Come up with writing ideas better

Brainstorm ideas for your essay writing more efficiently

by Kasra Sharifan | Aug 7, 2019 | Writing

Many IELTS candidates complain about the lack of ideas they need for writing. They anxiously spend a long time thinking but have no idea what to write, so the IELTS answer sheet remains blank. However, the good news is that to solve the problem, they only must follow easy steps.

1) Extract Ideas

The technique to extract ideas is simple yet really effective. Follow these steps:

Choose a writing sample from many model writing answers available.
Look at the body paragraphs, (exclude introduction and conclusion) and find the focus of each paragraph, i.e. the main idea which appears in the topic sentence. Write them down.
Now that you know the main ideas, let’s read the paragraphs completely to find the supporting ideas that the writer has used to explain about the main ideas.
Now you have the writer’s mind map. Only change ONE of the ideas and rewrite the whole text. You will be able to quickly improve your ability to come up with ideas!

2) Never lose sight of TED talks

To even further boost your knowledge and creativity and improve your ability to generate ideas, as we have always said, watch a TED talk a day.

Choose a TED talk from loads of beautifully-selected ones available.
Read this lesson to know how to work on these talks.

3) Read extensively

Finally, you can read magazines or newspapers to have something to write about in IELTS.

Choose a good newspaper or magazine. The best ones are listed here.
Find articles that relate to the topic(s) you would like to write about, or the ones you find interesting and informative.
Underline the information, and before writing, take a look at the underlined words and phrases.

Kasra Sharifan

Co-founder and CFO

British Council certified English teacher, IDP-trained IELTS instructor, content writer, editor-in-chief, co-founder, and Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at IELTS Juice Online Academy.