How To Plan An IELTS Essay In Five Minutes

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:

• How to classify the question before you write anything, and why getting this wrong costs you the whole essay

• How to fix your position for each body paragraph first, and leave the introduction until last

• How to build an example that earns marks, even when you invent it on the spot

• How to ask why three times to turn a thin idea into a full paragraph

• How to use your last few minutes to check your work

About this episode

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 (ieltspodcast.com/writing-task-2/essay-plan). This episode is me doing it rather than describing it.

Full transcript

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 …