Task 2 for the General Training and Academic IELTS exam requires you to write an essay. Therefore, in this lesson, we are just going to look at the basic structure of your Task 2 essay to help you think about how you should organize your ideas for that portion of the exam. An important concept for essay organization is the idea of a paragraph.
In its most basic way, a paragraph is something that is organized visually in an essay, in one method by indenting. That is where every time you start a new paragraph you put the first line just a few spaces over from the rest of the lines in the paragraph. That tells the reader that you are starting a new idea, that your new paragraph is beginning.
You can also do a block method. That is where you do not indent the first line, but you do leave a space between your paragraphs. One line is enough. On your official writing, on your official paper, your test paper you can just leave one line blank in between paragraphs and that will tell the reader that you are starting a new paragraph.
You should choose one method or the other do not switch back and forth. You do not need to do both of them so on your IELTS, you need to choose which way you are going to show you are starting a new paragraph. However, a paragraph for your task two essay is going to be about two to five sentences long, in other writing you will do for college or for work or any other, place, really.
You could have paragraphs that are much longer than five sentences. But for your IELTS essay, two to five sentences are good for each paragraph, because of the time. You do not have enough time to write really long paragraphs for your essay. And a paragraph needs to be organized around a clear topic or thought, so each paragraph you write will have its own main idea, one big idea, that holds all of the rest of the sentences together.
Each paragraph has its own main idea or basic concept. They are absolutely necessary for your task two essay. You really may not just start from the top and go all the way through without organizing your ideas into paragraphs. You will not do well on your task two essay, if that is how you organize things. Your thought needs to be separated in very clearly presented and the best way to do that is to organize your thoughts into paragraphs.
For more details on this lesson, please watch the video on our Youtube channel.
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