Yesterday, one of my writing correction service students sent me an interesting question that I had not seen before. As always, I wrote a sample band 9 answer for him, and I thought I would share it with all my website readers, too. The question is about whether or not ambition is necessary for achieving success.

Planning an Answer

Here is the question:

Some people think that ambition is essential for success.

To what extent do you agree?

First of all, let’s think about the question. It helps to paraphrase it a little. In other words, it is asking you “To what extent do you agree that people need to be ambitious to achieve success?”

On the surface, it seems pretty obvious. Most people who are very successful are also very ambitious, so the answer seems to be “yes.” However, there are no right and wrong answers for IELTS writing, so it’s really a matter of opinion.

Personally, I want to say that I disagree that it is essential and make these two points:

  1. Most of the time, people achieve success due to ambition.
  2. However, other factors (such as innate talent or joyful enthusiasm) are the main reasons.

I will structure my answer like this:

IntroductionExplain the main idea.
Give my opinion in the outline sentence.
Body paragraph #1This will be a sort of concession paragraph, where I admit that ambition is a huge contributing factor.
Body paragraph #2Here, I will give two other factors and attempt to show how they can function in the absence of ambition. These are natural talent and sheer enthusiasm (i.e. passion).
ConclusionThis paragraph will summarise the essay.

You can learn more about agree or disagree questions here.

Notes on Language

First of all, you should try to make yourself aware of the important words related to this topic and also the ways that they might be used. That includes parts of speech (verb, noun, adjective, etc.).

The student who sent me this question wrote an essay in which he frequently mixed up these words:

  • success / succeed
  • ambition / ambitious
  • achieve / achievement

You must also think about spelling and collocations. Please also consider repetition. You might be tempted to overuse words like “ambition” because they are so fundamental to the essay, but you can use omission, pronouns, and synonyms to avoid this. Here’s a useful guide to avoiding repetition:

Sample Band 9 Answer

It has been said that ambition is necessary in order for people to achieve success. However, not all successful people are ambitious and so, whilst it is often true, it is not absolutely essential.

Admittedly, ambition is a major contributor to success. It seems self-evident that ambitious people are more likely to go out and achieve great things. The history books are full of such examples, including great leaders, scientists, and athletes. Achieving anything of great importance requires overcoming challenges and often adversity, and this is of course hard to do without a sense of ambition.

That said, there are other factors to consider, and these might render ambition unnecessary in some cases. If a person is naturally talented, they might achieve amazing things in life without any sense of ambition. Take someone with a gift for music, as an example. They might be so astoundingly skilled that they can learn music easily, then impress others to the extent that they become famous. For others, this might be less about natural talent than passion. In other words, they might learn music out of personal interest and then practise it for their own enjoyment, ultimately earning the respect of the musical community not through ambition but through enthusiasm for music as an art and for their own sense of enjoyment.

In conclusion, in most cases it is probably true that ambition is essential for success; however, there are other factors to consider. Many incredibly successful people have achieved great things in spite of a lack of ambition simply due to their talent.