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How to get ideas for an IELTS essay

How to get ideas for an IELTS essay

You guys often ask me this question in the emails: “How do I get ideas for an IELTS essay, when I don’t understand the topic?”. And you’re right, it is extremely hard to write about something you don’t understand.

So here’s what you can do to solve this problem:

  • Work on your vocabulary and learn new words, to make sure you will be able to understand the topic or at least take a very good guess.
  • Read as many IELTS essays as you can. You can find many sample essays here. Reading other people’s essays helps with the ideas, if you don’t have any of your own – “borrow” from others.
  • Read as much IELTS essay topics, as possible. You can find essay topics in every post in the Recent exams category. Why should you do it? Simply because sometimes the topics repeat in the future exams 🙂

    • Important! Don’t try to memorize essays. IELTS examiners are trained to look for memorized essays and they will disqualify your work on the spot.

    IELTS exam in Vietnam – October 2008 (Academic)

    Want to tell me what your IELTS exam was like? It’s easy – click here and fill your story in. Thanks for sharing, your help is much appreciated!

    Here’s what P. from Vietnam told me about his exam last Saturday:

    Listening

    Section 1: Filling a form for a child to learn piano. My first 3 answers were piano, guitar, and drum. Oh my God, I almost forgot how to write the word guitar. Luckily, my guess was right.
    Section 2, 3 and 4: I don’t remember exactly. But there were more multiple choice questions than last time.
    Section 4 is about the impact of food on learning.

    Reading

    It was more difficult than the last time. There were 2 kinds of matching: matching heading and matching task in the test. It also had summary completion, multiple choice and familiar kinds of questions in IELTS test.
    I don’t remember clearly about the content, just that it was about ancient human.

    Writing

    It was really difficult.

    Task1 (Report)
    They gave us 2 pie charts with different subjects, one is about Types of Language Training for Employees and the second one is about Purposes for learning a foreign language. But they asked me to compare and contrast since the 2 charts had nothing in common.

    Task2 (Essay)
    I can’t remember the topic very well because I didn’t understand it myself. It is about laws and society.

    Speaking

    I did a poor job because the examiner this time was difficult. Moreover, the candidate right before me did better job than me.

    I was asked about tourism and had nothing to say about it, therefore, I answered like a crazy man.

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