We have already written about typical mistakes candidates make in IELTS essays, but starting to write your response straight away should also be added to that list. If you start writing without thinking about what to write and how to write, you will likely lose points for coherence and cohesion as well as for the task achievement criteria.
Before you actually write an essay, you have to think about what ideas to develop and what examples you will provide to support them. Brainstorming is a very important part of essay planning, and it is a skill that can help you complete the task. At the exam, you will have only a few minutes to generate ideas for your essay, so it is advisable to practice brainstorming during your IELTS preparation. The more you practice, the easier it will become for you to generate ideas for IELTS Academic Writing Task 2. In the beginning, it might take some time, but you will notice that it will get quicker allowing more time for task completion. Here are some ways that will help you become a pro in generating ideas for your essays and get a higher score for the exam.
Things not to do
The most common problems students and candidates name when planning an essay are:
- spending too much time planning an essay;
- being unable to come up with “good” ideas;
- lack of words, i.e. they cannot write more than 250 words, etc.
If you face one of these difficulties, the first thing you have to remember is that IELTS is a language test, not a knowledge test. You do not have to make your ideas “interesting”. IELTS checks if you can use a wide range of vocabulary and grammar, how logically you can structure your essay and organize your ideas, and whether you can write about the topic or not. You do not receive extra points if your ideas are more interesting than the ideas of another candidate, i.e. you should not overthink. What you have to do is to come up with the best ideas as quickly as possible, and then extend and explain each of those ideas with examples and supporting details.
For example, if you receive the following task, you do not have to think about five reasons why it is necessary to be naturally talented to become successful and five reasons why being hard-working matters in sports and list them one after another. Do not write 10 sentences with ten different reasons. What you have to do is to pick up one or two ideas and support them with good examples from your personal or someone else’s experience, or study, or research, or a news item, etc.
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How to practice generating ideas
- Asking questions.
Read the task carefully, find the main topic and decide how many parts the question has. For example, in the task above the topic is ‘It is necessary to be talented or hard-working to achieve results in sports’. There are three parts in the question: give reasons, include examples, and give your opinion.
Turn the topic and the two parts of the task into questions:
- Is it important to be talented? Why / Why not? What examples support this view? Do you know anyone who is talented and successful?
- Is it important to be hard-working and practice a lot? Why / Why not? What examples support this view? Do you know anyone who is hard-working and achieved high results in sports?
- What do you think is more important? Why?
The next step is to brainstorm answers to these questions.
Another way to come up with the ideas is to use special questions such as ‘Who?’, ‘Where?’, ‘Why?’, ‘When?’, ‘How?’, ‘How much/many?’, ‘What?’, Which?’.
- Changing perspective.
This is a very useful and popular technique. While you practise writing essays during your preparations, try to look at the problem from different angles, i.e. consider what different people might say about the issue and why.
For example, ‘Is it necessary to be talented or hard-working to achieve results in sports?’:
- a sportsman would say, ‘You need a goal, and you have to work hard and maintain a proper focus because when things finally go how you envision in your mind you see all your hard work pay off.’
- a coach would say, ‘Talented athletes change the sport. They do things that no one before them has done. These people see records not as barriers but as goals to be achieved and bettered and in doing so they change the sport. Champions set new standards of performance and change our beliefs about what’s possible.’
- I would say…
READ ABOUT: Tips for note completion questions in IELTS Reading
- Mind Mapping.
This way helps you organize your ideas visually. Start with brainstorming keywords, and then place the micro-keywords on the branches, for example.
Another way to organize a mind map is to place the main idea in the middle, then write the views, examples, and details on the branches. This strategy will definitely help you empty your brain onto the page.
A doodle is a kind of drawing you make while your attention is otherwise occupied. Doodles are simple, they can represent some ideas, have some concrete meaning, or may just be composed of random and abstract lines. What you need to do to doodle is take a pen or a pencil, and paper, and allow your mind to have control of it. Use lines and shapes instead of words. You don’t need to draw any particular image–images will start to take shape as you move the pen over the paper.
Even such outstanding people as a poet and physician John Keats, an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer Sylvia Plath, and the Nobel laureate in literature, 1913 poet Rabindranath Tagore, were doodling in their manuscripts and margins of notes. Some doodles and drawings were found in notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Many American Presidents, including Thomas Jefferson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, used to doodle during meetings.
Of course, you won’t have much time for drawing pictures because the examiner probably won’t give you a good band score no matter how impressive they are. However, if you take a minute or two to draw what you are going to write or speak about will get you thinking again. Use this technique while your IELTS preparation.
- Imagine you are discussing the issue with a friend.
This technique will definitely turn out to be the most effective because when we talk to our friends we do not always feel stressed. If you reduce tension, you will be able to concentrate on what you have o write or say. What you have to do is to imagine that you want to explain your point of view or the problem to your friend or a family member if they ask what you think. When you have to write about two different views imagine that your friend has the opposite one and write down what he or she would say.
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