The Ultimate Guide To IELTS Task 2 Introductions

So the first part of our essay is going to be our introduction. There are five stages to writing an introduction. Stage number one, analyze the question. If you don't understand the question, you won't be able to write a good introduction. Then decide your position. All right? Pick a clear position. If it asks you about that, sometimes position might be called opinion. Then you have to generate ideas. But only after you've analyzed the question and you've thought about your position. Then you plan everything out. And then and only then do you write your introduction. This is where a lot of students mess up is because they immediately go in to stage five and they skip stages 1 2 3 and four. If you skip any of these stages, your introduction won't be as effective as it could be. You'll start your essay and you'll get confused. You'll get lost. You'll have to start again. It'll be a complete mess. Please do follow these steps. So, let's look at the first part which is analyze the question. So, there are three layers to analyzing a task two question and this applies to any task two question. Layer number one is where students spend most of their time and this leads to huge problems. Layer one is the general topic. So let's say the question is about health. What students do is they look at that think oh this is about health and they just write everything they know about health. It is important that you first identify what that common topic is. The reason why you want to identify that is so that you don't make that mistake. You don't write everything you know about that topic because within that general topic is layer two which is the specific topic. you're narrowing your focus to what is kind of the subtopic underneath that. So for example, if the general topic was education, but the subtopic was maybe about music or teaching music to young children, that is not generally about education. That is a very specific thing within the general topic. And then layer three are the instruction words. They are telling you exactly what to do. Some questions might say give your opinion. Other questions might say discuss two different opinions. Others might say what are the causes and solutions. They are telling you exactly what they want to know and most students don't actually pay attention to this and just write very quickly as much as they can about the general topic. Do not do that. So let's look at the sample question. Nowadays more tasks at home and work are being performed by robots. Why do you think this is happening? Is it a positive or negative development? Let's use this three-step system. Step one, what is the general topic? Well, the general topic is technology. Within that big, big big topic, they want you to write about not just robots, but how robots might replace humans at home and at work. And then if we look at the instruction words, they want you to say, why is this happening? Is it good? Is it bad? The examiner must be able to look at your essay and know that you have understood this is the instruction that they're giving you and to be able to look at your essay and understand why you think this is happening and do you think that it's good or bad within this specific topic, not this general topic. But the good thing about this is it's a system that you can apply to any question. If you follow that system every single time, it's pretty much impossible not to understand the question and give the examiners what they're looking for. We've included a free workbook for this lesson. So, if you want, go down, download that, and come back to this lesson. I have set you little tasks throughout the lesson, so you can print it off if you like or, you know, have it on a separate device or in a separate window. But, if you want to really learn from this lesson, try and do the tasks within the workbook. and I'll tell you when those tasks come up. So, if you want, go and do task one and come back and we'll look at stage two of how to write an introduction, which is to decide your position. So, for double questions, they will often ask you things like, do you think this is positive or negative? Do you think this is a good or a bad thing? They'll give you two sides and ask you to take a position on one of those sides. So, just think about it. Some people think this, some people think that. They want you to say which one you think is true. Easiest way to do this for double questions is just to pick the side that is easiest for you to write about. Even if you disagree with that side, but you know a lot about it. That's uncommon, but sometimes it happens. Just keep it simple and pick the side that is easiest for you to write about, not the one that you really feel deep down is actually true. And there is no right or wrong position. Both of them you can make a valid argument for them. So let's look at a sample using our question. So we're going to focus in on the question which is is it a positive or negative development? Just a fancy way of saying is it a good or a bad thing. So this requires you to take a position and keep it super simple. Either say I think it's good or I think it's bad. Look at the question. Think about it. Which one is easier to write about? And the way to think about this is just can you think of good ideas? Can you think of ideas for this side? Can you think of ideas for this side? Can you explain those ideas? And can you think of examples for those ideas? You don't go need to go into too much detail right now on this. That's the next step. But this will take you 3 seconds just to think like what side? Okay. Yeah, I know a lot about that side and could easily write about that. Just pick that one and delete the other one. So now we have analyzed the question. We fully understand it. We fully understand what to do. We've taken our position. The next is we need to generate ideas. So what I want you to do is look at this essay, pause the video and think about if is this a good essay, is it a bad essay, if so, what are the problems? So if we have a look at the ideas that the student has. So technology is developing very fast. It's quite vague. It's not bad, but it's quite vague. And people have busy lives. So she has one idea, two ideas. They need help with their daily tasks. We have three ideas here. Companies want to make more profit and they want to reduce costs. Idea number four. Idea number five. Robots are more accurate. Idea number six, you get the point. This student has done something that many, many students do, which is brainstorm. Why is brainstorming a problem? Well, I want you to think about if you've brainstormed before, how did you feel? Did you feel good when you were brainstorming? And did it result in a good essay? So brainstorming is where you take your topic, you create a little bubble and you just think of as many ideas as possible and hopefully some of them will be able to help you with your essay. What is the problem with brainstorming? Well, the first one is you don't have time. When we surveyed our students and asked them how they felt when they were brainstorming, they said things like stressed, worried, confused, and lots and lots and lots of negative thoughts that they were having. This is mostly because you're running out of time. And then if you think about what brainstorming does is it generates lots of ideas, but it doesn't generate ideas that specifically answer the question. The reason why brainstorming was invented, it was actually invented by marketing companies. thinking of ideas for new adverts like TV adverts and for that it is amazing because you want to really think outside the box. You want to think of brand new creative ideas. That is the opposite of what you should be doing on test day because you're not trying to think of creative ideas. You're not trying to think of innovative new ideas. You're trying to think of ideas that actually answer the question. So, not only does it waste time, but it wastes time even more because if you look at the ideas that you actually produce, most of them will actually be irrelevant. So, it wastes even more time as you kind of sift through these ideas and think about which ones would actually work for my essay. And then because you have you're running out of time, you pick some of these ideas that are quite vague or they might be irrelevant and these end up in your essay. So you waste time to become stressed out to produce something that will lower your score, not improve your score. Not a good idea. So before we show you a much better technique, we need to think about what a good idea is in terms of writing an essay for the IELTS test. Well, number one, the idea needs to be easy to understand. Remember the purpose of writing. Why are we writing? We're not writing to get a high score. We are writing to help the examiner. help the reader understand what is in our head and only if we do that the result will be a high score. It also needs to be relevant. It needs to answer the specific question. So if you look back at the student sample essay that we showed you, some of those ideas are very vague, so not very relevant. Some of them are completely irrelevant. They don't actually answer the question at all. And then for you, your ideas need to be easy for you to explain and easy for you to develop. This is a very common problem that we see with very well- educated people like doctors, lawyers, engineers, people that have for years studied very complex topics and they kind of bring that into the essay writing process with them and they'll try and think of the most complex ideas. Well, those ideas are actually difficult for you to write about. If it's difficult for you to write about, it is actually lowering your score and there are no extra marks for high-level ideas. There are ideas that are relevant and ideas that are irrelevant. That's the only thing that the examiner is really thinking about. So, let's look at a simple idea and a complex idea. Remember the question, why are people using robots? Simple idea. After a long day at work, people are tired. easy to understand, easy to write about, directly relevant. And a good test is could you take that idea, tell it to anybody outside in any English-speaking country, show them the question and say, "I think this is a good idea." Would everyone understand you? Or would they be like, "I don't really know what you're talking about. That's difficult to understand. Can you explain that? What do you mean?" If they're asking you those follow-up questions, then it's not a very clear relevant idea. But if you said something like this, computers and AI have become much cheaper in recent years. So companies find it makes more financial sense to replace workers with machines. So could you walk up to the average person on the street and would they understand that completely? Well, they might ask you, well, why has AI become cheaper? Like most people are not AI experts. Would you need to explain M's law to them? Then you would have to talk about data center infrastructure. And then we would need to have like a philosophical debate about the value of human labor. Now, we could do that, but you would need to be an expert on all of those things. And then you would need to spend a huge amount of time explaining them, thinking of examples. So simple ideas make your job much easier and the examiner's job much, much easier. So just use simple ideas. Instead of brainstorming, we developed a different technique, a much simpler technique called the direct method. So let me show you why do you think this is happening? Instead of writing a bubble and lots of arrows, just ask yourself directly that question. Why is this happening? That cuts through all of the complexity and normally the first answer that pops into your head is the best. Other people find it easier to think instead of what is the best idea, what is the simplest idea? Or some people like to use this technique which is if you asked a 100 people what would be the most common answer. Now you don't have to use all of these techniques. Some people find one of them more useful than others. But try them. Use your your workbook. Try them out and try and think of an idea using one of those techniques. And then for question two, we've already taken a position. So let's say for example, our position is positive. We think it's a good thing. We would just ask ourselves that direct question. Why is it good? Keep it simple. It doesn't need to be complicated. Okay, so let's do this live. Robots are performing more tasks [snorts] at home and work. Why is this happening? Pause the video. Think about this for 20 seconds at most. Then write it in the comments. We look at every single comment. So we might give you feedback on it as well. But make sure you're using one of those techniques, not brainstorming, just one of the direct method techniques. Okay. So what we did was when we were working with our VIP students, we did this with them. And the most common answer was advancements in AI, artificial intelligence. And when we asked them why they think this is positive, it reduces the amount of work we have to do. Extremely obvious and simple, but those are the best answers. Now, if you got a different one, don't worry. put it in the comments and we'll tell you whether it is good or not. Like you might think that this is a negative development and you come up with a good answer on why you think it's negative or you might have a completely different idea from advancements in AI and we'll show you more samples later on in this lesson. But what you should do is go through kind of the checklist of is this easy for the examiner to understand? Is this relevant to the question? And can I actually write about this? If you answer yes to all three questions, then it is a good idea and you can just move on. So, we've completed the first three stages and now we're going to move on to the next stage, which is the planning stage. So, whenever I say to a class of students, oh, you need to plan. The first thing they think about is, I don't have time to plan. This is a huge misconception that if you spend time planning, you're going to waste time later on and you're going to run out of time later on when you're writing your essay. So, that's a bit like saying Google Maps is a waste of time. Why do we spend 30 seconds typing our destination into Google Maps? Well, that 30 seconds saves us a huge amount of time because we know exactly where we're going to go because Google Maps will take us there. That's exactly what a plan does. It takes a minute or two to do that plan, but all of your thinking goes into that plan and it means that you're not going to get lost. It's actually a huge investment of time because not getting lost and knowing exactly what to write means that you will always finish on time. And the good news is you don't have to plan your entire essay. You can just plan your introduction. And once you nail your introduction, the introduction actually acts as a plan for the rest of your essay, which you'll see. So, if we look at our workbook, this is a little plan that we can make. So, you don't have to write all this out. Um on test day like on test day you could just have Q1 Q2 okay why is this happening very short notes like this position do I think this is good or bad I think this is a good thing why saves time or saves work and that very simply is your plan all this is doing is just keeping your thoughts very very clear on paper now some people like to write a little bit more some people like to just do very very short notes. But it's important that you do plan something because if you don't, it's hard to keep everything in your head at the same time, especially on test day when you're under time pressure, you're stressed out. Just keeping things really, really simple in this way, is keeping you on the right track. We're nearly at the end where we've analyzed the question, decided our position, we've thought of our ideas, and we've put those into a brief plan. Now, and only now can we move on to writing our introduction. Before we do, it's always good to think about what is an introduction and more importantly, what is not an introduction. So, what is an introduction? Well, number one, it tells a reader what to expect. Think about it as a little flag where you fly it and you say, "Here's what is going to be in the rest of this essay." It helps the reader. So, it's much much easier for the examiner, for the reader to follow the rest of your essay, to follow your main body paragraphs, to follow your conclusion if your introduction is really, really clear and it tells them here's what you're going to see. And it helps you organize your thinking. Anything that helps you organize your thinking more clearly and helps the examiner understand your essay is a very, very good thing. But more importantly, what is an introduction not? These are the notto-dos. Number one, it is not a chance for you to show off your vocabulary. This is a terrible first impression to create where you try to insert lots of fancy phrases and words in your introduction. The examiner knows exactly what you're doing and you're probably making a lot of mistakes that you're completely unaware of. So, just keep it simple and write your introduction as clearly as possible using simple language. It's also not a chance for you to hook the examiner. A lot of uh people write hooks at the beginning of their introduction thinking that you have to hook the examiner in. Number one, it's not a creative writing process. And number two, the examiner is being paid to look at your essay. You don't need to hook them. Their salary is the hook. You don't need to hook them in. And then a lot of people put in proverbs and quotes and phrases. These are just memorized chunks of language. And again, the examiner knows what you're doing. and the examiner will literally just delete them. They won't pay attention to them at all because you're not being tested on how many proverbs and quotes and chunks of language you can memorize. You're being examined on can you clearly communicate in English. If you have to memorize hooks and big words and big chunks of your introduction, that is a clear, if not the clearest sign that you don't know how to communicate clearly in English. So don't do that. Just focus on doing exactly what we teach you in this lesson and you'll be fine. So there are three parts or three elements in an introduction. And again, this is for double questions. So part one is your paraphrase. So paraphrasing is just stating something again so that it means the same thing using different words, different language. Then you briefly answer question one and you briefly answer question two. And the key word there is briefly. You're not adding any detail in there. You're just stating here's what I think about question one. Here's what I think about question two. Now, a lot of people worry about number of sentences and number of words. It normally this whole introduction will normally be two to three sentences. Sometimes fewer than that, sometimes more than that. But don't worry about number of sentences or number of words. Focus on quality. If you're focusing on how many sentences are here, how many words, you're not really focusing on doing the right things, just do the right things well and length will take care of itself. So the first element is paraphrasing. So let's look at that in more detail. The first method that we use to paraphrase is using synonyms. So if we look at this example, I am a male teacher from the country of Ireland. I am a man. So, man, male. These mean the same thing, but they're different words. Educator, teacher, nation, country. We've used synonyms to change this sentence [snorts] so that it means the same thing, but it has different words. And then we could take this sentence and we could change it even more. So, here we've changed Ireland to Irish. a man or a woman who is from Ireland, they are Irish. We've changed the form of the word to a different version of that word, but it means the same thing within the context of that sentence. But very very importantly, just because words are synonyms doesn't mean that they are close synonyms. So for example, rich and decadent are synonyms. They have similar meanings, but do they mean the same thing? Are they close synonyms? Rich and wealthy. The meaning of that is tied to how much money you have. Decadent is more a moral judgment. It's talking more about excess, throwing your money around and spending it on things that are not really necessary. So you can be an extremely rich person and not be decadent. Similarly, country and kingdom. So a country is a state with borders. A kingdom is slightly different. So they mean similar things, but they're not close synonyms. Whereas country and nation mean the same thing. So be very very careful with synonyms. Think about are they loose synonyms? They kind of mean the same thing. Or are they close synonyms? They mean pretty much exactly the same. If you want to uh be sure, just only use words you are sure of of the meaning of that. That's a good rule to have in general. But synonyms alone are normally not enough. What we can do also is we can change the structure of the sentence. So here's the original one. Nowadays more tasks at home and work are being performed by robots. So we can change the structure where we take a noun or keyword from the end of the sentence and we can flip it. We can put it to the beginning of the sentence. So instead of performed by robots, robots increasingly carry out tasks both in the home and at work. Then we can combine these two where we can add synonyms. So we taken this sentence and then we change some of the synonyms. So instead of carry out taking on instead of home domestic instead of work professional settings. So you can see if you combine those, it is a very very effective technique. But make sure they have the same meaning, they're grammatically correct, and you have sufficiently varied the vocabulary. If you want to test your skills, go to your workbook, and I have set you a little challenge. It is task number five in your workbook. And once you do that, what you can do is you can use this little checklist to check whether your paraphrase is correct or not. Number one, does it mean the same thing? This is where if you've used words you're unsure of, it might not mean the same thing. Whereas, if you've used words you're 100% sure of, it probably does mean the same thing. Is it grammatically correct? So for example, if I wrote I am a male teacher from the country of Ireland, that would be okay. But if I said, I am a man teacher from the country of Ireland. So man and male are synonyms, but wouldn't actually be correct. And is it varied enough? Now, a big mistake that a lot of students make is they think that they have to change every single word. And if they don't change every word, that's not paraphrasing. It's pretty much impossible. So for example, if you change the word robots to robotics, that would actually be wrong. Robots are the actual devices, the actual things, the products. Robotics is the kind of academic discipline, the subject. So if you looked at that sentence and you thought, I can't think of any way to change robots. Uh what will I say? Uh I'll change it to robotics. Within that context, that would be wrong. Whereas if you just repeated the word, if you just wrote robots, that would be correct. You don't have to change every single word. Okay. So let's have a look at two paraphrases from our VIP students. So they've changed home to residential kingdoms. Residential. All right. That is something to do with homes, but residential kingdoms, not really. A very very common overused word is plethora. A lot of students memorize this word, but a pleth plethora kind of means that there's too many of something. So that's not what the question statement actually says. They've changed robots to robotic entities. Sounds fancy. This doesn't mean anything. It would have been better if they just said robots. Then corporate environments. Corporate is more about big corporations. Like this is a workplace, but this isn't a corporation. In this modern era, again, just memorization. Examiners see it every single day. And then there are grammatical errors because the student is using words they don't really understand. If you're using words you don't understand, you're far more likely to make grammatical errors and it is full of vocabulary errors, too. So, not good. But many of you might have looked at that and thought that it was good because it has words like plethora kingdoms, corporate entities and thought, "Oh, this this student has a really high level vocabulary." Vocabulary is 25% of your total score, but the vocabulary needs to be accurate. It needs to be correct to get that score. So, if we compare it with this one, robots are increasingly taking on tasks both in the home and the workplace. It means the same thing. They have used different words that are correct. They've changed the structure. The vocabulary doesn't look memorized. It doesn't look forced. And there are no grammatical errors. So this is an excellent paraphrase. But as you will notice, it is much simpler than this one. Important thing about paraphrasing too is practice. You do need to practice. You probably do need to get feedback on your paraphrasing as well. The more you practice it, the more feedback you get, the more you're going to learn. It's just the way it is. So, after your paraphrase, you will write that out full stop. The next thing you're going to do is you're going to briefly answer both questions. Just keep it short and simple. You don't need to add length. You don't need to add complexity. You don't need to add detail. If it asks for your position, state your position only. Don't include examples. Don't include explanations. Just say I agree or I disagree or I think this is good or I think this is bad. Very very simple language and just briefly answer both questions. If you do all of that you will write a very good introduction but don't leave the examiner guessing. A good test should be and this is something that I used to do in the classroom all the time with students when I was teaching this. I would get the students to cut out with scissors on on paper. um their introduction and hand it to other students and get them to give each other feedback and say like, "Do you actually understand what I think about the question, what my position is?" And if they were able to do that, that was a pretty good introduction. We call it the stranger test. Could you hand this to a stranger with the question and your introduction and they know exactly what you think about it? This is an introduction by one of our VIP students. Let me just talk you through how the examiner is thinking about this. They're looking at this and thinking, has this person understood the question? It's impossible to write a good paraphrase without understanding the question? They have. They've understood the question. Their grammar in their vocabulary is pretty good because they have completed the paraphrase effectively. It's impossible to write in an effective paraphrase without having good grammar and vocabulary. They're also thinking they haven't added in any memorized phrases or hooks or anything like that. This person has been taught by someone who knows what they're doing. Then they'll look at the second part of it. This is mainly due to rapid advancements in artificial intelligence. They have answered question one. I believe this is a largely positive development as it significantly reduces the burden of work on people. They have clearly answered question two by giving their position. I think this is positive and here's why I think this is positive. So those three elements are all in there. The examiner knows exactly what the rest of the essay is going to be. Would you understand what someone thinks about the question just by reading that? I think so. To summarize what we have done so far for our introduction, we've analyzed the question using those three layers to think about it. We generated ideas using the direct method, not brainstorming. We've shown you how to briefly answer both questions and take a position. And we've shown you how to paraphrase and then put all that together. But you still have to write your essay and it's very very important that you do that obviously. So let's move on to main body paragraphs.