Hi everyone, Chris here from IELTS Advantage, and this is IELTS Writing Task 2, Everything You Need to Know. All right, so what we're gonna do in this video is we are going to break IELTS Writing Task 2 down into three parts, the planning part, the writing part, and the checking part. Often students get really confused about what to do when they're writing their Task 2 essays, and a very, very common problem is people see the question, they begin writing immediately, they get lost because they didn't do any planning, then they run out of time, they don't have any time to check. And what you should aim for is to plan everything out and then write your essay and then have time to check it at the end.
So we're gonna show you everything you need to know about these three stages. Right, so let's start off with planning. So the planning stage is broken down into four more stages. When I'm teaching my students, what I like to do is break things down so that they're easy to understand, so that it's easy to learn and then easy for you to do on test day. So we're gonna talk about the different question types, how to analyze the question so that we understand it fully, how to generate ideas, and then something called structure planning.
And then we'll move on to writing. So the first thing you need to be aware of are there are about six different types of essays. And if you have the same approach for every single different type of essay, you're not going to do as well as someone who understands the differences between these different questions.
and has a different approach for each of them. So there are opinion questions, like do you agree or disagree, discussion questions, advantages and disadvantages questions, problem and solution, causes and solution, and then double or direct questions. In this video, we're principally going to focus on opinion essays, but all of the things that we're going to discuss are applicable generally to the other types of essays. The video would be about eight hours long if we looked at this one, then this one, then this one, then this one, then this one.
We're going to give you everything everything you need to know in one video. All right, so when you see the question, you need to understand what type of question it is first. Then you need to analyze the question. So first question you need to ask yourself when you see the question is what type of question is it?
Is it a discussion question, an advantages or disadvantages question? And you wouldn't believe it, the number of students who see the question like this one here and just immediately start writing and don't actually think about what they're asking you to do. The most important thing for writing task two is that you answer the question and you follow what they have asked you to do and you give them what they are looking for.
So what type of question? Here's a question from Cambridge 11, the book, governments should spend money on railways rather than roads. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
So by looking at this, Second sentence here, to what extent do you agree or disagree? We know this is an opinion question, we need to give our opinion and we need to state to what extent do you agree or disagree. The second question is really really important.
There's a common problem that examiners see every single day is the students will look quickly at the question and they will write generally about the topic. So if the topic is about global warming they will write everything they know about global warming and just put it on the paper. that is not answering the question you need to understand what the general topic is so that you can then drill deeper down and focus on the specific thing that they're asking you so have a look at this and think about what the general topic is governments should spend money on real ways rather than roads so what is the general topic the general topic is government spending so if you just wrote everything you know about government spending in relation to railways and roads and infrastructure in general, you're not really answering the question.
But it's important that you understand what the general topic is so that you don't write about that generally. Then you need to ask yourself the third question, what is the specific topic? All right, so government should spend money on railways rather than roads.
So within the context of the general topic of government spending, You need to talk about whether government should spend money on railways or roads. That is the most important aspect of the question and you need to say do you agree or disagree about that thing. If you get into the habit of asking yourself those three questions you will always understand the question and you will always answer the specific question. It means that you're going to be way ahead of 80-90% of students because what they do is they just look quickly at the question, panic, and start writing about the general topic and don't say whether they agree or disagree or give an opinion at all. Next, Idea generation.
Very very common question we get asked is how do we generate ideas? Keep it simple. Don't overcomplicate. Number one, do not brainstorm.
If you go to most IELTS classes and the class where it teaches you how to generate ideas, 99% of teachers will tell you to brainstorm. Brainstorming for IELTS Writing Task 2 idea generation is completely useless. Why is it completely useless? Well, what does brainstorming do?
Brainstorming encourages you to think of as many different ideas as possible. Which is exactly the opposite to what you are supposed to do. You are supposed to think of a limited number, a small number, of specific relevant ideas that actually answer the question.
Brainstorming does not do that. What it does is it produces 10, 20, I've even seen students generate 30 different ideas and 99% of them are completely useless. And brainstorming seems to encourage students to think of the most complicated or complex ideas possible.
That is not what they are looking for. They're looking for the most obvious, simple, straightforward ideas. There is no extra marks to be gained by thinking of amazing, complicated, high-level ideas.
They want you to show that you can use ideas to clearly communicate in English, which means keeping it simple. So, what should you do instead of brainstorming? Instead of brainstorming, ask yourself a direct question. So for this particular question, what you would ask yourself is, why should governments spend more money on railways rather than roads?
So instead of, you know, brainstorming where you would write railways versus roads and like a little bubble around it and 20 arrows, just ask yourself one question. And what is the most obvious straightforward idea that comes up? Write it in the comments below. Don't think of the most complicated idea. The simplest idea is always the best.
And if you can't think of an idea personally, try and think a little bit outside the box by thinking, if 100 people were asked this direct question, what would most people say? And that kind of shift in your mindset takes you out of your own brain in a way and makes you think generally about the specific question. and allows you to generate ideas effectively and quickly.
Because you only have 40 minutes, really, to answer the whole question, to plan, to write, to check your answer, you don't want to be spending more than a few minutes generating ideas. Now that you've generated your ideas, you've thought about the question, you know how you're going to answer it, you're going to have lots of ideas in your head. And it's a bad idea to immediately start writing. You want to structure your ideas. and put them into a plan in black and white on the paper.
And in order to do that, what you should do is you should get a structure. So this is a structure for an opinion essay. It's not for any other type of essay.
And there are many, many, many different structures that you can use for opinion essays. This is one that I teach my students because it's easy to learn and it gets high marks. It's not the only structure that you can ever use, but we have helped more people get a band seven. or above than any other course or school in the world.
So you can say, oh, my teacher said to do this or do that. Feel free to say that, but this is the one that we teach our students. But the point is that I'm not teaching you a structure for opinion essays.
I'm teaching you how to plan your answer. So get a reliable structure. It could be this one, but get a structure for all of the different types of question.
You'll have a different structure for discussion questions, advantages and disadvantages questions, double questions. Get somewhere that you trust. How can you trust them?
Look at their past scores. Look at whether they have Lots and lots and lots of success stories, successful students, if they have, their structures are probably pretty good. If they don't, I wouldn't trust them. But the point I'm trying to make is, you memorize the structure, and then you populate, you add in your ideas and all of the information here. So this will take you just a few minutes to do.
If you practice doing this, it'll be very, very quick. And all you'll do here is populate this structure with your ideas, and then what it does is it creates a roadmap for your essay. So when you're writing, you're just focusing on writing.
You don't want to be writing and thinking of ideas and thinking of vocabulary and grammar and, oh, what's my structure here and what's my idea development? You want to just be focusing on writing. Our brains are not very good at multitasking.
So all of this planning stage is to create this roadmap for your essay. And that is going to mean that you write a very clear, coherent essay, and you're focusing on one thing at a time. And you might be thinking, well, Chris, I don't have time to do all of this planning.
You will. If you do all of this, you will be able to write your essay a lot quicker. You're not going to get lost.
And if you try this method, you might take a little bit longer to begin with, because that's totally natural. When you're learning something new, it will take you a little bit longer. But if you continue to practice in this way, you will have no problem getting everything done in 40 minutes.
So just to review the planning stage, understand the question type. analyze the question properly, generate your ideas, and then put all of your ideas and all the things you're thinking about into a structure plan. And now we have a map and we can start on our writing stage.
So there are three stages to the writing stage. Introduction, main body paragraph, and your conclusion. So breaking everything down so that it's very, very simple to learn, so that you can give the examiners exactly what they want on test day.
The biggest problem that examiners see every day when they're looking at introductions is people adding things that are just not necessary to the extent that the introductions are meaningless. The student has completely wasted their time. What is an introduction? An introduction is to introduce the reader to what you are going to write.
If you think about it that way, then you are going to write a very, very effective introduction. But if you listen to someone who is telling you things that they don't really know what they are talking about and telling you to include this and include this and include this, you're just adding a bunch of nonsense into your introduction. And it's a terrible way to introduce yourself to the examiner, because the examiner is looking at that and thinking, another 5.5 or another 6. It's very rarely that someone writes one of these meaningless introductions and then gets a high score. So these are five things not to include in your introduction. Number one, a neutral background statement.
Complete waste of time. It doesn't add anything to your essay and it's going to lead to repetition because you're going to paraphrase the question anyway. So why would you write something that's very very similar to a paraphrase and is a complete waste of time?
Remember you are on the clock and it's just a terrible way to introduce your essay. Memorize phrases. You are not going to trick the examiners.
This is what they do every single day. They get up, they look at essays and they go to bed. They don't do anything other than look at these essays again and again and again and again.
They have seen every memorized phrase. And what they'll do is they'll just completely discount them. So if you're at a school or you're looking at a website where they say, like, memorize this fixed phrase and insert it into your essay, that is one of the worst things that you could ever do. Also, it's a waste of time to put this essay will for example discuss both views and give a reason conclusion at the end That's what your essay is supposed to do You're stating the obvious and very much like a neutral background statement.
You're not adding anything to your essay You're not telling the examiner what you think about the question, which is what you're supposed to be doing Number four, a specific number of words or sentences. I see this a lot on YouTube and on Facebook and on blogs where they say write three exact sentences and write 20 words in your first sentence. Nonsense.
Some introductions are long, some are short. Some introductions are long and good and some introductions are long and bad. Some are short and good and some are short and bad.
Length has nothing to do with quality. It's all about quality, not quantity. And number five, fancy vocabulary. You are trying to impress the examiner by showing off your list of vocabulary that you've memorized. It's not a memorization test.
You're going to get it wrong. Or the examiner is going to know that you memorized it. It is very, very, very obvious. And you're not going to be writing an effective introduction because you write an effective introduction by writing an effective introduction, not by inserting lots of fancy words. So just by avoiding these five things, you're going to write a much better introduction.
But what should you include in your introduction? So what I'm going to show you here is an answer from one of our students. What I tend to do is not share what I would write. because I'm a native English speaker.
You guys are learning English. I'm an IELTS teacher. My sample answer is not going to be very relevant to you, but a student's sample answer is.
So this is a VIP student who we work with, and this is their. introduction. States should allocate more funding to railway lines instead of building new highways. This essay agrees with this statement because trains are environmentally friendly and benefit a greater number of people. So what I'd like you to do is read this introduction.
And think of the formula that they used. Think of the principles that they used in order to write this. What does it contain?
So feel free to pause the video, think about it. There are three things that it has. And the three things are, they paraphrase the question, they clearly stated their opinion, and they stated their main ideas.
So the first sentence, states should allocate more funding to railway lines instead of building new highways, they're just paraphrasing the question. This essay agrees with this statement, that's clearly stating their opinion, because trains are environmentally friendly, idea one, and benefit a greater number of people, idea two. So if I see this as an examiner, what is it saying to me?
It's saying that they haven't included any of this nonsense, which is what 80-90% of the time they see. And what they've done is they've proved to me that they know how to paraphrase effectively, which is one of the things that they'll be looking out for if you hope to get a balance 7, 8 or 9. Your position is very clear throughout the whole essay, because it's here throughout the whole essay. means in the introduction too. And I know exactly what their main ideas are.
I know exactly what is coming up in the rest of the essay. They have introduced, that's what you're supposed to do in an introduction, introduced what is going to be in the rest of the essay. And if you're looking for more detail and you want more instruction on how to write an introduction or a main body paragraph or a conclusion, we have a course called IELTS Essay Builder which focuses primarily on How to write an introduction, main body paragraph and conclusion is totally free.
Just click below the video and you'll be able to gain instant access to it. So if we look at their introduction, idea one. environmentally friendly. Idea two, benefit a greater number of people. Guess what we're going to put in the main body paragraphs.
Main body paragraph one, environmentally friendly. Main body paragraph two, benefit greater number of people. One paragraph, one idea.
One paragraph, one idea. You should not have multiple main ideas in one paragraph. The purpose of a paragraph is introduce an idea and explain it, give an example, discuss that idea, and then If you want to start a new idea, start a new paragraph. And we're gonna break down the main body paragraphs a little bit for you here. Topic sentence, the first thing that you wanna add in.
Then you wanna add in an explanation, and then you want to add in an example. Not three sentences, three elements here. You're going to always have this first, then you're going to have this, and then you're going to have this.
So this could be one, two, or three sentences. This could be one or two sentences, depending on the question, depending on the topic. but you're always going to have these three elements in here. Topic sentence is just telling the reader, this is my main idea. This is what the paragraph is about.
Number two, explanation. You are giving the reasons why your main idea answers the question. All right, think about it that way.
You're providing reasons. You're showing why. Imagine the examiner having that question for you. So you say, this is my main idea.
Well, why does this answer the question? How does this answer the question? What are your reasons? Give me more.
And then the example is going to be your supporting evidence. So you can give your opinion. This is what you think, that you're going to strengthen your argument by giving evidence.
And again, this is a quick overview of main body paragraphs. If you want more detail and more examples and everything else, click below to get that free course IELTS Essay Builder. It's going to help you out a lot.
And then conclusions. Things that you don't want and things that you do want. You want to finish your essay strong.
You don't want to write a great introduction, a great main body paragraph, a further great main body paragraph, and then throw away everything that you've done at the end because you don't. get your conclusion done or you write a poor conclusion. There should be no new ideas whatsoever.
This is not your chance to add in future predictions or this is what I think or this is something that I should have mentioned above but I didn't and let's just sneak it in here. Oh I thought of a new idea let's put it in there. No and there should be no general statements all right you're not adding in a general statement here because what a lot of people teach you is Start off your introduction with a general statement, complete waste of time, and then your conclusion, a general statement. Some even tell you to put a general statement in your main body paragraph. It's just filler.
It's just fresh air. It doesn't actually lead to you creating a coherent argument in your essay. So what you should do instead, clearly state your position. Check out the IELTS Writing Task 2 marking criteria that the examiners have beside them when they're looking at your essay. Every examiner...
is looking at the same criteria, state your position clearly throughout your essay. So it should be in your introduction and your conclusion. A lot of people get confused about this and a lot of teachers don't teach this because they I think it's repeating ideas.
You shouldn't be repeating vocabulary. You should try and vary your vocabulary as much as possible, but it's fine to restate your position because that is what an essay is supposed to look like. You state your position in your introduction, then you discuss it in the main body paragraphs, and then you state it again in the conclusion.
And then finally, summarize your main ideas. So what you're going to do in the conclusion, I agree or I disagree, why here are my two main ideas. And again, if you want more information about how to write effective conclusions, check out the free course below. Okay, so we've wrote our introduction, we've wrote our main body paragraph, and we've wrote our conclusion.
Finally, we need to check everything. You wouldn't believe the number of students that I work with that are at a band 7 level. up until this point and then they don't check it they make a few little errors and that drops them down to a 6.5 how many people watching this video put in the comments have got a 6.5 probably the reason why you got a 6.5 is you didn't have time to check or you didn't check properly because it's those little mistakes and they all add up that lead to you getting a 6.5 So there are three different checks that you want to make.
And before you say it in the comments, I won't have time to check everything. You don't have a problem with timing. You have a problem with writing. So I can write a banine essay in 15 minutes. because it's my job and I've done it over and over and over and over again.
Students that I work with can write a band eight or a band nine essay in about 30 minutes. And that is not because they are really, really good at time management or they learned some secret time management tricks. It's because they're really good at writing.
So you need to improve your writing and then you're going to improve the speed. of your writing and get everything done really really quickly and you'll have time to plan, time to write and time to check everything at the end. So the first check is grammar. Grammar is 25% of your total mark and those little mistakes all add up and if you're getting a band six which is the most common score that we see for grammar it's going to lead to you probably getting a 6.5 overall because it will probably drop down your coherence and cohesion score as well. And the first part of checking happens weeks and months before you even do the test.
Identify your main areas of weakness. So you're not doing this while you're checking your essay, you're checking this way before you begin the test. The reason why this is so important is students very rarely are terrible at every area of grammar. They normally have one or two areas that could be prepositions or articles or verb-subject agreement or tenses or punctuation.
Normally there's just one area of weakness or two areas of weakness. And if you have one or two areas of weakness, it's going to lead to mistakes in every single sentence. So the best way to prevent mistakes is to identify those weak areas, work on them, turn those into areas of strength, and then you won't have to check as much because you're going to reduce the number of mistakes that you make dramatically. And then for grammar, there are three checks that you want to make. Read after every completed sentence.
So at the end of every sentence, read the sentence again. Does it make sense grammatically? If not, correct it. Read after every completed paragraph. So when you finish your introduction, read the whole introduction.
When you finish your first main body paragraph, read the whole first main body paragraph and check for grammatical errors. Read after you've completed the entire essay. So that means that you have checked every sentence three times.
You might think that's overkill, but if you start doing it, you will start to see that you miss little mistakes even at this stage. And I think it's also a good idea to break your checking down into focusing on grammar first and then vocabulary second because our brains are just much better able to focus on one thing at a time and do one thing effectively at a time often when people are checking they'll just look for everything they'll look for grammar and they'll look for vocabulary and they'll look for ideas and development and all of these things and they've got 17 different things going through their head at the same time and it means they don't spot anything so check your grammar first then check your vocabulary. Here are some things that you should think about when you're checking your vocabulary. Most important is meaning.
Does the word mean what you think it means? And what we tell our students is to follow the 100% rule. If you are not 100% sure about the meaning and whether it fits into that sentence or not, don't use it.
Use a simpler word. Now, a lot of students will argue about that and say, I want to put as many High-level words in as possible. If you do that, you're going to get most of those high-level words wrong. It's a complete waste of time even putting them in there, and it's going to lower your vocabulary score.
So it is better to use a simple word properly than use a complicated word incorrectly. Collocations, very, very important in English. Check the collocations.
When you are learning new words, you should always be thinking and noting down collocations. Appropriacy. Is it appropriate to use that word? in that sentence. And variance.
Have you repeated some words? It's okay if you repeat some words, but you should try and vary your language as much as possible. So have a quick check.
Is there any way that you could use a synonym instead of that word that you've repeated? And then level. You might want to have a look at the more simpler words in your essay and if possible, up-level them. Is it a way of improving your vocabulary by turning a simpler word into a more complicated word? For example, if you're writing about food and you write the food was very nice, you could change very nice to delicious.
And the third check, think about everything else. So think about paragraphing. Is your paragraphing clear? Word count, have you wrote over 250 words?
Coherence and cohesion, is your essay as easy to understand as possible and well linked up together? Was your position, your opinion clear throughout the entire essay? And did you answer the specific question? And if you check all of those things, I guarantee you that you're gonna spot a few things and be like.
oh if I kept that in I would have got a lower score than I was hoping for and by doing all of that checking you're going to get the score that you deserve. Okay guys, so everything you need to know about IELTS Writing Task 2, question type, question analysis, idea generation, structure planning for the planning stage, how to write an introduction, main body paragraph and conclusion for the writing stage, we go into far more detail on these three things inside our IELTS Essay Builder. It's a complete free course that you can gain access to. Just click below the video and you can gain instant access to that. And then make sure that you're checking your grammar, checking your vocabulary, and checking everything else.
Hopefully you enjoyed this video and you find it useful. If you need any help, feel free to comment below. We answer every single comment. And if you want to send us an email, chris.ieltsadvantage.com is my email address.
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