What IELTS Writing Task 2 Asks You to Do

Writing Task 2 gives you one question, forty minutes, and a minimum of 250 words. You write a formal essay that responds to a statement about a general topic. It counts twice as much as Task 1, so it decides most of your Writing band.

That is the whole job. The difficulty is not the topic, which is always general enough for any adult to have an opinion on. The difficulty is that most candidates read the topic and skim the instruction, and the instruction is the part being marked.

The question has three parts

Every Task 2 prompt is built the same way. Read it as three separate things.

1. The context sentence. One or two lines setting up a situation. "Many people believe that social media has damaged real friendships." This is background. You are not asked to agree that it is true.
2. The instruction. The line that tells you what to produce. "To what extent do you agree or disagree?" or "Discuss both views and give your own opinion." or "What are the causes, and what solutions can you suggest?"
3. The standing line. "Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience." This appears on every question and never changes.

Only part two varies, and part two is what your essay has to satisfy. An essay full of intelligent material about social media that never says how far you agree has not done the task. The examiner is not asking whether you wrote well about the topic. They are asking whether you did the thing the instruction named.

Here is the test. Cover the context sentence with your hand, read only the instruction, and ask: does my essay answer this? If the instruction says "to what extent", your essay needs a position with a degree in it. If it says "discuss both views and give your own opinion", it needs both views and an opinion, because that instruction contains two obligations and candidates routinely deliver one.

The four criteria, applied to Task 2

Your Task 2 answer gets four scores, each on the nine band scale, each weighted equally. They are Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. The four are averaged to give your Task 2 band.

Task Response

This asks whether you answered the question that was set, held a clear position throughout, and developed your ideas rather than listing them.

The most common loss here is not being off topic. It is being underdeveloped. A paragraph that states a reason and then restates it in different words has one idea in it. A paragraph that states a reason, explains the mechanism behind it, and gives one concrete example has one idea developed, which is what the descriptors ask for.

The second most common loss is a position that moves. If your introduction says you largely agree, your body paragraphs argue both sides evenly, and your conclusion says it depends, you have written three different positions. Pick one in the first two minutes and hold it.

Coherence and Cohesion

This asks whether your answer is organised and whether the reader can follow it without effort. Paragraphing is explicitly part of it.

Four or five paragraphs, one central idea each, is enough. What costs marks is the essay that runs 250 words as a single block, or that starts a new paragraph every two sentences. It also covers linking words, and this is where over-preparation hurts: "Firstly, Moreover, In addition, Furthermore, Lastly" stacked at the front of every sentence reads as mechanical rather than cohesive. Reference words carry more of the load. "This shift", "such policies", "the same problem" tie sentences together without announcing themselves.

Lexical Resource

This asks about the range, precision and appropriacy of your vocabulary, and about spelling and word formation.

Range does not mean rare words. It means you can say a thing in the way that fits, and you are not repeating the question's own nouns in every sentence. Precision matters more than difficulty. "Governments should subsidise public transport" is stronger than "Governments should give a lot of money to help buses", and it is not a harder word, it is the right one. A word used slightly wrongly is noticed, and it is noticed more than a simple word used correctly.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy

This asks whether you can use a variety of sentence structures and how many of your sentences contain errors.

Range and accuracy are both scored, and they trade against each other. An answer made entirely of short simple sentences can be error free and still capped, because the range is not there. An answer that attempts long conditional and relative clauses and breaks half of them is also capped, because too many sentences carry errors. The target is a mix, with the complex sentences under control. Two or three well built complex sentences per paragraph does more than a page of attempts.

One paragraph, before and after

Here is a body paragraph at roughly band 6, on the question of whether governments should fund public transport rather than roads.

Firstly, public transport is very good for the environment. Cars produce a lot of pollution and this is bad for the environment. Moreover, many people use cars every day. So the government should give money to public transport because it is better for the environment.

The idea is fine. The problems are visible: "the environment" three times, "good" and "bad" doing the work that precise words should do, four sentences of nearly identical structure, and no development past the opening claim.

The same idea, rewritten:

The strongest argument for funding public transport is environmental. A single bus carrying forty passengers emits a fraction of what forty cars emit over the same route, so shifting even a modest share of commuters off the road produces an immediate cut in urban emissions. Cities that have invested heavily in rail networks, such as Vienna, report lower per capita transport emissions than comparable cities that expanded road capacity instead.

Same length, roughly. What changed: the claim now has a mechanism behind it, then evidence. Vocabulary is precise rather than rare, "emits", "commuters", "road capacity". Sentence structures vary. The linking is built into the logic with "so" and "instead" rather than bolted on with "Moreover".

Spend the forty minutes like this

The five minutes of planning are not optional time you can borrow from writing. An essay with a decided position and two chosen ideas is almost always better than the same candidate's unplanned essay, because Task Response and Coherence are both about decisions made before the first sentence.

On length: 250 words is a minimum, not a target. Under it, the answer is penalised. Around 270 to 290 is comfortable. Beyond about 320 you are usually adding repetition and losing checking time.

What to do today

Take one recent Task 2 question. Do not write the essay. Instead, write only the instruction line, your position in one sentence, and your two main ideas in one sentence each. That is four sentences and about five minutes. Do it for five questions. The habit you are building is the one that Task Response actually rewards, and it is cheaper to practise than a full essay.

When you do write a full answer, you can paste it into Bandly for a per criterion estimate of where it sits and which sentences drove each score, then compare that with the four descriptions above.