 Okay, so what if I know nothing? We get this question at least a few times a day. People emailing us saying what if I open the test paper on test day and I look at the task-to-question and I know nothing. I just don't know how to start. I don't understand the topic. I don't know how to think of ideas. So if you look at most IELTS websites, the majority of them have fake questions and this is where this fear comes from because if someone is producing IELTS questions and they don't know what they're doing, normally what they do is they think that oh, IELTS is really difficult therefore I must create really difficult complex questions. If you look at real IELTS questions, so ones produced by Cambridge, if you go into the IDP website, the British Council website, the official IELTS website, you'll see the task-to-questions are not really that complex. They are on very common topics and the questions are designed in a way that anybody with half an education will be able to think of some ideas for them. The other thing is, so many students after they do the test, what they'll do is they'll go online, they'll go on some blog or they'll be chatting to someone and they'll tell people this is the question that I got. 99% of those questions are misreported. This isn't the student's fault but it's very, very difficult for someone to do a whole question, finish the test and then remember that question and then be able to tell everyone accurately what it's like. So if you're looking at fake and misreported questions, no wonder that you're worried that you're not going to be able to answer the question because you're looking at questions that are far more difficult than what you'll really get on the test. So only look at official questions. Then you also need to think about the common topics. So the common task-to-topics. Now, can we accurately predict exactly what is going to come up? No, but are there some topics that come up again and again and again? Yes, I've analyzed thousands of past questions and there are some topics like education, technology, health, environment, government. These everyday topics that do come up quite regularly. So how can you use this information? What you can do is use the common topics as part of your IELTS preparation process. Log into every day into a popular English news website. So BBC News, New York Times, The Guardian, something like that. And at the top of the website, you'll see education news, the environment news, technology news, all these common topics. If you read one story about education, one story about technology, one story about the environment, are you going to find it difficult to think of ideas if you did that every day during your IELTS preparation and only takes five minutes? You can spend longer on that if you want to work on other things, but it really doesn't take that much time. So if you're looking at real questions and you're also reading the news each day and reading about these common topics, you should have no problem thinking of ideas and understanding the question on test day. So that's the first thing. Next, what is a good idea? So it doesn't matter how amazing an idea generation technique is if it is resulting in bad ideas. So we have to think about what a good idea is so that when you're generating your ideas, you'll be able to pick the ones that are best and be able to use those in your essay. I hope you're enjoying this video on IELTS writing. If you want to improve your IELTS writing even more and put all of the things that you're learning from our YouTube channel into practice, I've developed a free course called IELTS Essay Builder. What IELTS Essay Builder does is it gives you a free course that structures everything from your introduction to your main body paragraphs to your conclusions. It shows you step by step, sentence by sentence, how to write everything that you're learning here. And it's 100% free and it's helped thousands of students get a band 7, 8 and even 9. To sign up for that for free, all you have to do is just click the link in the description, enter your email address on that page and we'll send you that free IELTS Essay Builder for free. Thanks very much and I'll be back to the video. So what is a good idea? So the first one and the most important one, it has to be relevant. All right, it has to be relevant to the question. If it is not relevant to the question, it is not going to answer the question. The number one thing that you must do is answer the question. So if you have irrelevant ideas, you're not going to answer the question. You're likely to get a band 5 for task achievement. The rest of your essay is not going to be very good either because you're just starting off on the wrong track. So imagine you are on a journey. The end of your journey is when you finish your essay. If you use irrelevant ideas, you're going off on a tangent. You're going to write about something that is completely unrelated to the topic. So make sure your ideas are relevant. The second thing is can you develop those ideas? So you might think of the most amazing idea ever, but if you can't explain that idea, if you can't support that idea with a relevant example, it's useless. Because in the test, in the writing task two, you're not just going to write a bunch of ideas. You're not going to have a main body paragraph with six or seven different ideas. You're going to have one idea and you're going to fully develop that idea with explanations and examples. So unless you know about that idea and you can develop it, you can explain it, then don't use it. The third thing is can you think of that idea quickly? So if I give you six hours to think of an idea, you know, anybody can do that. But can you think of ideas quickly? So what you're trying to do is you're trying to think of relevant ideas that you can develop and that you can think of quickly. So those are the three things that you should be thinking about. If you can't think of relevant ideas, if the idea is not relevant, it's not a good idea. If you can't develop it, it's not a good idea. If you can't think of it quickly, it's not a good idea. All three of those things must be present in any technique that you use to help you generate ideas. And that brings us on to brainstorming. So as I said at the start of this lesson, if you go into any IELTS classroom today, so all around the world there will be a hundred different classes all teaching IELTS at the same time. If you ask the teacher how do I generate ideas, they will say brainstorming. Now does this work? No, it does not work. In fact, it is the most useless thing that you could ever do on the test. It does not help at all. Why is that? Brainstorming results in irrelevant ideas. How you brainstorm is you just think of as many different ideas as possible. So if you're just thinking of as many ideas as possible, what you're going to do, you're going to think of irrelevant ideas. You're also, because you're thinking just about as many ideas as possible, you're going to think a lot of those ideas are going to be ideas that you know a little bit about but you can't fully develop them. You can't explain them, you don't have examples for them. So what this does is it results in a huge number of irrelevant or useless ideas and it takes you a very, very, very long time to do that. So you're left with a bunch of useless information, you've just wasted a few minutes and then you have to sort through all this useless information. A better way would be to quickly think of relevant ideas that you can develop and be able to do that pretty much instantly. Now, not instantly is probably the wrong word actually. You don't want to do things instantly because that means you're not thinking about them. But you should be doing them pretty quickly. When I work with my students on my VIP course, we aim to get them to the point where they can look at any question and think of relevant ideas that they can develop in a few seconds. And that might sound a little bit ambitious but it's totally possible by using some other idea generation techniques and forgetting about brainstorming. So if there's one thing that I would suggest to you to take away from this lesson is stop brainstorming. I know that your teacher has probably told you that that's a really good idea but your teacher hasn't taken the time like I have to really work with students and consider what actually works and what doesn't. If you want to stick with brainstorming, stick with brainstorming. If you want a better way to do it, keep watching this lesson. So number one is called the coffee shop method and I developed this myself when I was working with students in the classroom. And one thing that I picked up on, one pattern that emerged was when I first walked into an IELTS class, I would start the class maybe the first five minutes just chatting with the students, asking them how they were, talking about different things in the news or talking about current events. And these were intelligent students that had no problem talking about these current events, things in the news, things that they were doing, no problem at all. As soon as the class started and as soon as I put a task to question in front of them, the same students that had no problem whatsoever thinking of ideas was like their brain completely shut down. So I started to spot this over and over and over again and when you spot a pattern like that, obviously there's something wrong and you want to fix it. So what I did was I spoke to the students and asked them why do you have no problem thinking of ideas before class but it's when class starts, you can't do it. And it was because they were in something that I call test mode and so this affects your writing, it also affects your speaking more than anything that people, for example, on the speaking test when you are talking to someone outside of class, their fluency is great, their grammar is great, their pronunciation is great but then when they step into the real test, everything falls apart for some reason. Again, this is what I call test mode. So what we want to do is we want to normalize the situation. So even though it is a very stressful test and you're going to have, you know, there's a lot at stake. I understand, I speak to students every day about how important this is. We want to normalize it as much as possible and reduce stress as much as possible so that we can think normally. So the coffee shop method, what it does is I say to my students, imagine instead of doing the IELTS test imagine you're sitting with a friend in a coffee shop in your imagination and you're discussing the question like two normal people would in a coffee shop. So it's probably better just to show you a real example of how this would be. This video is sponsored by us, IELTS Advantage and the IELTS VIP course. The IELTS VIP course is the most successful IELTS course in the world. That is a fact because we have more than 7, 8 and 9 success stories than any other IELTS course in the entire world. We do that by simplifying the whole IELTS process supporting you with some of the best IELTS teachers in the world and being with you every step of the way until you get the score that you need. So thank you for making it this far in the video. I want to give you 10% off our VIP course. All you have to do is just look down in the description. You will see our special link that you need to get 10% off. Just click that and you can sign up. If you have any questions about the VIP course, always feel free to get in touch with us. Chris at IELTS Advantage.com is my email address. We answer 100% of the questions that we get. Hope that you will become a VIP. If not, enjoy the rest of this free video. So here's a question. Today more and more tourists are visiting places where conditions are difficult such as the Sahara Desert. What are the advantages and disadvantages for the tourists? So this is a real question from Cambridge 12. And this is a very typical question. It's not difficult to understand. But when students see this, they overcomplicate everything. They make it more complex than it really needs to be. So instead of just looking at this question like an IELTS Task 2 question imagine you're sitting with your friend in a coffee shop and you're saying like a lot of people are going to more extreme places on holiday these days. What are the good and bad things about that for the tourists? So instead of using words like advantages and disadvantages, just simplify it. What are the good things about that? What are the bad things about that? And by doing that, you will be able to easily generate ideas that are relevant, that you can develop and you can think of them quickly. So no brainstorming, just thinking about that for a few seconds and it will generate really good ideas pretty much immediately. Another way to think about this is something that I call the family fortunes method. This is something that I developed with my VIP students because as I said before, one technique will work for some students but it won't work with other students because their brains don't work like that. Everybody is different. Everybody's brains are wired differently. So there were some students who I was showing the coffee shop method to and they were still having problems. So I said okay, let's think about this differently and let's think about why you find this method difficult. So they were still over-complicating everything. This is particularly with people who are very intelligent. So I think about a third of my VIP course, there are doctors and engineers and lawyers and people like that, very, very, very intelligent, highly qualified people. Those types of people tend to over-complicate everything and they find it very difficult just to keep things simple. So this is for someone, if you're a doctor or an engineer or a lawyer, someone who has a lot of education, this technique is probably for you. So what is family fortunes? Family fortunes is a game show and basically what it is, they ask the contestants questions and the questions are always, we asked 100 members of the public this question. What was the top answer? What was the most common answer? And this is a great way to think of Writing Task 2 ideas. So what you do is you look at any question and you think if we asked 100 members of the public randomly what would be the most common advantage that they would say and what would be the most common disadvantage that they would say. And if you do that, you will always think of very relevant ideas. You will always think of ideas that you can develop because these are the most common ideas. They're the most straightforward ideas. They're the most simple ideas. And you'll always be able to think of them quickly. So some people like this one, some people like that one. There are many other techniques that I teach. I'm not going to share all of them with you because that would be a very long class and my VIP students would be a little bit angry with me if I shared everything with you. But hopefully that will help you generate ideas. So now what I'd like to do is look at this question, pick one of these techniques. So either imagine you're in a coffee shop and you're discussing this with a friend or think what would be the most common advantage what would be the top answer for disadvantage. And you can simplify it by what's a good thing about it. What's not such a good thing about it. Keep it simple. So in the comments, let me know one advantage and one disadvantage and you will surprise yourself just how easy this is. So we're getting some comments. Thank you very much. So Lynn Lloyd says advantage, unique experience. Excellent. That is the most common one. That's the most straightforward one. That's the easiest one to explain. Perfect. Experience about desert. So the question, this question is not about deserts. It's not about the Sahara Desert. They say such as the Sahara Desert just to help you understand the question. The question is about visiting places where conditions are difficult. So extreme places. So it's not about deserts. Option, exploring places. Yeah, perfect. So you get the idea how easy it is to think of these things. So give me one bad thing, give me one disadvantage, one drawback of visiting a place that has an extreme environment like Antarctica or the Arctic or the Sahara Desert or Mount Everest or something like that. So the negative thing, gourmet health problems. Yeah. So the negative part of visiting the Sahara Desert or Antarctica is something could happen to your health. You know, you could have an accident. You could get a disease. There's not many hospitals around there. That's a pretty, probably number one reason why people don't go on holiday up Mount Everest. You know, some people do, but you know, most people don't because maybe it's not the biggest reason. Maybe because it doesn't really have, you know, beaches and cocktails and you know, things like that. Disadvantage, complex preparation. Yeah, it's expensive to go to those places. So it's, you know, what is the average holiday cost? $1,000, $2,000, probably to visit Antarctica it's going to cost $10,000 to $20,000, you know. All of you are getting it. All of you are thinking of great advantages and disadvantages. So if you're watching this video, you're obviously worried about idea generation, but hopefully I simplified it for you and showed you that you don't really need to worry about it. This is all you need to do. Don't worry about brainstorming and use, you know, seek out people who have actually thought about making it easy for students. Hopefully you enjoyed this lesson. My email address is Chris at IELTSAdvantage.com if you need help with your IELTS preparation. Bye-bye.