How to write a great Cambridge B2 First Certificate essay every time - FCE Writing Part 1

hi guys how you doing writing a cambridge b2 first certificate essay is not as easy as it seems and students don't often get very high marks because they don't do what is expected of them today we're going to look at how to structure any b2 first essay no matter what the question is and how to plan what you're going to write stay where you are and we'll get started in a few seconds [Music] today's lesson is divided into two parts the first part is how to structure any b2 first essay and the second part is how to plan your essay although these are two quite separate things they are closely connected because you can't have one without the other if you want to write a good essay and get high marks and we all want to write a good essay don't we the structure deals with formatting your essay and the planning deals with the content and we'll see how to apply both to a genuine essay question from the cambridge english website and here is that essay question now it says you must answer this question yes the essay question is compulsory for everybody write your answer in 140 to 190 words in an appropriate style on the separate answer sheet right we know how many words we need to write now you do not need to count every single word in your essay the examiner will not count every single word in your essay however the examiner will instinctively know if the nsa is too long or too short now most people write an average of about 10 words on the line which means that you need between 14 and 19 lines the instructions tell us to write an essay in an appropriate style and the style or register you must use for an essay is formal formal writing means no contracted verb forms do not and not don't and so on avoid phrasal verbs if you can and use normal verbs and don't use colloquial or slang expressions let's continue reading the task in your english class you have been talking about education now your english teacher has asked you to write an essay for homework write your essay using all the notes and giving reasons for your point of view that first sentence is really important because it gives you the general topic of the essay in your english class you have been talking about education education is the general topic of the essay next we have the essay question some parents teach their children at home rather than sending them to school is this a good or a bad thing for the children and then it tells you what you have to write about one having a parent as a teacher two making friends and three your own idea every essay question is presented to us in the same way and because it is presented in the same way every time we can use the same structure every time now before i tell you how to structure your essay what i'm going to tell you today is not the only way to write an essay but this is what i teach my students and this is why i think you should do the same too firstly being able to structure every essay the same way means that when you go to the exam you don't have to think about how you are going to structure your essay because you already know how to do it secondly structuring your essay this way means that you will not forget anything and you will answer the question fully which will hopefully give you top marks for content and thirdly this structure encourages you to use good organization and linking devices let's look at the structure the first thing your essay needs is an introduction what does an introduction do well it presents the general topic in context and it paraphrases the question why is that so important the examiner knows what the question is well yes the examiner knows what the question is but someone who doesn't know what the question is should be able to pick up your essay and by reading your introduction understand what the question is so your introduction should have two sentences the first one places the general topic into context and the second sentence paraphrases the question by doing this you demonstrate to the examiner that you have understood what the essay is all about and you have created a good first impression next we need to think about the main content of the essay in the task we are told to write about three things and cambridge give us the first two the third point or prompt is blank and has the words your own idea in brackets and it's here that students often go wrong either they don't include a third point at all in their essay or they think that your own idea is their opinion of the question and it becomes the conclusion of the essay your own idea is another aspect of the question that you choose and that you must develop in the main body of the essay so your essay will discuss three things the first two points are given to you by cambridge and the third one you choose the best way for you not to forget the third prompt or confuse it with your conclusion is to have one paragraph for each prompt which means that the main body of your b2 first essay will have three paragraphs plus one paragraph for the introduction and one paragraph for the conclusion so in total your essay will have five paragraphs like this you don't have to write about each prompt in the order if you don't want to you don't have to write about prompt one and then prompt two and then prompt three and in fact it may be a good idea to change the order in which you deal with the prompts and i'm going to give you a little trick that i learned from another teacher now paragraphs 2 and 3 should be complementary to each other in other words they should be on the same side of the argument paragraph four on the other hand should provide an opposing point of view it should disagree with paragraphs two and three and in a perfect world paragraph four will support what your personal opinion of the question is but it doesn't have to why is this important well by doing this you are organizing your text in a logical way you are also demonstrating to the examiner that you are considering different points of view and by structuring your paragraphs like this you are guaranteed to cover all the content points in a cohesive way and you are giving yourself the opportunity the opportunity to use some good quality linking devices and organizational patterns all of which will mean you will get a high mark for organization the last paragraph we need to write is our conclusion where we can finally give our opinion and answer the question and this is where students will often write in conclusion i believe abc because xyz and their reason xyz will frequently have nothing to do with what they have just written in the main body of their essay you must never ever introduce a new idea in the conclusion the conclusion needs to summarize what has been said in the main body of the essay and then you give your opinion now because we have been clever in structuring our three main body paragraphs so that the first two agree with each other and the third one disagrees we can create a contrast in the conclusion where we have the point of points that disagree with our opinion first followed by the point of points that agree with our opinion and this leads us beautifully into the part of the conclusion where we express what our opinion is and answer the question now i know that what i have just said about the essay structure may seem a little confusing but let's take it and apply it to our sample essay question see how to plan our essay 2 and it will all make sense planning a b2 first essay planning is a fundamental part of writing any composition in the exam you have one hour and 20 minutes to write two compositions which means that you have about 40 minutes per composition so it is really important that you spend a few minutes at the beginning brainstorming the question don't be tempted to start writing your essay immediately without making a plan and if you see other people doing that in the examination room then you know that they will get a worse mark than you because they haven't planned what they are going to say right let's plan this essay together here is the question once again the first thing we need to do is identify what the general topic of the essay is that's easy because it says in your english class you have been talking about education education is our topic okay great already my mind is thinking about language connected to the topic now before we go any further we want five paragraphs an introduction three content points the content points we need to talk about and a conclusion i recommend that you draw five boxes on the question page one for each paragraph that way you have a visual reminder of how to structure your essay and it will help you when we organize our paragraphs in a bit now let's look at the task in more detail it says some parents teach their children at home rather than sending them to school is this a good or a bad thing for the children here we have to make a choice between two things is it a good thing for children to be educated at home by their parents or is it a bad thing there are generally two types of essay questions at first certificate level one where you have to make a choice between two things like in this question or there will be a statement followed by a question like do you agree so you have to answer yes or no anyway here we have to choose between two things and it is from this we will get our introduction but we don't need to do anything with it for the moment let's look at the three content points first and we have one having a parent as a teacher two making friends and three our own idea the next thing that we need to do is to think about what our own idea is remember our own idea is not our opinion about the question but another aspect of the question that we must talk about in the main content of our essay so what is our third content point going to be how about organizing your time when you choose what your third point is going to be it needs to be sufficiently different from the first two so that the examiner knows that you have a third content point and you don't repeat yourself now that we have our own idea we need to search our brain for some topic specific vocabulary related to each of the content points think of about two or three words or expressions for each one and write them down next to the prompts on the question paper let's do this together having a parent as a teacher now we can have maybe qualifications knowledge of a subject and too friendly making friends socialize with classmates best friends and lifelong friendships and for organizing your time we can have timetable terms and school holidays okay you don't have to use all of these expressions but by writing them down they help you to focus on what you are going to write about and you don't have to start searching for vocabulary while you are writing on the answer sheet the next thing we need to think about is how to order our paragraphs we want one paragraph for each content point and this is where we need to bring in our clever little trick that i told you about earlier for structuring our paragraphs now we want paragraphs two and three to agree with each other and paragraph four to disagree with paragraphs two and three let's think about each content point in relation to the question now in my personal opinion having a parent as a teacher is a bad thing for a child because parents might not be qualified or have the necessary knowledge of all the subjects not going to school is also bad for children because they don't socialize with their classmates and it's harder to make friends or any lifelong friendships however not having to follow the school's timetable and being able to organize your time can be beneficial both to the children and to the parents and that's good for everyone now for this question in particular we are quite lucky because our first two content points agree together both things are bad for the children and our third content point disagrees with them because we've said that being able to organize your time is a good for everybody and at this point i want to make some quick notes next to my boxes so that i have my main idea for each paragraph in the right order so that i can then start writing my essay on the separate answer sheet but before i do remember that in another essay question you can change the order of the content points so that you always have this structure of the first two paragraphs agreeing and the third one disagree the last thing our essay will have is a conclusion our conclusion will summarize what we write in the main body of the essay and then it will express what our opinion of the question is and we don't need to plan it any more than that at the moment because it will kind of write itself when we get to it after all that let's write an essay we want two sentences in the introduction one to put the topic into context and another to paraphrase the question and here is our introduction nowadays more and more parents are deciding to educate their children at home although this may have some advantages there are some disadvantages for the pupils good now we can create our three paragraphs and the first one is about having parents as a teacher firstly children who do not attend school only know two teachers their parents it is debatable whether the parents have the qualifications or the knowledge to teach every subject although a mother and father might be an expert in one or two subjects schools provide teachers expert in every subject now our next paragraph is about making friends and it complements our first one so it would be nice to connect the two with a linking device also i want to say two things in my paragraph i want to say that by going to school children can socialize with classmates and build lifelong friendships and a great way to say this is to use a not only but also inversion which the examiners will love because it's an example of more complex grammar so let's create our paragraph besides having specialized teachers schools are a place to meet people of our own age and to make friends not only are you able to socialize with your classmates but you also have the opportunity to start many lifelong friendships paragraph four is the one that disagrees with what we have just said so far so we want to start it with an expression that shows contrast an easy one to remember and one which you can use in every essay is in spite of the above so let's write the paragraph in spite of the above not having a fixed school timetable means more flexibility with when and what you study moreover school terms and holidays can put pressure on families so not having to think about that can lead to a happier family environment excellent the last thing we are left with is our conclusion we haven't thought about our conclusion until now and that's because we hadn't written our essay every conclusion must refer back to what you've written before and connects it to your opinion hopefully you will have an opinion about the question and what you have written will represent your opinion but if you don't have an opinion and the essay doesn't represent what you think it doesn't matter the examiner does not know so just invent an opinion and make sure it is related to what you have discussed before because we have two paragraphs that support one point of view and one paragraph that supports another point of view we want a lovely sentence with a contrast in it to reference all of that but we want whatever point of view that represents hours to go second so that it links in to our answer and our conclusion is to conclude while being able to have a flexible timetable may be beneficial the advantages of having expert teachers and friends are greater and that is why i believe it is better for children to attend school that's it we have finished our essay i've gone a little over the word limit at 196 words but that's not a problem and that my friends is how you structure and plan your b2 first certificate essay to sum up you want five paragraphs introduction content point content point content point conclusion the first two content points agree the third one disagrees you need to identify the topic and what the question is you need to think of the third content point and then brainstorm some topic specific vocabulary for each point then organize your content points to follow our structure so that to agree and one disagrees and this gives you your paragraph order and finally decide what your opinion is for your conclusion i hope you found this useful if you are sitting the cambridge first certificate exam soon i wish you all the very best of luck let me know in the comments below how you get on i've got some other videos all about the first exam on the side click the link if you have time subscribe to my channel if you haven't done so already the button is just below thank you so much for watching until the next time take it easy bye for now

Channel: English With Rick

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Keywords: english lesson, b2 first essay writing, how to write a b2 essay, how to write b2 first essay, b2 first essay writing exam, how to plan a b2 essay, plan b2 first essay, b2 first essay structure, fce essay writing, writing a cambridge fce essay, writing a b2 essay, cambridge first certificate writing exam, b2 first essay writing advice, cambridge fce essay writing, writing an essay for b2 first, cambridge writing essay, writing essay for b2 first, b2 essay, cambridge fce

Id: _oZgvo2X0A8

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 05 2021