IELTS Writing Task 2 | 3 Simple Techniques That Make Writing Easier

hi everyone chris here from ielts advantage and in this video we're gonna do two quite special things so recently we surveyed more than a hundred thousand ielts students and we asked them what's your biggest fear your biggest struggle when it comes to writing task two and there were three things that came up again and again and again and we're going to talk about those three things in this video and show you how you don't have to worry about them that they're really easy to solve what we're also going to do is i'm at my home right now i'm going to take you in here take you on a little tour around my town to demonstrate how easy it is to actually solve these problems and the three problems are number one understanding the question because if you don't understand the question you won't be able to write a good essay number two generating ideas that help you answer the question and generating those ideas quickly and easily and number three taking those ideas and developing them into main body paragraphs so we're gonna solve all of those problems for you in this video first let's have a look at the question that we're gonna look at today okay here's the question many people like to go on holiday abroad while others believe it is better to visit places within their own country discuss both views and give your own opinion [Music] so why do students find it difficult to understand a question so in order to do that i've brought you up here this is one of the highest points uh where i live and it'll all make sense in a couple of minutes so let me tell you a little story about how i used to trick my ielts students so when i was teaching in the british council i was teaching in the classroom and what i would do before task two lessons is i would take the topics from the task two questions i wouldn't tell my students i was doing this on the first five ten minutes of the class i would just talk to them about these topics so for example with that question what i would do is i would say i'm thinking of going on holiday here in vietnam where do you think i should go and the students would have no problem telling me where i should go why it is great and then i'd say i'm actually thinking of going somewhere else is there anywhere else around here outside of vietnam that would be good and they would again have no problem telling me about thailand and cambodia and japan and all these places in asia that i should go to but then i would give them the ielts task 2 question on a piece of paper and they just fell apart they had no idea how to answer it they would spend 10 15 minutes just staring at the page and they wouldn't be able to generate ideas understand the question and definitely not write a good answer so what they needed to do was literally take themselves out of the classroom and start to normalize the question when i say normalize the question i mean take it out of the ielts context and put it into real normal life and that is what we're going to do now i am currently up here at a castle a medieval castle that is right beside my house and i'm going to take you up to the very highest point and explain how i would understand that question okay as you can see i'm not up at the top of the castle here and what we're going to do is use the view behind me to discuss how to actually understand a question so let's have a look here okay so this is my hometown this is where i live so if i was looking at that question what is the goal the goal is to answer two questions why would someone want to go on holiday here if they're from here and why would somebody not want to go on holiday here so if we look down here we have the beach here we have a nature reserve just here we have the mountains here we have a massive forest park just here on beautiful countryside and lakes and everything all around it so it's pretty obvious why someone would want to go on holiday here because it is an area of outstanding natural beauty and there's a lot of things to do outdoors when it comes to walking when it comes to looking at pretty mountains and visiting the beach and forest parks and nature and all of these things so it's pretty obvious why someone would want to visit here why would somebody not want to visit here well pretty obvious reason so i've been trying to make this video for about three weeks and it has rained every single day for three weeks ireland where i am now is notorious for wet wintry windy weather even in the summertime it's currently july so that is why people do not like to go on holiday here especially if you're from here so as you can see what i've done is i've taken the task to a question out of the classroom out of the ielts context and just normalized it and instead of looking at the page and panicking and worrying about the question what i've done is i've just normalized it by asking myself two simple questions why would somebody want to go on holiday in their home country and why would somebody not want to do that why would they want to go abroad and that instantly allows me to fully understand the question and not only do that but within my own understanding my own personal life my own experience of life which makes it much much easier to understand and much much easier to answer at the same time and you can do that for pretty much any ielts question so a little task right now what i would like you to do just have a think for two minutes about your own life experience your home country and in the comments below answer two questions why would someone want to go on holiday in your home country and why would somebody from your home country want to go on holiday abroad instead keep it incredibly simple the two most simple obvious ideas you can think of [Music] okay back in the car i'm going to take you on a little adventure now to demonstrate the main problem when it comes to generating ideas there is one technique that every student or 99 of students use and 99 of teachers teach this technique and i'm going to demonstrate why this is no good why it is a complete waste of time and it actually makes your job way more difficult than it needs to be so what i'm going to do now is take you around my local area and brainstorm brainstorm ideas for this essay okay let's go idea number one historical sites medieval castles all over this place idea number two beautiful panoramic views number three little walking trails through the nature reserve going to the beach sand dunes or sand dunes depending on the pronunciation here we have the beach there's the irish sea and there are the more mountains sweeping down to the sea waterfalls and finally lakes so we've brainstormed and we've got all those ideas but what is the problem with brainstorming we've got all these fantastic ideas what is the actual problem with that well let's go back to the car and we'll talk about that so what is the problem with brainstorming first of all do you even remember what the question was brainstorming encourages our brains to go off in many many different directions and to not really worry about answering the question or being relevant to the question but just generate a bunch of ideas and so that is problem number one you often will generate ideas that are irrelevant to the question and you will get lost through brainstorming second question or the second problem is how much time did we just waste you are going to be under pressure for time you will only have 40 minutes to do task 2 and what brainstorming encourages you to do is to think of as many different ideas as possible without really thinking about time and it often leads to you wasting a lot of time i'm wasting time doing something that is not actually helping you because the result is often confusion the result the product of brainstorming is a bunch of ideas some of them are relevant some of them are not you've just wasted a lot of time and now you need to sort through all of those ideas and pick the ones that at the end of the day you have to develop those ideas you have to explain how they answer the question use example so let's take for example waterfalls let's say you decide to go with that idea people go on holiday in their home countries because they like to visit waterfalls can you really explain why someone would say hmm i don't want to go abroad this year let's stay here so we can visit a waterfall it doesn't make any sense so you've just wasted your time with that one beaches all right so we went to the beach and we visited the beach beaches in ireland it is absolutely freezing on the beach in ireland and the water is even colder you will have more chance of catching a cold than catching a suntan on the beach here people just would never ever say i really want to go on holiday in ireland because of the beaches so again you've got multiple ideas and some of them you can't use at all some of them you can't explain some of them you can't use examples for so brainstorming is a complete and utter waste of time so what should we do instead of brainstorming so in order to answer that question i've taken you to my absolute favorite place in my local area and it really is about again taking it out of the ielts context and just normalizing it and using your own life experience to help you quickly and easily generate ideas and it's starting to rain as i told you it is ireland so it does rain a lot here so instead of brainstorming which is a very unnatural artificial way of generating ideas we would just ask ourselves direct questions so for me right now what i would ask myself is why would someone visit this area to go on holiday why would they do that another direct question i could ask myself is if i was to go on holiday in my local area what would i do where would i go and by doing that i instantly will be able to generate a relevant idea so my idea is this place this place is called tullymore forest park and people come here from all over the world to walk to relax so it is just miles and miles and miles and miles of forests and rivers and beautiful locations where you can just go and walk in peace there's no one around here even though many people visit it there's just so much space and so much open fresh air that you can pretty much be alone and it is absolutely beautiful it's so beautiful that hollywood movies are even coming here to be to be shot on game of thrones was even shot in this location and i'm going to show you that in a second so instead of drawing a circle on a page and worrying and thinking of trying trying to think of really really impressive ideas and wasting your time brainstorming just ask yourself direct questions what's the most obvious answer what is the first answer that pops into your head and if you do that you will generate relevant ideas very very quickly and you will also be able to do the next most important thing which is fully develop your ideas into a coherent paragraph so your next task is i want you to generate one idea all you have to do is just generate one idea i want you to think about one reason why somebody would decide to go on holiday in their own country in your local area or your general area your country what is the first idea that pops into your head what is the most obvious answer it doesn't have to be a location it could be an activity or it could be something more general than that but try and do that and pop it into the comments and the great thing about that technique as well is it will normally generate an idea that is easy for you to explain and easy for you to provide an example for because there's no point in trying to think of an idea that you cannot actually use in your essay a very very common mistake that we see and this also is because of brainstorming students instead of putting one idea in a paragraph and fully developing that idea they will just put many many many many ideas in there so for example if i was doing that i would write many people go on holiday here because there are historic castles there are lakes there are waterfalls there are beaches and there are forest parks to go and walk in that would be a terrible paragraph because it is just a list of stuff it is not actually a clear coherent paragraph a clear coherent paragraph has a topic sentence saying this is my idea then you explain that idea and then you give an example and that is what we're going to do now i'm going to take you down here to where they film game of thrones and i'm going to explain how to use your own experience to normalize it and write a coherent paragraph okay i'm going to show you some of this place and talk while i show it to you because this place is obviously a lot more beautiful than my face so it'll be a welcome relief so when we are writing main body paragraphs what we need to do is first of all we need to say what the paragraph is about so that is our topic sentence then we need to explain how that main idea answers the question that's our explanation so that's the second thing and thirdly what we need to do is we need to provide evidence to support our main point that's our example and that's what we're going to do here so my main point is that lots of people want to stay at home and go on holiday at home here because there are beautiful forest parks for them to visit so that's my topic sentence so as you can see i'm taking it out of the ielts context and i'm just normalizing it as if i was talking to someone on a normal basis like i'm talking to you right now so why would somebody want to visit a forest park well as you can see it's just full of natural beauty it is very very peaceful and people can also go for a walk and get healthy at the same time so that is my explanation that is why people would want to visit here and you know also there aren't many places in the world as beautiful as this and it is about a five minute drive from my house so that's a pretty convincing argument as you can see all right to provide evidence what i would do is i would just talk about this park and i would name the park and say how many thousands of people actually visit here every year now that's not a personal example because i'm not saying i went on holiday last year and went for a walk in this forest park i'm talking more generally than that i'm talking about how many many people go on holiday and visit this place every single year and it's as simple as that and if you look up here we're getting to a little bridge there's a bridge just up here if you go over that bridge that is actually where they filmed one of the scenes from the first ever episode of game of thrones so if you look down there that is where they filmed one of the scenes from the very first series of game of thrones if you know that scene and what happened in it pop it in the comments below if you can guess what it is okay so you've heard me do enough talking for today what i'm gonna do is jump in the car go back to the office and i'll jump in front of my computer screen and i'll type this up for you so you can see what it would look like on paper okay so we're back in the office and what i'm going to do is take all of those thoughts all of those things that i've been thinking about and talking about to you guys and put them on paper it is very useful to think about writing your essay in three stages the first stage is the planning stage and this is where we are doing our thinking so the first part of the video that is really me planning out my answer it is me thinking about the question understanding the question generating ideas picking an idea that i think that i can develop thinking of explanations examples for that idea and now it is my job to put it onto paper which is the writing stage this is extremely important because you don't want you don't you don't want it to be thinking and writing at the same time obviously when you're writing you're going to be doing a little bit of thinking but think of it as a google maps for your essay your plan is your google map you are investing that time of getting your phone and putting in the destination and then looking at the route and like okay i know exactly where i'm going instead of without google maps you're going to be thinking and trying to find the place at the same time you're going to get lost that is what happens if you don't break it into these two stages so the first part of the video was my plan now i'm going to put it on paper and the last part is checking checking the grammar checking the vocabulary checking your ideas the coherence of cohesion all of those things and that is going to make sure that you don't make silly mistakes and you get the best possible mark so let's look at the writing stage the very first thing that we need to write is our topic sentence don't over complicate topic sentences really what they do is they just say hello mrs or mr examiner this is what my main idea is this is what this paragraph is about this paragraph has one idea and this is my main point all right so let's put that in here many tourists decide to vacation in their home country because they want to visit areas of outstanding natural beauty areas of outstanding natural beauty that's what they're called in this country northern ireland those forests those sand dunes and everything they're in places called areas of outstanding natural beauty in your country it might be called a national park just keep it simple whatever it's called in your country in english put that in national park is means exactly the same thing that's just what they're called here so if you read this would you understand what the main point i'm about to make is would you understand what my main idea is would you understand what my main argument is of course you would or hopefully you would if i've done a good enough job and that is exactly what a topic sentence is but that is not going far enough the examiner doesn't have your whatsapp he can't send you a text message after you're done and say well what do you mean by this why would someone visit a national park instead of flying abroad and going on holiday why would someone want to do this so you need to fully explain your main point so let's do that now okay explanation this is because so imagine the examiner saying why well this is because these places are not only naturally beautiful but they also provide a place where families can relax and exercise in a stress-free environment so this is basically what i was talking about when i was wandering around the forest i was saying things like it is so beautiful it is really straight you know you don't feel stressed here you can relax and you can walk around you can exercise and it's basically it explaining why someone would want to visit there it's pretty obvious why someone would want to visit there but just because it's obvious doesn't mean that you just keep that to yourself you need to put it on the paper do not assume that the examiner understands what you mean you must explain it to her you must explain what you think and put it on to the page okay but that's not enough what we need to do now is go a little further we can't just put one short sentence in because imagine again the examiner is saying well so what okay i get that national parks are beautiful and you can relax there and you can walk around them but why would you want to go on holiday there instead of flying away somewhere else so we need to fully explain that a little bit more so city dwellers people who live in cities live in cramped conditions they live in little apartments most of the time that are often lacking in open spaces and can have poor air quality so what i just did there was i've just remembered the cities that i have lived in i live i've lived in sydney australia i've lived in new york city i've lived in london i've lived in ho chi minh city in vietnam most of the time especially in ho chi minh city we're living in little apartments no criticism of vietnam or ho chi minh city they're great places but they are lacking um in big open beautiful areas where you can just walk and breathe fresh air and so i just thought about that and explain why i would want to visit somewhere in the country that i'm currently in national parks are the perfect antidote to modern living i've talked about modern living living in cramped and in cities living in little apartments living where you can't go out for a walk and breathe fresh air i mean people don't have to fly very far to appreciate them all right so you don't have to get on an airplane you don't have to fly you know 18 hours in a plane to go and just walk around a nice place you can just get in the car and visit somewhere quite close to you but this isn't far enough we need to provide evidence these are just our thoughts we need to provide real evidence as to why this is true imagine you are arguing with someone imagine for me maybe my wife wants to get on a plane and travel to thailand to go to a beautiful island and a nice beach and i say no we're going to stay in northern ireland she would say well can you give me an example of of a place where we could go sure and i'm going to give you that example so imagine you're you're arguing with someone not physically fighting with them or anything like that but just having a healthy debate with them um you always can strengthen your argument by putting in some evidence or an example in other words for example thousands of northern ireland residents people who live in northern ireland travel to tullymore park the place that i took you to to enjoy miles of forest trails the pathways through the forest each year instead of flying to a far away destination so you could use any national park or beautiful place that people visit in your home country it doesn't have to be complicated it doesn't have to be 72 percent of people who harvard university asked said that they got like don't over complicate it just use your own experience i don't think there's a country in the world that doesn't have at least one place that everybody knows where you can go and visit there that's kind of like this so you could use that and that will be perfect to use that try and always use examples from your own experience and because they are real and because they will make sense if you make up examples then you're normally going to get in trouble okay guys so your task write one main body paragraph don't write the whole essay at this stage just write one main body paragraph based on your own experience don't copy my idea don't copy my explanations don't copy my example obviously unless you're from northern ireland and if you're from northern ireland why why are you doing the ielts test but think about it from your own life experience why would someone in your country want to stay there and go on holiday there doesn't have to be a destination doesn't have to be a place or a national park just think of one reason put that into your topic sentence then explain why and then provide evidence in the form of an example and if you learn anything from this video it is just to keep things really simple don't over complicate them and use your own experience take it out of the ielts context and just think about this from your own perspective imagine you were sitting in a coffee shop with someone and they said why are you going on holiday this year oh i'm thinking of actually staying at home why would you say that what would be your explanation where would you want to go keep it simple and you will be able to write a really really effective paragraph and i'll try and give as much feedback as i can we will read 100 of the paragraphs that you post and you'll also improve your ielts score by doing so so it's in your interest to do it thank you very much guys really appreciate it on the way up to the mountain up to the waterfall seen this it is easier to take an empty bottle down a mountain than a full one up here lots of tourists visit mountains and go mountain climbing take water bottles up and then throw the empty ones away at the top of the mountain which has a double meaning also relates to ielts why put in all the hard work and then do something really dumb at the end so why watch this video and not complete the tasks so you've done the hard work you've watched the video do the tasks put them in the comments and you might even get a reply from me or one of my team thanks very much guys and check out the other videos on our youtube channel and give them a like if you like them and comment if you need any help whatsoever we check all the comments i better go before i fall down this mountain bye [Music] you

Channel: IELTS Advantage

Views: 38,557

Keywords: IELTS, IELTS Advantage, IELTS Lesson, IELTS Preparation, IELTS Class, IELTS Writing, IELTS Writing Task 2 | Is it as Complicated as You Think?, IELTS Writing Task 2, Is it as Complicated as You Think?, www.ieltsadvantage.com, Chris Pell, Is writing Task 2 difficult?, Band 7, Band 8, IELTS Writing Task 1, WT2, IELTS Test, IELTS Exam, How to pass the IELTS Exam, IELTS Speaking, IELTS Reading, IELTS Essay, Game of thrones, Northern Ireland, Forest, Beach, Walking, Scenic, NI

Id: v_tVNrjLpVs

Length: 28min 49sec (1729 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 15 2020