Tenses for IELTS Task 2: Pick the Tense From the Job the Sentence Does

Most pages about tenses for IELTS Writing Task 2 give you a list of the twelve English tenses with one example sentence each. That list does not help you in the exam, because the question you actually have is different: you have written a sentence, and you need to know which tense it should be in.

In Task 2 the tense is decided by the job the sentence is doing. A sentence that states a general claim takes present simple. A sentence that reports a change up to now takes present perfect. A sentence that gives a finished example takes past simple. A sentence that predicts takes a future form. The essay topic does not decide anything.

This guide gives you a table that maps sentence function to tense, a count of what real band 7 and band 8 answers use, and one body paragraph rewritten with the reason for each change.

The short version, in a table

Task 2 asks you to argue. Almost every sentence you write is doing one of seven jobs. Find the job, and the tense follows.

Two rows in that table cause most of the damage, and they are not the ones candidates expect.

The general claim row. Body paragraphs in Task 2 are mostly general claims. A general claim is present simple. Candidates write it in the future, because the claim feels like a prediction to them: if people use public transport, the air will be cleaner and the city will be quieter. The first half is a claim about how cities work, and claims about how things work are present simple. Write cleaner air follows from lower car use, and keep will for the one sentence where you are genuinely predicting.

The finished example row. An example is the strongest thing you can put in a body paragraph, and it is almost always finished. Something happened, in a particular place, and had a result. That is past simple from start to finish. Candidates begin the example in past simple and drift into present simple halfway through, which breaks the example into two unrelated statements.

What real band 7 and band 8 answers actually use

This is the part the ranking pages leave out. They tell you a tense is possible without telling you how often it appears in an answer that scored well.

I counted it in Bandly's own Task 2 sample library. There are 17 published Task 2 samples there, with estimated bands from 6 to 8. For each one I took the first sentence of the answer and classified the tense of its main verb. The result:

Eleven of seventeen opened in present perfect, with sentences such as mobile phones have become an essential part of our daily lives and traffic congestion has become a pressing issue. Not one opened in past simple.

That is a pattern worth copying for one reason, not two. Present perfect is the natural tense for the opening of a Task 2 essay because the opening sentence has a specific job: it says that a situation exists now and arrived recently. Present perfect is the tense English uses for exactly that. Past simple says the situation is over, which is the wrong thing to say about a problem you are about to spend 250 words discussing.

I counted one more thing in the same 17 answers. Ten of them never use the word will once. The seven that do use it average two uses in the whole essay. So the future form that candidates reach for in every body paragraph is absent from the majority of answers that scored 7 or above.

A caution on all of these numbers. The bands on those samples are estimates produced by Bandly's own scoring engine, which has not been checked against a qualified human examiner. The counts are counts of what the text contains, which is solid, and the bands beside them are estimates, which is weaker. Read them as a pattern in the writing, not as proof about scores.

Where past simple belongs

Past simple has one clear home in Task 2, and candidates either never use it or use it everywhere.

Its home is evidence. A body paragraph that makes a claim and then supports the claim with something that actually happened is stronger than a body paragraph that makes a claim twice. The support is a finished event, so it is past simple.

Many cities have reduced congestion by making driving expensive. London introduced a congestion charge in 2003. Traffic entering the charging zone fell by about 15 per cent in the first year, and bus use rose.

Three sentences, two tenses, and each tense doing its own job. The first sentence is present perfect, because it reports a change up to now across many cities. The next two are past simple, because they describe one finished case.

The error to avoid is sliding back into present simple inside the example: London introduced a congestion charge in 2003. Traffic falls by about 15 per cent. The date fixes the event in the past. A present simple verb after that date says the fall is a general truth about London, which is a different and weaker claim.

If you are describing data rather than arguing about it, the tense rules are different again and are decided by the dates in the chart. That is Task 1, and it has its own decision table.

Conditionals, and the drift that costs the most marks

The sentence pattern that breaks most often in Task 2 is the conditional, because it has two halves and each half takes a different tense.

The pattern for a real possibility is: if plus present simple, then will plus the bare verb.

If governments raise fuel taxes, drivers will look for alternatives.

Not if governments will raise. The if half never takes will in this pattern. This is the single most repeated grammar error in Task 2 body paragraphs, and it repeats because the candidate thinks the sentence is about the future, so both halves get a future form.

The pattern for an imagined or unlikely situation is different: if plus past simple, then would plus the bare verb.

If public transport were free, far fewer people would own a car.

Here were is not a past tense in meaning. It describes an imagined present. Mixing the two patterns, as in if public transport was free, people will own fewer cars, produces a sentence that is understandable and wrong, which is the exact category the Grammatical Range and Accuracy descriptors penalise.

Why one tense decision costs more than one mark

Task 2 is marked on four criteria: Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. A tense error lands in the last one, and it lands harder than most errors.

The public band descriptors for Grammatical Range and Accuracy describe your writing in terms of how many of your sentences are error free. That is a proportion, not a count. One wrong word choice is one sentence spoiled. One wrong tense decision is not one sentence spoiled, because you made the decision in your head and then applied it to every sentence in the paragraph.

A candidate who decides that a body paragraph about the benefits of cycling is about the future will write five sentences in the future. If present simple was correct, five of their sentences now carry an error and one decision did all of it. Nothing else you can get wrong in 250 words damages that proportion so efficiently. The same logic applies to complex sentences: the structure you repeat is worth more attention than the word you used once.

One paragraph, rewritten

Here is a body paragraph of the kind that sits around band 6 for grammar. The topic is whether governments should charge drivers to enter city centres.

Before. Firstly, if the government will charge the money for driving in the city, many people will stop to use their cars and they will use the bus or the train instead. This is reduce the traffic and the air will be more clean. For example, in my country the government has introduced this charge and the traffic was better after that.

Now the same paragraph, sentence by sentence, with what changed and why.

Sentence 1. If the government will charge becomes if the government charges. The if half of a first conditional takes present simple. They will use the bus stays in the future, because that half is the predicted result.

Firstly, if the government charges drivers for entering the city, many people will stop using their cars and will travel by bus or train instead.

Sentence 2. This is reduce is not a tense at all; it is a present simple verb with a stray is in front of it. The air will be more clean is a general claim dressed as a prediction, so it moves to present simple.

Lower car use reduces congestion, and cleaner air follows.

Sentence 3. This is the example, so it is past simple throughout. Has introduced is present perfect, which refuses to sit beside after that; present perfect cannot take a finished time reference. The second half was already past simple, which is why the sentence sounded wrong even to the writer.

For example, my own city introduced a charge of this kind in 2019, and congestion fell noticeably within a year.

The full paragraph, rewritten:

Firstly, if the government charges drivers for entering the city, many people will stop using their cars and will travel by bus or train instead. Lower car use reduces congestion, and cleaner air follows. For example, my own city introduced a charge of this kind in 2019, and congestion fell noticeably within a year.

Three sentences, three tenses, and the tense in each one matches what the sentence is doing. The vocabulary barely changed. Nothing was made more complicated. What changed is that no sentence now contains a tense that contradicts its own time reference, and that is what the Grammatical Range and Accuracy descriptors are reading for.

A two minute check before you hand the paper in

You will not have time to think about tenses while you write. You will have two or three minutes at the end. Spend them like this.

1. **Find every if.** Check that no if clause contains will or would. This is the most common error and the fastest to find.
2. Find every date and every past time phrase such as in 2019, last year, in the 1990s. Every verb in the same sentence should be past simple. If one is present perfect, it is wrong, because present perfect cannot take a finished time.
3. Read your body paragraph topic sentences. If one is in the future and is not actually a prediction, change it to present simple.
4. Check subject and verb agreement on your opening sentence. The opening is usually present perfect, which means has or have, and a plural subject takes have. One of the 17 samples I counted opens with tourism have grown, which is the right tense and the wrong agreement.

That is four checks, and all four are mechanical. None of them requires you to judge your own writing, which is the part nobody can do reliably about their own work under exam pressure.

Doing this on your own writing

Reading a table is not the same as finding the error in your own paragraph. The tense you chose felt right when you wrote it, which is exactly why you will not see it on a reread.

Write one Task 2 answer under timed conditions, then run the four checks above on it before you look at anything else. Then paste it into Bandly and read what comes back for Grammatical Range and Accuracy. The band is an estimate, not a verified score, and it is the sentence level feedback that is worth your time: it names the sentences carrying the error, which is the thing a table cannot do for you. Comparing your own paragraph against the Task 2 samples and the essay types they cover is the other half of that work.