IELTS Writing Task 2 Ideas: What to Write When You Know Nothing About the Topic

You read the question, and nothing comes. Space exploration funding. Museum entry fees. Prison reform. You have never had an opinion about it, you have 40 minutes, and the panic is costing you minutes you will need later.

This is not a knowledge problem. It is a process problem, and a process can be practised. What follows is four fixed lenses that produce ideas from any Task 2 question, worked on a prompt most candidates would call unfamiliar.

The exam is not testing what you know

Task 2 is marked on four criteria: Task Response, which asks whether you answered the question with a clear position and developed your ideas; Coherence and Cohesion, which is organisation; Lexical Resource, which is vocabulary; and Grammatical Range and Accuracy.

None of them asks whether you are right about space exploration. What the first criterion rewards is a position that is clear, relevant to the question, and extended with explanation and support.

That changes the job. You do not have to know the subject. You have to produce two ideas that are relevant, then explain each one well enough that a reader who disagrees can still follow your reasoning.

The four lenses

Run these four questions over any prompt. Each one produces one or two ideas in about 20 seconds. You need two good ones, not eight.

1. Who is affected? Think in three groups: ordinary individuals, organisations such as businesses and schools, and the government. Most Task 2 topics change something for all three, and they rarely want the same outcome.
2. What does it cost? Money and time both count. Who pays, who saves, and what else could that money have bought. This lens is reliable because almost every Task 2 debate is a trade off with a budget inside it.
3. Short term against long term. Many arguments are strong on one timescale and weak on the other. Something cheap now that creates a cost in 20 years is an argument with a built in structure.
4. What happens if nothing changes? This gives you the consequence argument, and it is the easiest one to develop, because you are describing a direction rather than defending a fact.

Two of those four will give you a usable pair. Pick the two you can explain most easily in your second language, not the two that sound most intelligent.

Worked on a hard prompt

Some people believe governments should spend money on space exploration. Others think this money should be used to solve problems on Earth. Discuss both views and give your own opinion.

Here is the lens pass, written as it would look on exam paper. Short notes, no sentences.

That is four lenses and about 90 seconds. Now choose.

View one, space spending is justified: space research produces technology that returns to ordinary life, and satellites are already part of everyday infrastructure.

View two, Earth first: urgent needs have a stronger claim on a limited budget, and the people paying the tax are often the people without a hospital.

My position: governments should fund both, but the share for space research should rise only when basic services are already covered.

Two ideas, one position, drawn from two lenses. No specialist knowledge appeared anywhere.

Developing an idea without facts

An idea becomes a band 7 body paragraph through explanation, not through data. The chain is claim, reason, consequence, example.

Thin, 38 words:

Space research is useful because it creates new technology. Many things we use today came from space programmes. This is a good reason for governments to spend money on it.

The claim is there twice and the reason is there once. Nothing is explained, and "many things" is the kind of support that could be written by someone who has not thought about the question at all.

Developed, 92 words:

Space research is worth funding because its results do not stay in space. To put a satellite into orbit, engineers have to solve problems in materials, power supply and data transmission, and those solutions are then available to every other industry. Weather forecasting is the clearest case: farmers in countries with no space programme of their own plan their planting around satellite data. The spending looks narrow when it is approved, and the benefits turn out to be general, which is an argument for treating it as infrastructure rather than as a luxury.

Same idea. The second version explains the mechanism, names one concrete case, and closes with the point restated as a judgement. It contains no statistic and no study. It is longer because the reasoning is visible, and visible reasoning is what the criteria call extension and support.

Four things to avoid when you are short of ideas

• Invented statistics. "A recent study found that 72 per cent of people agree" is a sentence you cannot be asked to defend, but it reads as unsupported, and a plausible everyday example does the same work more safely.
• Listing five ideas. Candidates who panic often write one sentence about five different points. Task Response rewards two developed ideas far more than five undeveloped ones.
• Writing about the topic instead of answering the question. An essay full of facts about space exploration that never says whether the money should be spent has answered a different question, and the first criterion falls hard.
• Memorised openings. "Since the dawn of civilisation, mankind has always been fascinated by" costs you 15 words, says nothing about this question, and is recognisable as something written before you saw the prompt.

The three minute drill

Practise the lenses, not the topics. Find any Task 2 question, set a timer for three minutes, and write only this: four lens notes, two chosen ideas, one position sentence. Do not write the essay.

Ten of those drills take half an hour and are worth more than one full essay, because the lenses are the part that fails under pressure. When you do write a full answer, mark it one criterion at a time, and look specifically at whether each body paragraph explains its idea or only repeats it.

If you want a second opinion on an essay you wrote from a topic you knew nothing about, you can paste it into Bandly for an estimated band on each of the four criteria and feedback on which sentences carry your argument and which only restate it.