IELTS Writing Task 2 Topics: The Nine Themes Every Question Comes From

Most candidates prepare for Task 2 by collecting questions. They download a list of five hundred, read fifty of them, and walk into the exam hoping one of the fifty appears. It never does, or it appears in a wording they do not recognise.

The questions change. The themes do not. Almost every Task 2 question in the Academic and General Training papers comes from a small group of subject areas, and each area has a fixed set of arguments and a fixed set of words. Learn nine themes and you have prepared for the whole exam.

The nine themes

Look at any set of recent questions and you will find each one sits inside one of these rows, or occasionally across two of them. A question about whether children should be given mobile phones is family plus technology. A question about whether governments should fund the arts is government plus culture.

Why this changes how you prepare

When you prepare by question, every new question is new work. When you prepare by theme, the work compounds. Ten ideas about education will serve you across questions on university fees, on exam pressure, on subject choice and on adult learning.

This matters for two of the four public band descriptors, which are the criteria your writing is marked against: Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy.

Task Response improves because you have real ideas to develop rather than one thin idea repeated. An essay that says "education is important for the future of the country" three times in different words has not developed anything.

Lexical Resource improves because theme vocabulary is used naturally. A word list learned with no theme attached produces sentences where a rare word sits in the wrong place. A word learned inside its theme is used the way people actually use it.

How to build one theme

Take education. Give it thirty minutes and produce four things.

1. Six arguments for, six against, on the theme's most common question. For "should university education be free?", the arguments for include widening access, national economic benefit, and removing debt as a barrier to lower income students. Against: cost falls on taxpayers who did not attend, funding for quality drops, and free places may go to those who would have paid anyway.

2. Ten collocations. Not ten single words. tuition fees, state funded, widen access, academic standards, vocational training, higher education, drop out rate, publicly funded, entry requirements, transferable skills. Collocation is a pair or group of words that native speakers use together. It signals control of the language far more clearly than a rare word used alone.

3. Two concrete examples that are true. Countries where higher education is publicly funded. Apprenticeship systems that route school leavers into skilled trades. You do not need statistics, and inventing them is a risk with no reward.

4. One paragraph written out in full. Not planned. Written.

Making higher education free would widen access most for students from lower income families, who currently weigh a degree against years of debt. That calculation removes capable candidates from the system before they apply, which is a loss to the country as well as to them. Where tuition is publicly funded, participation among these groups tends to be higher, although the cost of that policy falls on taxpayers who may never attend a university themselves.

That paragraph took the argument, one specific group, one consequence, and one honest concession. It runs about eighty words, which is the right size for a body paragraph point.

The nine theme plan, in nine days

Do one theme per day. Thirty minutes each. On day ten you have arguments and vocabulary for the whole exam, in a form you can revise in ten minutes before the test.

1. Education
2. Technology
3. Environment
4. Work
5. Health
6. Government and society
7. Crime
8. Culture and globalisation
9. Family and children

Keep each theme on one page. If it does not fit on one page, you have collected too much and will remember none of it.

The mistake to avoid

Do not turn theme preparation into memorised sentences. A prepared sentence such as "In this fast-paced modern world, education plays a pivotal role" is recognisable, and language that is clearly memorised and does not fit the question is not credited in the way you hope. Prepare the ideas and the word pairs. Build the sentence in the exam, around the exact question in front of you.

There is a simple test. If your prepared material could be pasted into an essay on any topic without changing a word, it is too general to help you.

Reading the question inside the theme

Knowing the theme is half the job. The other half is the instruction line, which decides the structure.

1. "Discuss both views and give your own opinion" needs both sides plus a position.
2. "To what extent do you agree or disagree" needs one position, held throughout.
3. "What are the advantages and disadvantages" needs balance and no personal opinion.
4. "What are the causes and what solutions can you suggest" needs causes matched to solutions.

Same theme, four different essays. Candidates who prepare only content, and never look at the instruction line, write a good essay about the wrong question, and Task Response drops for it.

Do this today

Pick the theme you feel weakest in. Set a timer for thirty minutes and produce the four items above: six arguments each way, ten collocations, two true examples, one written paragraph. One page. Then find any real Task 2 question in that theme and write the full essay in forty minutes.

When you have that essay, paste it into Bandly for an estimated band on each of the four criteria, along with the sentences behind each estimate, which shows you whether your theme preparation actually reached the page or stayed in your notes.