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Recent IELTS Writing Task 2 Questions and How to Plan Each One in Five Minutes
Most candidates prepare for Task 2 by reading finished essays. This feels productive and does very little, because on test day you will not get the question you read about. You will get a question you have never seen, and you will have five minutes to decide what to say.
The skill that transfers is planning. The essay is just the plan written out in sentences.
This post gives you twelve question shapes that keep reappearing, and for each one a plan rather than a model answer. Read them as templates for thinking, not as content to memorise. Memorised content is easy to detect and is marked down.
The five minute plan, in four lines
Every plan below has the same four lines. This is deliberate. The shape does not change with the topic.
- Position. Your direct answer, in one sentence. If you cannot write this, you cannot write the essay.
- Body one. One idea, plus the mechanism that makes it true.
- Body two. A second idea that is genuinely different from the first, plus its mechanism.
- Concession or limit. The case where your position is weakest. This is what separates a developed answer from a confident list.
Five minutes. Keywords, not sentences. Then write for thirty two minutes and check for three.
The word mechanism is doing real work here. It means the explanation of how the idea produces the result. Public transport reduces traffic is a claim. Public transport reduces traffic because a bus lane moves forty people through the space one car occupies is a mechanism. Task Response rewards the second.
Question shape one: opinion, agree or disagree
Some people believe that unpaid community service should be a compulsory part of high school programmes. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
| Line | Plan |
|---|---|
| Position | Largely agree, but only when the placement is chosen by the student |
| Body one | Builds workplace skills schools cannot teach, because the tasks have real consequences |
| Body two | Widens the social circle beyond one income group, which changes career expectations |
| Limit | Compulsory placements that are badly matched teach resentment instead of responsibility |
Question shape two: discuss both views
Some think children should begin formal education at four, while others believe seven is better. Discuss both views and give your own opinion.
| Line | Plan |
|---|---|
| Position | Later start, with structured play in the years before it |
| Body one | Case for four: earlier literacy exposure helps children whose homes have few books |
| Body two | Case for seven: countries with a later start show no long term disadvantage, and play develops self regulation |
| Limit | The gap for disadvantaged children is real, so a later start needs funded preschool alongside it |
Question shape three: advantages and disadvantages
More people are working from home. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this trend?
| Line | Plan |
|---|---|
| Position | Advantages dominate for experienced workers, disadvantages for new ones |
| Body one | Advantage: commuting time returns to the worker, and hiring stops depending on geography |
| Body two | Disadvantage: informal learning disappears, and a junior employee learns by overhearing |
| Limit | The split falls along career stage, not along job type |
Question shape four: problem and solution
Traffic congestion is worsening in many cities. What problems does this cause and how can they be solved?
| Line | Plan |
|---|---|
| Position | The core problem is unpredictable travel time, not lost time itself |
| Body one | Problem: emergency services and deliveries cannot plan, so costs rise across the whole economy |
| Body two | Solution: congestion pricing, because it makes the cheap option expensive exactly at the peak |
| Limit | Pricing hits low income drivers hardest unless transport improves first |
Question shape five: two-part question
Why do fewer young people vote than older people, and what could change this?
| Line | Plan |
|---|---|
| Position | Both halves answered in one sentence: weak habit formation, fixed by lowering friction |
| Body one | Cause: voting is a habit built through repetition, and young people have had fewer chances to build it |
| Body two | Change: automatic registration and weekend voting remove the small barriers that stop first time voters |
| Limit | Turnout rises slowly, so no single reform fixes it in one election |
Question shape six: positive or negative development
An increasing number of people buy everything online. Is this a positive or a negative development?
| Line | Plan |
|---|---|
| Position | Positive for consumers, negative for town centres, and on balance positive |
| Body one | Positive: price transparency and access for people far from large shops |
| Body two | Negative: the high street loses the foot traffic that funded its other businesses |
| Limit | The negative concentrates in small towns, so the average hides the harm |
Six more shapes to plan yourself
The table below gives six further recurring questions with only the position line filled in. Complete the other three lines for each. This is the exercise; the essay is not.
| Question | Suggested position line |
|---|---|
| Should governments fund the arts, or is that money better spent elsewhere? | Fund them, but through access rather than through prestige buildings |
| Is it better to learn a subject in a classroom or online? | Depends on whether the subject needs correction in real time |
| Should companies be required to hire equal numbers of men and women? | Requirements at the hiring stage treat the symptom |
| Do international sporting events benefit host countries? | Benefits are short term, costs are long term |
| Should the news media be regulated by government? | Regulate ownership concentration, not content |
| Is technology making people less able to concentrate? | The change is in what attention is worth, not in the ability itself |
How to use these without memorising them
Take one shape a day. Set a timer for five minutes and produce the four lines. Do not write the essay. In two weeks you will have planned forty questions, which is far more coverage than you would get writing fourteen full essays in the same time.
Then write one full essay a week from a plan you produced cold, under exam conditions with a forty minute limit. That is the only part that needs the full time.
When you write those weekly essays, you can run them through Bandly to see estimated bands for Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy, along with the reasoning behind each estimate. Those numbers come from a language model rather than a qualified examiner, so use them to find the criterion that is holding you back, not to predict a test day result.
Find out what this essay would score
Paste your own answer and Bandly returns an estimated band for each of the four criteria, with the sentences that pulled the score down. Under a cent an essay, about six seconds.
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