How to prepare for the IELTS / TOEFL Essay (Idea Bank Mini Course), Part 2 (Subtopics)

hi everybody welcome back to our course about how to create an idea bank in today's video we're going to look at the next part of the idea bank which is the sub topics now we spoke in the last video about vocabulary how you should collect it why you should collect it collect as much of it as you can and the reason is words are ideas so now we're going to have to take all of these words and put them into more focused looks at the topic itself so we're going to think about the abstract topic and then we're going to look at the more focused topic so again for example education education is very abstract there's nothing you can actually point at for education but a more focused topic might be private versus public schools or uniforms for students or letting them choose what they want to wear study near home or go overseas like an international student all kinds of different sub topics within education and that's what we're going to do well here and as well for housing so what you're going to do first is you're going to just brainstorm these ideas from your keywords especially use your headings go through all your headings and think about what kinds of debates or what kinds of questions you can ask where you would actually use these words in your answer now another place to get ideas for subtopics is from actual questions or task prompts we'll do that in the next video but you can also already start looking for different types of questions or if you have a book they give you sample questions start getting ideas about these subtopics from these questions okay now as you're creating these subtopics there are certain things you want to think about to make it a bit easier for yourself think about things that can be compared or contrasted and you're going to show the comparisons and the contrast debatable things you're going to look at two sides of something positives and negatives advantages disadvantages pros cons four again etc think about things that are a matter of choice something you're given a few things or you're given two things and you have to choose one and you have to give reasons for making that choice and start thinking about all these reasons and all these choices also start thinking about terms and concepts things that are not necessarily debatable but things that you can expand on and give an argument or an opinion about by itself and i'm going to give you examples of all of these as well think about things that might have causes like for example pollution has causes and solutions what you can do about these things and write all these ideas down because then you're going to start expanding and adding more ideas to them and long-term effects as part of solutions as well now you're going to start making mind maps so you have all these random ideas you're going to start connecting them so let's take education again as an example within education of course you're thinking about teachers from teachers you can think about you know do teachers have more power or to teach or do parents have more power to teach who helps their child more the teacher or the parent and then you're moving on to more specific ideas think about courses again very important part of education should courses be a choice for the student or should they be mandatory should schools teach courses that focus on theory or should they teach courses that focus on skills training and again the more you think about specifically the more focused the subtopics become and again from courses you're talking about theory versus skills when you're thinking about skills you're now thinking about stem courses science technology engineering maths or humanities like the arts and philosophy and things like that which is more important and then you're also thinking why once you're thinking about stem courses you can think about a specific course within that coding should students learn to code why is coding important how is coding useful for the a student's future and you're getting more and more and more specific and your subtopics are getting more and more focused okay so now let's look at housing we're going to go back to our topic from before you have a building type now you have building types you can talk about residential versus commercial you can talk about apartment versus house if you're thinking about economics you can talk about buying versus renting so you're going from a very abstract big topic to a smaller topic to smaller topics and debates etc from design if you're talking about the building or the house that's designed are you more worried about aesthetics or utility how the building looks or how it's used etc materials should you use concrete more or wood more etc economics of housing you can think about specific terms like airbnb is this a good way is this a good investment should you use your apartment to rent out to strangers for short term etc what are the benefits of building equity equity basically means you're building up a money stake in something so if you own a house your ownership your net worth of money goes up because you own it if you're renting you're basically throwing money away so you take all of these different subtopics and then you start creating more specific ideas for each of those sub topics themselves so for example if you have apartment versus house for example start by looking at an apartment what are the advantages of living in an apartment it's more affordable more units are available etc also think about the disadvantages of living in an apartment you can hear your neighbors you can meet your neighbors in the elevator for some people that's an advantage for some people that's a disadvantage because you want a little bit of privacy which you would get in a house so that's one of the arguments you can make in your essay is the neighbors situation right so here are a whole bunch of examples i'm not going to read them all for you you can pause the video and look at it if you want but like i said i've already created this ebook i'll tell you about where you can get that a bit later on in our last video for the course okay so that's that now generally speaking you should have at least 10 subtopics for each topic the more you have the better right but 10 should be a bit of a minimum as you're creating the subtopics you might come across more new words that you didn't think of before add them to your keyword list but the main advantage of the subtopics and this is why it's very important to do it are the skills that you gain by doing so critical thinking and analysis you're looking at a topic and you're starting to think about it in a wider range than you had before for most of for most people especially the people taking the ielts and the toefl maybe you're young you're out of high school etc housing is not something you're thinking about doing creating this idea bank helps you start thinking about it and thinking about it a bit more widely comparative analysis you're learning how to look at things from different sides like the apartment advantages disadvantages compared to a house's advantages and disadvantages you're learning how to brainstorm which you're going to have to use during the test when you look at your question and how to think of ideas you're building vocabulary you're learning how to manage your time because you're going to learn how to practice your planning skills before you start writing you're organizing things you're putting things into groupings you're putting things into debatable contexts i guess you could call it and you're learning abstract reasoning you're taking a random idea that you haven't thought about before and you're starting to think about it in wider and wider views i guess you could call it that okay so a lot of skills to be gained these skills will be useful later on once you're well past your ielts and toefl exam and in university and you're gonna have to do this a lot more okay so keep all that in mind so that's it for subtopics next we're gonna look at questions and you're going to build all your questions from your subtopics so you'll notice keywords help you build subtopics subtopics help you build questions and so on and so forth okay i'll see you next video and we'll continue from there

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Keywords: IELTS, TOEFL, English writing, writing skills, language test, English grammar, English vocabulary, how to write an essay, essay writing, English test, English skills, IELTS high score, TOEFL high score, language skills, collocations, how to write in English, IELTS high band, IELTS writing, TOEFL writing, academic writing, academic vocabulary, IELTS test, TOEFL test, IELTS success, TOEFL success, English teacher Adam, IELTS preparation, learn english, english words

Id: TjdirRoThOw

Length: 8min 46sec (526 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021