so the other day I was wondering do all of these band 8 and N students have anything in common so I decided to research hundreds of students and what I found was they all do these five small planning hacks so in this video I'm going to show you what these five planning hacks are how you can start using them today and how they'll help you massively improve your I writing score and finish everything on time on test day to show you what I mean I've brought you to my local park yes this is what Parks look like in in Ireland every year people come here and walk right past the map and they go walking up into these mountains up here and get completely lost but if you follow the map and the arrows around the park it's impossible to get lost but only if it's a good plan if you have a bad plan you're going to get even more lost and fail the test so let's go for a walk and I'll show you what bad n students do completely differently the first thing b n students do is they start the question very differently from other students they do something that most students don't even think of but it's the most important thing of all I want you to imagine that you're here with me on my walk in this beautiful Irish Forest every year so many tourists come here and have to be rescued by helicopter because they come unprepared what could we do to prevent that from happening to make sure that we never get lost well there are a few things that they all have in common number one they didn't check the map number two they didn't think about what clothes they might need here in Ireland it can be nice and sunny one moment and chucking it down and freezing the next and most of them didn't take time to pack the essentials like water and food and a phone to call someone in case they get lost this is exactly the same with students who get lost during the ISS writing test they don't take the time to fully understand the question and if you don't understand the question you're going to get lost every band n student that I've ever worked with has spent at least one or two minutes just sitting silently and thinking deeply about the question and they also follow a three-step system that we teach our VIP students and I'm going to reveal this to you for free in a free essay course that I'll give to you towards the end of this video but first let's talk about the next thing bad n students do differently so these bad n students have taken the time to fully understand the question but next they need ideas to answer the question these high level students generate ideas very very differently from other students so first we need to ask ourselves what do most students do if you look at the official statistics from I the average writing score worldwide is just ban 5.5 so what most students do is obviously not working and idea generation is a huge part of this so what is the most popular idea generation technique if you have a real problem brainstorming so helpful for writing brainstorming is to come up with some ideas that you want to write about now I want you to think about how do you feel when you are brainstorming when we ask students this they often say things like stressed frustrated it gives me a headache Under Pressure all these negative emotions so we have a system that makes people feel terrible but doesn't produce very good ideas now if brainstorming worked it probably would be worth feeling terrible to get good results but the problem with brainstorming is it produces lots of irrelevant ideas and takes a lot of time so it makes you feel bad and it produces bad results and it's no surprise that our bond 8 and N students use a completely different system in fact it is the opposite of brainstorming it produces relevant specific ideas in a fraction of the time and that is the pathway system these paths here are designed to help people walk around the park with the least amount of effort and make sure that they don't get lost you can of course go off the paths and go into the woods but you'll probably get lost and it's going to take a lot of effort and you might hurt yourself and it's a very bad idea instead just follow the path of least resistance and you'll be fine so instead of brainstorming and going off the path and getting lost just ask yourself one simple question what is the simplest most straightforward idea that directly answers this question this generates relevant ideas that are easy to understand and easy to write about very very quickly and this will also keep your examiner very happy because it says in the marking criteria for band n your ideas are relevant fully extended and well supported I've also included a few more idea generation techniques that I share with my VIP students and I'm going to include those in the free course at the end of the video so now you've fully understood the question and you've got high quality ideas is how do you put those into your essay let's go to one of the bridges here in the park to explain how band 78 and N students use these ideas to write a great essay see many students have great ideas but they don't know how to put those ideas into an essay that keeps the examiner happy if we look at the marking criteria it says in order to get a bound eight or nine we need to sequence information and ideas logically and skillfully manage paragraphing but how do we do that to get to the other side of this River we need a bridge this bridge was built in 1790 by people who know way more about engineering than I ever will I'm a complete idiot when it comes to Building Bridges but I can use their knowledge from the past to walk across this bridge and this is where structure planning comes in structures have been designed by people who know more about IELTS than you ever will their skill and knowledge allows you to take your ideas and insert them into their structure and then you can safely make it across to the other side but remember I mentioned before that the average score worldwide is just 5.5 and there are lots of people on the internet that tell you they have band nine structures the problem is not structures in general it's the people on the internet who claim they have these ban line structures so the key really is to find structures developed by people who really know what they're doing the good news is that on our VIP course and the structures available for free on our website they've not only been approved by many many many experienced examiners but they've produced more b seven eight and N success stories than any other course in the world so rest assured you know they work and if you want some of those structures included in the VIP course and me explaining step by step exactly how to use them the good news is you can get 10% off our VIP key course today I've included a 10% special discount Link in the description of this video so now we have three out of the five but does just understanding the question generating great ideas quickly and then using a great structure guarantee a high score unfortunately not you see ideas and structures are only really 50% of your total score the other 50% is for grammar and vocabulary can to have the best ideas and structure in the world but if you have grammar and vocabulary problems you're not going to get a high score if you want a high score everything needs to be at that score but luckily our five-step planning system steps four and five are vocabulary and grammar so vocabulary just means the words you'll use to express your ideas in the essay they are just things that you use in your essay on a walk in the forest there are things you need to use to help you get around Park safely like a bottle of water or a snack instead of a bottle of water you could bring a bottle of champagne but you'd look ridiculous you could just jump into this waterfall and drink as much as you want but it's probably better just to buy one from the shop our band n students use their planning time to think of great vocabulary and this works so well because of how our brains operate you see our brains can only really focus on one thing at a time try and think of two things simultaneously right now you can't do it but on test day I students try and think of what does the question mean ideas structures vocabulary grammar I'm feeling very hungry why does the examiner hate me I'm going to fail how do I tell my parents oh my God I'm never going to move to Canada these are just way too many things to think of and that's why many many students fail our band8 and nine students take a few minutes to focus on the question and think about topic specific relevant words and then when they come to write their essay they can just focus on writing they're not trying to think of grammar vocabulary writing ideas all at the same time they do their thinking first and then they're writing and that's why they have great success and this is really the key difference between band S 8 and N students and everyone else they use planning to help them focus on one thing out of time students that do too many things at the same time mess up and fall in students that just focus on one thing at a time make it safely to the other side but what about the final 25% of your writing score grammar the most important thing the markting criteria says about grammar is the majority of sentences are error free and makes only very occasional errors or inappropri Sees In other words The Examiner is cting the number of errors that you are making if you make fewer errors your score improves following this planning technique you are just focusing on writing when you're writing and you make fewer errors this planning method also saves you time because doing one thing at a time is far more efficient and allows them to get everything done within 40 minutes in fact most of our students by following this system have found 5 or 10 minutes left at the end to just check their work if they check their work they're reducing and fixing the number of errors that they're making increasing their score even more and if you do all five of those things you'll make it to the other side safely even on a day like this so I promise you a free course if you want that it's called ielt essay Builder it's in the description and it's going to take you step-by step how to write the best essay possible don't forget we also have the 10% discount for a v VI course or if you want to just continue on your journey with us on YouTube click one of these