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Five Minutes of Planning: The Highest-Value Habit in Task 2

IELTS Writing29 August 2026 · 8 min read · WiderAI Team

Spend the first five minutes of your forty Task 2 minutes planning, before you write a single sentence of the essay. It feels expensive when the clock is running, but it is the single change most likely to raise a Writing score, because it directly targets the two criteria candidates lose the most marks on: answering the whole question, and organising ideas so an examiner can follow them.

Here is the logic. An examiner assesses Task 2 on four criteria, and two of them — how fully you respond to the task, and how coherently your ideas progress — are decided before your grammar ever matters. A candidate who writes beautifully about the wrong question, or who changes position halfway through, caps their own score no matter how good the English is. Those failures happen at the planning stage, or rather in its absence. You cannot fix a missing plan with vocabulary.

A useful plan is short: a position, two or three main ideas, and one piece of support for each. It fits in the margin of the question paper or on the notepad in the computer test. The five minutes are not for writing sentences — they are for making decisions, so that when you start writing you never have to stop and think about what to say, only how to say it.

Why does planning raise your band?

The task instruction in every Task 2 question tells you to give reasons and include relevant examples, and the question itself usually contains more than one part. "To what extent do you agree?" requires a clear position sustained through the essay. "Discuss both views and give your own opinion" requires three things, and candidates regularly deliver two. Examiners are trained to notice when a part of the task is missing or barely touched, and it limits the score for task response immediately.

Planning is how you catch this before it costs you. When you write the question's parts down as a checklist — view one, view two, my opinion — you can see at a glance whether your outline covers everything. Without that checklist, you discover the missing part at minute thirty-five, when there is no time left to fix it.

The second gain is coherence. An essay written from a plan has one idea per paragraph, because each paragraph was a line in the outline. An essay improvised sentence by sentence drifts: a paragraph about cost slides into a point about convenience, then loops back. Examiners reward clear progression and logical paragraphing, and both are properties of the plan, not the prose.

There is also a fluency effect that surprises people. Writing from a plan is faster, not slower. When the ideas are already decided, the 35 remaining minutes go entirely into sentences, and most candidates find they finish with time to check their work — time that planning appeared to steal.

What should a five-minute plan contain?

Think of the five minutes in three stages.

1. Minute one: read the question twice and mark the task words. Underline the topic, the instruction (agree/disagree, discuss, problem/solution, advantages/disadvantages, or two direct questions), and any limiting words. "Some people believe children under twelve should not own smartphones" is not a question about technology in general — the limits are children under twelve and own.
2. Minutes two and three: decide your position and choose your main ideas. Position first, always. Pick the side you can support with ideas you can express in English, which is not necessarily the side you believe more deeply. Then choose two or three main ideas — no more. Reject anything you cannot explain in two sentences.
3. Minutes four and five: attach support and order the paragraphs. For each main idea, note one example or consequence you will use to develop it. Then number the paragraphs. A standard shape — introduction, two body paragraphs, conclusion — is enough for any band.

The plan itself should be in note form, and it can be in messy English or even partly in your own language. Nobody marks it. Its only job is to hold your decisions so your working memory is free for sentence-building.

How do you plan each question type?

The instruction word decides the skeleton, so learn one skeleton per type and planning becomes mechanical.

• Opinion (agree/disagree): state your position, then two body paragraphs supporting it — or one strong paragraph for the other side followed by a stronger rebuttal. Decide which shape before writing; mixing them mid-essay reads as a changed mind.
• Discussion (discuss both views + opinion): one paragraph per view, and make your own opinion explicit — in the introduction and conclusion at minimum. Plan whose view each paragraph presents so you never argue both sides in one paragraph.
• Problem and solution: plan the problems and solutions in matched pairs. A solution that answers no stated problem reads as padding.
• Advantages and disadvantages: if the question asks whether one outweighs the other, your plan must include a verdict, not just two lists.
• Two direct questions: the simplest to plan — one body paragraph per question. Copy both questions into your plan so neither disappears.

What goes wrong when candidates skip planning?

The most common failure is the drifting position: the essay opens agreeing, concedes so much in paragraph two that it now disagrees, and concludes with "it depends". Examiners read this as no clear position throughout, which is exactly the wording that holds essays at band 6 for task response.

The second is the overloaded paragraph. Without a plan, every idea that arrives gets written down, so a body paragraph contains four undeveloped points instead of one developed one. Depth beats breadth in Task 2: one idea explained, exemplified and linked back to the question scores better than four ideas mentioned.

The third is running out of essay before running out of question. Conclusion missing, second view untouched, opinion implied but never stated. All are planning failures, and all are cheap to prevent.

A quiet fourth: candidates who do not plan often reach for a memorised template instead, forcing the question into prefabricated sentences. Examiners recognise memorised language and give it little credit. A plan produces the opposite — an essay shaped by this question, in your own sentences.

Does the same habit apply to Task 1 and the other papers?

Yes, scaled down. Task 1 deserves two to three minutes: identify the main trends or stages, decide how to group the information into two body paragraphs, and choose what the overview sentence will say. Grouping is the Task 1 equivalent of a position — it is the decision that separates a report from a list of numbers.

The habit transfers beyond Writing, too. In Speaking Part 2 you get exactly one minute with a pencil and paper before the long turn, and candidates who treat it as a miniature planning session speak noticeably more coherently. If you want to feel the difference under real conditions, an IELTS speaking mock test will show you how much a sixty-second plan changes a two-minute answer.

Treat planning as part of the essay, not a delay before it. Forty minutes is not a writing window with planning stolen from it; it is five minutes of deciding and thirty-five minutes of executing. Candidates who make that switch almost always report the same two things: the essays got easier to write, and the scores for task response and coherence moved first.