Summarizing pragraph in Writing Task 1

[mrswordf1sh]

Hey guys,

I just wanted to ask at if the summarizing paragraph sentence should be the last one or the second one as Simon suggests. I am taking Simon's website as a reference for my IELTS studies (ielts-simon.com). His advice is to use summarizing paragraph as the second one. Buy I was thinking to make it my last paragraph which will begin with '' To sum up'' or something

What do you think?

Example from Simon's website:

The bar chart compares twelve countries in terms of the overall number of medals that they have won at the Olympic Games.

It is clear that the USA is by far the most successful Olympic medal winning nation. It is also noticeable that the figures for gold, silver and bronze medals won by any particular country tend to be fairly similar.

The USA has won a total of around 2,300 Olympic medals, including approximately 900 gold medals, 750 silver and 650 bronze. In second place on the all-time medals chart is the Soviet Union, with just over 1,000 medals. Again, the number of gold medals won by this country is slightly higher than the number of silver or bronze medals.

Only four other countries - the UK, France, Germany and Italy - have won more than 500 Olympic medals, all with similar proportions of each medal colour. Apart from the USA and the Soviet Union, China is the only other country with a noticeably higher proportion of gold medals (about 200) compared to silver and bronze (about 100 each).

[ranjeetrkl]

well, simon says that its not mandatory to use the overview as the 2nd paragraph, it can be in the last also.He recommend that you give summary/overview after introduction and specific details in the coming paragraphs. Writing overview in the beginning has a merit, as after your counting of words in task 1, you are short by 10-15 words, you can easily rephrase the overview in the conclusion.