Planning IELTS essays and finding
ideas
This lesson looks at how planning better can help you write better essays. I focus in
particular on “ideas” – something that catches many candidates out. The two key
points are that the ideas you need to write an IELTS essay are fairly simple and it
helps to make a difference between ideas, reasons and examples. You will also find
a model essay to download based on this lesson.
Problem 1 – not enough ideas
This is one of most common reasons for candidates to go wrong in the writing paper.
They see a question. Try to think of ideas. Come up empty and panic. You will find
part of my solution to this below. For now, I will just say that you need very few ideas
to write a good essay and those ideas can be simple ideas too. Don’t buy a book on
ideas for essays, instead learn this tip:
Tip – you need only 2 ideas to write an essay and those ideas are often found in the
question
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