In this tutorial, we look at how to plan an IELTS Task 2 essay in five minutes, worked through live on a real exam question.
We look at:
This is a recorded walkthrough rather than a written guide. I take the leisure time question, the same one used in our step by step tutorial, and plan it out loud from a blank page to a finished paragraph map.
Along the way I explain why a misread question sinks everything that follows, how I fix my two positions before writing anything else, and why an invented example can still earn marks if it lets you use the right grammar. I also talk about where to find ideas when you are stuck, and the few minutes at the end that most students skip.
If you want the written method, with each step laid out in order, read our IELTS essay plan for writing task 2. This episode is me doing it rather than describing it.
The complete transcript of the episode is below. Click to open it.
Read the full transcript of “how to plan an ielts essay in five minutes”Hello there podcast listeners. In today’s episode of the IELTS podcast, we are going to look at how to plan an IELTS essay in five minutes. Now, if you’ve just recently joined the podcast, then there’ll be no surprises for you.
Welcome to the podcast. But if you’ve been a long time listener, you’ve probably recognized or realized that I’ve been away for a while. And there’s a huge story behind that, but it coincided with me moving back to England, having a family, having a long break, but now I’m back.
I’m back in business. So let’s jump into it. Let’s explore.
Yeah, let’s just get into what you tuned in to listen to. So, what we’re going to do is learn how to plan an IELTS Task 2 essay in five minutes. Now, just a side note, the more you do this, the faster you will get, you know.
It’s like any task, any skill, the more you do this and if you just, you know, if you realize that you lose a lot of time on brainstorming and planning an essay it’s okay when you’re in your preparation stage you just got to realize that you know and admit like okay I’m losing a lot of time on this I’m just going to focus on that specific part of the essay writing process and also while you’re preparing you don’t want to get yourself down because what you should doing really is just recognizing like okay my ideas is my weak point or my planning is my weak area and then just isolate it and focus on that skill and then slowly you’ve mastered it and then the next time you write an essay you might think okay my vocabulary is the weak spot so you isolate that you work on that and eventually you will get up to a band seven or higher.
So sorry I went off on a tangent there. But let me just tell you what you’re going to learn in this essay, in this podcast. We’re going to cover the six moves that make up the plan, the order that you do them, how long to spend on each one, roughly.
And as I said before, don’t worry, the first time you do this, it takes a long time. Don’t worry. The important mindset to have is that okay it’s taking me a long time but I’m going to work on it, I’m going to perfect it and then once it’s perfected I’ll move on to the next part of this essay writing process.
So let’s jump into it so as I said we’re going to look at how long to spend on each component you’ll also hear me plan a real exam question out loud and you’ll be able to go from a blank page to a map of what you’re going to be doing. So let me just give you an analogy of why the plan is so important. It’s like when you set off on a journey, the GPS in the car or you’re new in a city, like if you take the wrong turning right at the beginning and you carry on down that journey, down that route, then you’re going to be way off target.
So it’s incredibly important just to analyze the question and just figure out what does the examiner want from me because if you speed run that first part and you understand incorrectly and then you go on to write an incorrect essay for example say the essay wants ABC and you understood because you speed ran it you understood it incorrectly and and you understood that it needed, I don’t know, BCD and then you go and plan an essay on BCD and then you write paragraphs on BCD and then you write a conclusion on BCD then it doesn’t matter how good you wrote it if you’re off topic you’re going to be losing points.
So the first one we have to understand what the question wants from us and now a key component of this is just to classify the question, okay? So, is it advantage-disadvantage? Is it to what extent do you agree?
There’s about four or five different question types discussed both views give your opinion, a two-part question, problem and solution and once you understand which question type you have is just far easier to move forward. So let’s listen to the first question we’ve got, the one we’re going to work through today. Some people think that it is important to use leisure time for activities that improve the mind, such as reading and doing word puzzles.
Other people feel that it is important to rest the mind during leisure time. Discuss both views and give your opinion. Now, as I said, how are we going to class that?
Well, the answer is in the question there. It’s discuss both views and give your opinion. So we’re going to look at the first viewpoint, which is, some people think it’s important to use leisure time for activities that improve the mind.
And the second viewpoint, probably paragraph two, is, is, other people feel it’s important to rest their mind during leisure time. Okay, discuss both views and then give your opinion. Right.
What are we going to do? So the first step I always recommend, especially in these ones, is just fix your position. Get your position clear.
I always talk about this as P1 and P2 as your position one, position two, and that corresponds to paragraph one, paragraph two. If we focus on the body paragraphs first, that will enable us to write, once we know what’s going in the body paragraphs, we then know what to put in our introductions and into our conclusions. And also, that’s where we want to focus most of our time on the body paragraphs, because that’s where we’re going to write the most and we’re going to pick up the bulk of the points.
So paragraph one. Yes, we’re going to fix our position. Use leisure time to improve the mind.
Stimulates the brain, makes use of idle time. You could learn a language and you could just overall improve yourself. Paragraph two, no, I think you should rest the mind.
Work is stressful. Sports scientists realize the value in rest. value in rest.
I mean that’s just one example that popped into my mind now while I was just looking at my notes. So I’m just going to write that down and I’ll come back to that later because it’s usually good to have some solid examples. Some of the reasons why resting your mind is valuable.
Let’s see. You can allow your subconscious to actually process ideas. Now this is a tricky one to actually explain so I might just cancel that idea out to be honest because it’s not the quality of your ideas really, it’s the quality of your communication.
This is a language exam. Language is communication. So even if you are a neuroscientist and you come up with the best quality arguments, if you explain those poorly and poorly written English, you’re going to score poor.
I mean, the examiner at the end of the day doesn’t really obviously want to know your views on what to do with with your brain when you’re chilling out, the examiner really wants to know how you can communicate it, okay? So we get our positions, and if examples pop into your mind, just note them down, don’t worry, and try to generate a few ideas on this. And a few examples as well, while you’re here, while you’re in that, okay?
And then what I usually do now is just sort of like qualify them. go back to the question, double check, does it correspond? Then I’ll go and check my examples, do they correspond as well?
And this might seem time consuming, but as I said at the beginning, this is the key time you want to be spending, this is the key moment you want to be spending time because you’re starting out on your journey. And if you’ve got it wrong here and then you go and write your paragraphs, You’re going to end up in, as I used to say, a world of pain. You’re gonna be writing about, as I was saying at the beginning, BCD when the examiner wants ABC, for example.
Now then. So we’ve got an example here. Let’s just think of an example actually for body paragraph one.
Use leisure time to improve your mind. Let’s see. It stimulates your brain, makes use of idle time.
You could even learn a language. For example, Duolingo app states that with just 20 minutes a day, the users can improve in a language and if this compounds daily by the end of a year or two, you are going to be considerably ahead and if we look at this objectively this is far better the person will end up in a far better position than if they had just spent 20 minutes a day on TikTok or YouTube. Now I like that example because what we’ve done is it’s not only We’ve got like a solid example there of Duolingo.
I’m not even sure if that’s correct or not or accurate. I mean, but it does sound accurate. It does sound correct.
It’s fine. You’re not going to get fact checked on it. But what I liked about that example was is that I could use a new verb form than if they had.
You see, and then we’re picking up the points. And then body paragraph two, as I said, rest leads to better performance, back at work. I’m not going to do the subconscious one, I’m going to use the sports scientist one and just say like the brain is, it could be argued, the brain is a muscle, it’s one of the most energy consuming, one of the muscles that consumes the most energy and sports sports scientists are broadly in agreement, lovely little phrase there that I’m just going to write down in my notes because I want that phrase in my essay.
I’ll say I’m broadly in agreement that rest days speed up recovery and this is why from all serious athletes from MMA fighters to Formula One drivers to elite Olympians again that sounds so much better Olympians you know it’s that it’s this higher level vocabulary um anyway um as I was saying this is why all of them have a day dedicated to just rest okay now maybe there are some athletes out there who never rest I’m not so sure but I think from my general understanding is that most have a rest and recovery day okay and that’s another good phrase that I’d probably put down to insert into my essay a rest and recovery day because I think that is what is the terminology there okay so the next we’ve generated our example okay and now what I would would do here is use a structure.
The sentence guide does have a structure, it’s like we state our position, we say why and then we give an example and then we can even add like a conditional example there as well. But the whole essay structure and the phrases and the terminology and that’s a whole new essay. So, we’ve got now our ideas, we’ve got our examples, we’re going to drop it into our structure and because we’ve got our ideas then what we can do is go back, we can go back and use those ideas and insert them into our introduction and into our conclusion and this is how the the essay is going to basically write itself once we’ve got the planning under control.
Now there’s just two things more that I want to mention. One, I know a lot of students struggle with ideas. Now I’ll briefly just mention a solution that I know works and that is and this is used to be it still is actually in our course and basically you get given about 40 questions and you have to generate ideas for each question okay an idea and an example and here if you cannot do it I even suggest in the course that you go online and you research the question.
Now you could use chat GPT for this. But even then I would still write it out and just try and remember the reasons that I think the best solution, if you really want high quality ideas that are your own is start reading about subjects. Because if you go to chat GPT, it’s going to give you exactly what you want, which is like an idea or an opinion, which is efficient.
However, let’s say you’re stuck on an essay about climate change. You go to chat GPT and it will explain, it’ll give you an idea and opinion and basically answer the question for you, which is good. But if you can read around the subject, you’ll be far more knowledgeable for the next climate change question that might be slightly different from the one that you struggled on.
For example, it might be worth knowing that China is producing a lot of solar panels at the moment. It might be worth knowing that the war in the Middle East is pushing up petrol prices, which is also further accelerating the shift to renewables. You can start filling up your head with ideas.
Now, another way just to bulk out your essays is to ask why. So you’ve got your idea, then you ask why, and then you ask why again, and then you ask why again. And this is time consuming and it’s something that you want to do more so in the preparation phase of the IELTS exam rather than in the actual exam room okay by the time you’re in the exam room you want to be fully in control of this process so let me just give you an example of how this would work let’s go back to the question we’ve got our positions and let’s just focus on the second position which was, let’s see, rest the mind.
Work is stressful, rest leads to better performance at work. Why? Because you have time off, the subconscious could take over.
Also sports scientists recommend this. Why? Because they’ve done in-depth studies.
Why? Because they want to get optimum performance for the athletes. So just doing that why we’ve got more vocabulary in our answer, we’ve got more arguments, and it lets us choose from a selection of arguments.
Right. And one last thing before we finish, and this can easily boost your essay, your test two essay by five, 10, 15% and that’s just to allow a few minutes to check for mistakes. You start working through your essay, you look at every single word.
Some people recommend to go backwards through the essay. Some people just scan it and blitz it. You’ve got to find out what works for you.
If somebody says work backwards, try it out. It might be better for you. Personally, I found just putting my pencil or even just my finger over every single word.
I found that worked better. It’s up to you. You need to find out which one takes the most time, which one’s most accurate.
And also, probably you’ve got a certain grammatical structure or spellings that you always struggle on. So you want to look for those structures in your essay, pinpoint them and just make sure you haven’t made a mistake on them. Okay, we’re coming to the end of the essay, the podcast, sorry.
Thank you very much for listening. If you need any more help and guidance, then you can head over to www.ilspodcast.com. Wishing you a super day and good luck with your IELTS exam.
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