Being trendy without 'trend'

In general, all the lines show that there is an increasing trend of people with bronchitis.

When students are preparing for IELTS Task 1 writing they learn the importance of describing trends in graphs, tables and charts. Not surprisingly, they go ahead and use the word trend to describe these trends. But native speakers are less likely to do this.

In the opening example a trend is described, but the word trend is redundant. It is enough to write:

In general, all the lines show that the incidence of bronchitis is increasing.

This kind of statement stands out as a trend because it says something general about a change over time without mentioning data.

So here’s your checklist for a trend:

It is expressed as a sentence
It does not feature the word ‘trend’
It says something general without mentioning values from the graph, table or chart
It describes a change over time
The thing that is affected by change is named specifically (‘incidence’).

Understand also, that a trend is usually apparent in data that is highly irregular. In the following graph grammatical accuracy goes up and down erratically over time, but the general trend (shown by the straight line) is downward.

The ‘trend’ in this graph can be described as follows:

The more frequently the word trend is used, the less accurate the writing.