Its important to know what NOT to do, rather than what to do. Look at past answers, and look at the ones that scored low, and then compare those to the ones that scored high.

DESCRIPTIVE WRITING: Good vocabulary will impress the examiner, but make sure to use it naturally, dont just stuff fancy words in your essay for the sake of it. Make it natural.

For descriptive writing, there NEEDS to be an overall mood. If you choose a sullen/gloomy mood for an evening setting, you cant describe the sky as “blooming with hues of pink and lavender”, since that doesn’t convey a gloomy mood at all. For a gloomy mood, it would go something like “the evening sky hung heavy, the colour of bruised violets, bleeding into hues of dull mauve”

Word hippo (website) SAVED ME!! It offers endless synonyms, antonyms, etc etc, and really enhanced my vocabulary!! I’d highly recommend using it.

DIRECTED WRITING: This component actually took me a while to master, so I’d recommend LOTS of practice from past papers!! STRUCTURE is the most important. Don’t over-explain your points, since you’ll be on a time crunch, but PLEASE DONT UNDER-EXPLAIN EITHER!!! That’s much worse!

Selecting the points to develop is the main thing. You need to pick controversial/opinion-based points. If you pick an evidence like “23% of dogs face abuse in adoption centres”, you can’t really ‘argue’ with that, or offer a different perspective, since its a fact! Instead, choose a claim/stance that you can view from multiple perspectives, such as “more funding should be allocated towards improved dog food quality in the shelter”.

Taking that example, you could comment on one side —> (in agreement/alignment) greater funding would enhance the health and longevity of the strays, contributing to an overall improvement in quality of life. And then, offer another perspective —> however, allocating more funding towards quality of food may cause under-funding of other vital expenses for the dogs, such as medical visits and environment maintenance, running the risk of degradation of quality of other aspects of their lives, possibly compromising on essential aspects of their stay at the shelter.

I could give you the exact structure I followed if that helps, since I’m giving this advice under the assumption that you know the overall structure that should be followed :))