How to check your IELTS writing online, free
A grammar pass is not an IELTS check. Examiners score four criteria, and grammar is only one of them. Here is what a real free check looks like and how to run one on your essay in about a minute.
What a free IELTS writing check must include
IELTS Writing is scored on four criteria, each worth a quarter of your band: Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. A tool that only finds grammar mistakes is checking one quarter of your score and ignoring the quarter that keeps most people below Band 7, which is Task Response.
So before you trust any free checker, ask whether it gives you:
- All four criteria scored on the 9-band scale, not one overall number.
- A band range, not false precision. Human examiners disagree with each other by about half a band, so a single decimal like 7.24 is theatre.
- What to fix first. Your band is capped by your weakest criterion. A useful check names it.
- Feedback on your own sentences, not generic advice you could have read anywhere.
How to check your essay free, step by step
- Write a full answer under real conditions: a Task 2 question in 40 minutes at 250 plus words, or a GT Task 1 letter in 20 minutes at 150 plus words. Checking half-finished writing tells you nothing about test day.
- Paste it into the free checker on the Examinerly homepage. You get two free checks a day with no signup: your band, all four criteria, and the one criterion holding you back.
- Read the blocker first, not the mistake list. If your blocker is Task Response, no amount of grammar polishing moves your band.
- Rewrite one flagged sentence yourself using the Band 7 pattern shown, then write your next essay applying it. One pattern fixed per essay beats forty corrections skimmed.
What free checks are good for, and where they stop
Two free checks a day is enough to diagnose where you stand and track whether a fix is working week to week. What the free tier does not give you is saved history, your band trend over time, and volume: with a paid plan you can check up to 50 essays a month, which matters when your exam is close and you are writing daily. See the free vs paid correction guide for when paying is actually worth it.
One warning about free tools
Free checkers that flatter you are worse than no checker, because you walk into the exam expecting a band you will not get and pay the re-sit fee to find out. An honest band estimate lands within about half a band of examiners, who disagree by about that much themselves, and never inflates your score. If a free tool gives you a band above everything you have ever received from a human marker, be suspicious, not pleased. More on this in are AI IELTS checkers accurate.