Appositives to boost your IELTS grammar score

What is an appositive? 

An appositive is used to add extra information to a sentence. This information is never essential information that changes the meaning of the sentence. Instead, we use appositives to give details or helpful information. 

Why are appositives so useful? 

Appositives are great because you can use them almost anywhere. They are more common in written than spoken English but can be used in either. Appositives are my favourite way of adding complex grammar in IELTS writing task one because there is so much extra information you can include. This is particularly useful because it can sometimes be hard to find ways to include complex grammar in task one. 

Examples of appositives

Here are some examples of appositives: 

• My cousins, James and Martha, are teachers. 
• London, the capital of the UK, had a heatwave recently. 
• We ate fillet steak, one of the most expensive types. 

Most of the time, an appositive can be can have a phrase like ‘which is’ or ‘who are’ at the start. This doesn’t change the meaning (although it does technically change your appositive to a relative clause). For example: 

• My cousins, who are called James and Martha, are teachers. 
• London, which is the capital of the UK, had a heatwave recently. 
• We ate fillet steak, which is one of the most expensive types.

How do you make an appositive? 

Making an appositive is simple. There are three things to remember:

• The appositive goes directly after a noun which it is describing. 
• The appositive is separated from the rest of the sentence using commas. 
• The appositive can only contain non-essential information

The appositive goes directly after a noun which it is describing

This is fairly simple. First, remember that we only use appositives after nouns. Second, add your appositive directly after what you want to describe. 

The appositive is separated from the rest of the sentence using commas 

There are two scenarios here. First, you might have an appositive in the middle of a sentence. In this case, you should add a comma just before and just after the appositive. Second, you could be adding an appositive to the end of a sentence. In this case, you only need one comma before the appositive.  

The appositive can only contain non-essential information

The information in an appositive shouldn’t change the meaning of the sentence. The easy way to check for this is simply to imagine the sentence with and without the appositive. For example, we can see our examples above with and without appositives: 

• My cousins, who are called James and Martha, are teachers.
• My cousins are teachers.

• London, which is the capital of the UK, had a heatwave recently. 
• London had a heatwave recently. 

• We ate fillet steak, which is one of the most expensive types.
• We ate fillet steak.

For all of these examples, we can see that removing the appositive doesn’t do much to change the meaning of the sentence. 

Common mistakes with appositives

Using appositives with essential information

Let’s take a look at an example of an appositive that doesn’t work by comparing these two sentences:

• The dog, with the long hair, keeps trying to steal my food. 
• The dog keeps trying to steal my food. 

In this example, ‘with the long hair’ changes the meaning of the sentence rather than being extra information. As a result, it can’t be an appositive. 

Not paying attention to context

It often won’t matter in the IELTS exam, but the context you are talking about can influence how you use appositives. For example, if I write: 

• My sister, Annie, loves paragliding. 

This is completely fine if I only have one sister. However, if I have multiple sisters this becomes a bad appositive. Why? In that case, naming my sister changes the meaning of the sentence because it lets you know which sister I am talking about. 

If this is confusing, just remember to always check if removing the appositive changes the meaning of the sentence. 

Making appositives too complicated

One thing I’ve said before and will say again is that complex is not the same as complicated. Complex means something is hard to make. Complicated, on the other hand, means that something is hard to understand. For IELTS, we want our writing to be complex rather than complicated. Take a look at these two sentences from an IELTS task one question. Which is more complicated? 

• India’s population, which is rising faster than China’s, will overtake China in terms of population in 2030 and continue to grow into 2050. 
• India’s population, which will overtake China’s in 2030 and continue to grow into 2050, is rising faster than China’s. 

If you picked the second one, good job. While the second sentence is technically grammatical, it’s a mess. Avoid making the information in your appositives too long or adding more than one appositive to a sentence, even if you’re doing those things grammatically. 

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between an appositive and a relative clause?

This is a question which is beyond what you need to know to get a high IELTS score, but I’ll answer anyway. A relative clause, also called an adjective clause, has a similar function to an appositive in that it gives extra information. However, a relative clause is introduced with a relative pronoun like that, where, when, who, whose, which and why. 

Earlier we looked at adding phrases like ‘which is’ or ‘who are’ to the start of appositives. This is one way to make a relative clause, but there are others. Relative clauses can also exist without being surrounded by commas which makes them a bit harder than appositives. This is why I recommend students stick to  ‘which is/are’ and ‘who is/are’ relative clauses alongside appositives. 

Can you have two appositives in a sentence? 

Yes! Grammatically speaking, you can have as many appositives as you want in a sentence! However, just because you can sentence which is grammatical, this does not mean you should make that sentence. It’s easy for a sentence with two appositives to be confusing, even if they are grammatically correct. I’d only recommend this for very short appositives.