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By Christopher Pell
This post will show you how to make a great plan that will help you write a clear essay every time.
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.
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.
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.
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. Structure
4. Vocabulary
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?
One of the consequences of improved medical care is that the people are living longer and life expectancy is
increasing.
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.
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:
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.
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.
There are several different types of essay and each of them has a different structure.
Paragraph 1- Introduction
Sentence 1- Paraphrase Sentence
Sentence 5- Explanation
Sentence 6- Example
Sentence 8- Explanation
Sentence 9- Example
Paragraph 4- Conclusion
Paragraph 1- Introduction
Sentence 5- Explanation – death causes unhappiness and longer lives lead to happiness
Paragraph 4- Conclusion
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.
One of the consequences of improved medical care is that the people are living longer and life expectancy is
increasing.
Advantages- benefits
Disadvantages- drawbacks
Like everything on this website, you need to not only take the advice but to practice using it. Next time you are
practicing an Task 2 essay try using my advice and I guarantee your writing will improve.