Writing
Five minutes of planning buys back fifteen, and it is visible in your Coherence band. With a practice exercise.
Planning your IELTS Task 2 essay takes about five minutes of your forty, and candidates skip it because it feels like time not spent writing. It is the reason so many essays start well and fall apart in the third paragraph.
An examiner can tell within two paragraphs whether an essay was planned. Unplanned writing repeats itself, changes position halfway through, and arrives at a conclusion that does not match the introduction.
The forty minutes
Six blocks. The writing is only twenty-eight minutes of it.
Topic, focus, instruction. Decide the essay type before anything else.
Two main points with an example each is enough. More ideas developed less is what pulls bands down.
Decide which point goes in which paragraph and what your conclusion will be. Write the conclusion in note form now.
Forty words. Paraphrase and direction.
Twelve minutes each for two, or eight each for three. This is where the marks are.
Forty words, then read back for repeated errors, missing parts of the question and the word count.
Method
Six habits that make a plan useful rather than decorative.
Before you look for ideas. Knowing your conclusion makes every later decision faster, and it stops the essay drifting.
Two well developed points score higher than five mentioned. Depth is assessed; coverage is not.
An idea without support is an assertion. Note the example at the planning stage so you do not invent one badly under pressure.
Nobody marks the plan. What matters is that it exists before you start writing.
Plan ideas. Writing full sentences in the plan means writing the essay twice, and you do not have time.
Changing your position halfway through is the clearest sign of an unplanned essay, and it damages Coherence directly.
Practice
Decisions about planning. Choose the better option in each case.
Some people think governments should fund public sports facilities. Others believe the money would be better spent on medical care. Discuss both views and give your opinion.
You have forty minutes. Plan before you write.
1How long should planning take?
About five minutes. Enough to fix your position and two points per side. Fifteen leaves too little writing time, and none produces the drift examiners recognise instantly.
2How many main points should each side have?
Two. Two developed points beat four mentioned. Depth of support is assessed under Task Response; number of ideas is not.
3When should you decide your opinion?
At the planning stage. Deciding as you write is how essays end up contradicting their own introduction.
4What should a plan contain?
Notes. Writing sentences in the plan means writing the essay twice. Keeping it in your head is what unplanned essays feel like from the inside.
5How long for the two body paragraphs?
About twenty-four minutes. They carry the argument and most of the marks, so they get the largest block.
That is almost always a planning problem rather than a language one, and it shows up in Coherence and Cohesion rather than in grammar.
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A plan is easy to check. Whether the essay it produced reaches the band you need is not.
IELTStestONLINE keeps every score you get in one place, gives you an estimated band as you work, and assesses your writing and speaking against the four criteria so you can see where you stand before test day. See what full membership includes
About five minutes of your forty. Enough to fix your position, two points per side and an example for each.
No. The plan is not marked, so write it in whatever form is fastest for you, including note form.
Usually four: introduction, two body paragraphs and a conclusion. Three body paragraphs works if you have the time to develop each.
Fewer ideas, developed properly. Two points with support score higher than five points only mentioned, because Task Response is assessing how well you develop them.
Write the conclusion anyway, even a short one. An essay without a conclusion is treated as incomplete under Coherence and Cohesion.
Full membership
Coherence and Cohesion is where an unplanned essay loses most, and it is the criterion candidates find hardest to judge in their own work.
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