 in Writing — and the 3 Fixes That Move You to 7.0. Each Writing task is marked on four criteria, and a 6.5 is often two of them at 7 and two at 6. Using the public band descriptors, the book shows where the line between 6 and 7 sits in each criterion, and why more practice so often changes nothing: one missing band-7 feature holds a criterion at 6, however good the rest is.

The three fixes are answering every part of the task, taking two ideas further instead of listing four, and making the sentences you already write correct. Each one comes with a count to keep on your own essays — parts answered, steps per idea, error-free sentences long and short — and the checks are built to be run typed, since the test on computer has no spell checker. Part 7 sets out when the counts and a teacher's marks are enough to book again. The three writers in the book and their marks are invented; the marking rules come from ielts.org and the public band descriptors.

English only for now, free to download, no sign-up.

October 2, 2026

Stuck at 6.5? A book about the last half band

A new book is live: Stuck at 6.5? The Half-Band Wall and How to Break It. It starts with something a score report doesn't tell you: an overall 6.5 can be one half-band step from 7.0, or four. Add up your four scores — 7.0 overall needs a total of 27 — and you can count your own steps, see which skill they have to come from when your requirement sets a minimum per skill, and use the measurement figures ielts.org publishes to tell a real wall from the ordinary ups and downs of a score.

Part 4 shows where to look for the wall in each skill, using results you already have, and points to that skill's own 7.0 book for the fix. Part 6 helps you choose between a re-mark, a One Skill Retake and a full resit by how many steps you need. The four candidates in the book are invented; the rounding rule, the retake conditions and the figures come from ielts.org.

English only for now, free to download, no sign-up.

October 2, 2026

A Speaking 7.0 book: what "fluent enough" actually sounds like

A new book is live: Speaking 7.0: What "Fluent Enough" Actually Sounds Like — the last of the skill-by-skill 7.0 books, after Listening, Reading and Writing. It isn't another list of habits to fix; The 9 Wrong Speaking Habits already covers those. It shows where the line between 6 and 7 actually sits, as short transcripts with the pauses and corrections written back in — and band 7 has them too: it still searches for words and still corrects itself. What it doesn't do is lose the listener.

Part 5 decodes one original Part 3 answer across all four criteria, and Part 6 is a check you can run on thirty seconds of your own recording. Part 2 covers Speaking's side of 2026: it's the one skill the move to computer leaves alone, and a One Skill Retake is worth booking once you can name what you've fixed. Every question and transcript was written for this book; none is copied from a real test.

English only for now, free to download, no sign-up.

October 1, 2026

A Writing 7.0 book: the four criteria, one sentence at a time

A new book is live: Writing 7.0: The Four Criteria, Decoded Sentence by Sentence — the third of the skill-by-skill 7.0 books, after Listening and Reading. It picks up where The Band 7.0 Blueprint's Writing chapter stops: not what the four official criteria mean, but what separates a sentence that plausibly earns 6.5 from the same idea rewritten to plausibly earn 7, one criterion at a time — the exact word, clause or connector that changed.

Part 7 rewrites one original paragraph across all four criteria at once. Part 2 covers Writing's own 2026 question: where Writing on Paper is offered, fixing a sentence by hand costs more than on a keyboard, so more of your revising has to happen before the sentence goes down. Every example was written for this book; none is copied from a real test.

English only for now, free to download, no sign-up.

September 29, 2026

A third study plan: a fortnight to prove one error is gone

A third study-plan book is live: The 14-Day Polish: A Fortnight Plan from 7.5 to 8.0. It's for a candidate who already holds a real 7.5 and wants the next half band — a fortnight isn't enough time for a curriculum, but it's enough to run The Band 8.0 Blueprint's precision loop twice: baseline, log errors by type, find the pattern, fix one, re-test.

It doesn't re-teach any technique — the drills point at the Band 7.0 skill books, since the Band 8.0 shelf's own skill-by-skill books aren't written yet — and it says plainly that a solo reader has no second marker, and that the method proves more on Listening and Reading than on Writing and Speaking. A printable 14-day error log is included.

English only for now, free to download, no sign-up.

September 23, 2026

Two new languages: the site and The 7-Day Emergency Plan now in Bengali and Urdu

The site is now in eleven languages — Bengali and Urdu have joined English, Hindi, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Chinese in both scripts, Arabic, Polish and Spanish.

The 7-Day Emergency Plan is the first book to ship in both: the day-by-day teaching is translated, but the sample questions and model answers stay in English, because a translated model answer cannot show anyone what band 7 English sounds like.

Free to download, no sign-up.

September 22, 2026

A new shelf opens: the first book above Band 7.0

A new book is live: The Band 8.0 Blueprint: What Separates Good from Very Good. It's for a candidate who already holds a solid Band 7.0 and wants the next half or full band — the four skills don't change, but at this level the mistakes that cost you are the patterned ones, not the frequent ones.

It picks up where The Band 7.0 Blueprint leaves off, skill by skill, and adds seven original sentence-revision pairs showing exactly what a Band 8 essay does differently from a Band 7 one.

English only for now, free to download, no sign-up.

September 15, 2026

A second study plan: three weeks to one stronger skill

A second study-plan book is live: The 21-Day System: Three Weeks, One Band 7.0. It's for a candidate who already has some ability in every skill but one clear weak point — three weeks isn't enough to rebuild all four skills, so this book picks the one worth building back up and holds the other three steady while you do.

It doesn't re-teach anything itself — every technique it names points to the book on this site that already covers it — and it hands off to The 7-Day Emergency Plan for the final two days and the test morning. A printable 21-day tracker is included.

English only for now, free to download, no sign-up.

September 7, 2026

Seven more books, and the site in two more languages

Since the middle of August the library has grown from four books to eleven. The seven new ones are in English: The Band 7.0 Blueprint, Why Band 7.0 Is Called the Golden Score, The Minimum-Effort Path to 7.0, Listening 7.0: The 30-Correct-Answers Playbook, Reading 7.0: The 30/40 Question-Type Priority Map, The 9 Wrong Speaking Habits, and The 7-Day Emergency Plan.

The site is now in nine languages — Spanish and Polish have joined English, Hindi, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Chinese in both scripts, and Arabic. Six books are available in Spanish and seven in Polish; each book has its own page listing the languages it comes in.

You can now browse by category from the home page: books grouped by skill, by the band score you are aiming for, by the mistakes that cost the most, and study plans built around a printable tracker.

Every book now carries a link to the About page inside it, so you can always find out who publishes these and why.

Everything here is still free to download, with no sign-up.

August 16, 2026

A fourth book, and a native-speaker check on every translation

A new book is live for readers around band 5: forty everyday English phrases, each one shown next to the near-miss version most people actually produce, in Vietnamese and Arabic.

Every book on this site, in every language it is offered in, has now been read and checked by a native speaker — the last of them cleared that check this week.

Four books, seven languages between them, all free to download with no sign-up.

August 16, 2026

Every book now has its own page

Each book has a page of its own showing the full list of chapters, so you can see what is inside before you download anything. Click a book title on the home page to open it.

Nothing else changed about downloading: the button on the home page still downloads the PDF straight away, with no extra step.

Pages load a little faster too — the photographs on the site are now about 40% smaller, which matters on a phone plan.

August 15, 2026

This page

This is where updates get posted from now on — new books, new languages, new features, anything worth knowing about.

Right now: three books are live and free to download, no sign-up — Band 7 Writing Task 2, IELTS Speaking Parts 1–3, and Vocabulary & Phrasing for Band 7. Depending on the book, they are also available in Hindi, Vietnamese, Portuguese, Chinese and Arabic.

More is coming — check back here rather than guessing.