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LESSON 3: How to Plan an IELTS Essay FOR WRITING TASK 2 BY C HRISTOPHER PELL 9 4 COMMENTS
This post will show you how to make a great plan that will help you write a clear essay every time.
The Benefits of Planning
There are normally around 16 students in my IELTS classes. Every new class gets at least a 30 -
minute session with me on planning and how much it improves your essays. I normally give the
students 20 minutes to plan a Task 2 essay which they finish for homework.
This is always interesting because normally only 2 or 3 students actually follow my instructions and
use the time to plan. The rest of them go straight into writing the essay. The result? The students
who took the time to plan always (and I mean EVERY time) produce better essays.
Writing an IELTS essay without a plan is like trying to put IKEA furniture together without any
instructions. You will get half way through it, get lost and frustrated and you will lose control of your
entire essay and end up with something like this:
A good plan should be like a map that guides you through the essay and makes sure you get to
where the examiner wants you to go. Every sentence should have purpose, if you are just writing
for the sake of writing then it won’t be a very good essay. Less is more in many cases and a good
plan makes sure that every single sentence has a purpose.
This is the number one excuse for not planning.
What if I told you that the longer you plan, the less time it will take you to write the essay?
Let’s look at two examples: student A who doesn’t like to plan and student B who spends 10 minutes planning.
Student A does this: write-think-think-write-delete-think-write-write-delete-think-write.
Student B does this: think-write.
It is impossible for most people- including IELTS examiners and teachers- to sit down and write a
good essay without thinking it through first. If you don’t plan you have to think as you write and
doing these two things, plus writing in a foreign language, thinking about grammar and
vocabulary and thinking about writing skills all at the same time, results in a very confused piece of
writing. I also find that students who don’t plan have to re-start their essays and it is not
uncommon to see students delete entire essays and start again.
How Does a Plan Save You Time?
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You have 40 minutes to write a Task 2 essay. Even if you took 10 minutes to plan and 5 minutes to
check your work at the end this still leaves you with 25 minutes to write your essay.
The average 250 word essay is about 12 sentences long, so you have over 2 minutes to write one
sentence. I think everyone is capable of doing that.
When you have a good plan, you know exactly what that sentence is going to be about already and
how it fits in with the rest of the essay. You don’t have to think of ideas or about structure, just
writing sentences that are grammatically correct and clearly say what you think about the question.
You don’t have to spend exactly 10 minutes planning and 5 minutes checking at the end. You could
plan for 7-8 minutes and checking for 2-3 minutes. Practice to find out what works best for you. How To Plan Planning has 4 stages: 1. Question Analysis 2. Idea Generation 3. Structur e 4. V ocabulary Question Analysis
This is probably the most important stage. The number one problem most IELTS students have is
not answering the question properly. Did you know you can’t get above a band score 5.0 if you
don’t address all parts of the question?
Let’s look at an example question:
One of the consequences of improved medical care is that the people are living longer and life
expectancy is increasing.
Do you think the advantages of this outweigh the disadvantages?
The keywords here are ‘improved medical care‘. This is our general topic. It is important to know
this, not for what we should write about but about what we shouldn’t write about. A common
mistake is to highlight the main keywords, or main topic, and write about this very generally. If you
do this you have not answered the question.
We therefore need to think about things more specifically and look for what I call micro-keywords.
They are ‘living longer‘ and ‘life expectancy is ‘.
increasing We therefore need to write about
these and how improved medical care has increased life expectancy. But we can’t just write a
general essay about this, we must look at the instruction words next.
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The instruction words are ‘Do you think the advantages of this outweigh the disadvantages?‘
In this example we will have to decide which side (advantages or disadvantages) is stronger. If you
choose advantages then you will have to say why these are much stronger than the advantages
and why the disadvantages are not so strong. If you just discuss the advantages you will not
answer the question correctly. We will also need to make our opinion about his very clear. So in summary we must: 
Find keywords (general topic) 
Find micro-keywords (specific topic) 
Find instruction words (how to answer question) Idea Generation
Lots of teachers and books about IELTS advise students to brainstorm (thinking of as many ideas as
possible) at this stage. I don’t think that brainstorming is very effective because it leads to
irrelevant ideas and wastes valuable time.
Instead of brainstorming we need to answer the questions directly. If one of your friends asked you
this question in a coffee shop, you would have no problem thinking of an answer, so do the same in
the exam. It helps to frame it within ‘Why?’ questions.
So for the example above we could ask ourselves two questions:
Why are the advantages of increased life expectancy strong?
Why are disadvantages of increased life expectancy weak?
We can then simply think of one or two relevant ideas for each of these questions.
The advantages of increased life expectancy are strong because most people think it is good if
their friends and family don’t die too quickly and everyone is happier.
The disadvantages are that there is more demand for food and resources but this a weak argument
because technology can solve these problems.
We now have two very relevant ideas and we can now move on to our next stage. Structure
Next we need to put our ideas into a structure. This is very important because it helps us organise
our ideas in a coherent way, just like the examiner wants us to.
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There are several different types of essay and each of them has a different structure.
For this essay our structure will look like this:
Paragraph 1- Introduction
Sentence 1- Paraphrase Sentence
Sentence 2- Thesis Statement
Sentence 3- Outline Statement
Paragraph 2- Why advantages are strong
Sentence 4- Topic Sentence Sentence 5- Explanation Sentence 6- Example
Paragraph 3- Why disadvantage are weak
Sentence 7- Topic Sentence Sentence 8- Explanation Sentence 9- Example
Paragraph 4- Conclusion
Sentence 1- Summary of main points
We can these fill in our ideas:
Paragraph 1- Introduction
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Sentence 1- Paraphrase Sentence
Sentence 2- These Statement – advantages outweigh disadvantages
Sentence 3- Outline Statement – Advantages- happiness Disadvantages- technology
Paragraph 2- Why advantages are strong
Sentence 4- Topic Sentence – happiness
Sentence 5- Explanation – death causes unhappiness and longer lives lead to happiness
Sentence 6- Example –Okinawa and Sardinia
Paragraph 3- Why disadvantage are weak
Sentence 7- Topic Sentence – technology
Sentence 8- Explanation – technology can solve any of the drawbacks
Sentence 9- Example – GM crops and renewable energy
Paragraph 4- Conclusion
Sentence 1- Summary of main points
Now we have all our ideas and we can think of some vocabulary. Vocabulary
Another common problem students have is repeating the same words, especially words from the
question, over and over again. This lowers our mark for vocabulary because it shows that we can’t
think of synonyms. A solution to this problem is to identify words in the question that we might
need to use more than once in the question.
Let’s look at the question again:
One of the consequences of improved medical care is that the people are living longer and life
expectancy is increasing.
Do you think the advantages of this outweigh the disadvantages?
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We can think of the following synonyms:
Improved medical care- enhanced medical treatment
Living longer- improved longevity
Life expectancy is increasing- the length of time people live is rising Advantages- benefits
Disadvantages- drawbacks
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