IELTS Writing Task 2 Guide for Indian Students: Marking Criteria, Essay Skeleton & Common Mistakes

Task 2 at a glance

The timing split is where many students lose marks before writing a word. Task 1 feels easier, so it gets 30 minutes, leaving 30 for the task worth double. If you are consistently rushing Task 2, do Task 2 first — nothing requires you to answer in order, and finishing the high-value task with a clear head is worth more than a polished chart description.

The 250-word floor is a floor, not a target. Roughly 260–290 words is a comfortable band; padding to 350 costs you time and usually adds repetition, which the marking criteria penalise rather than reward.

The four marking criteria, decoded

All four count equally, which explains the most common score shape: a student with excellent vocabulary and grammar who partly answers the question is averaging a strong two criteria against a weak one, and lands at 6.5 no matter how good the English is. Fixing Task Response is usually the fastest available gain, and it costs nothing in language ability — it is a reading-the-prompt problem.

Note what is not on the list: impressive-sounding phrases, length beyond the minimum, and the number of linking words. Students consistently optimise for exactly these three because they are visible, while the criteria reward things that are not.

The five question types — and what each one obliges you to do

Spend the first two minutes deciding which type you have and underlining every part you must address. Almost every low Task Response score traces back to a prompt that was skimmed, not read — and this is the cheapest two minutes in the whole test.

• Opinion (agree or disagree): state a clear position in the introduction and defend it throughout. A "partly agree" position is acceptable, but it must be a definite stance, not fence-sitting. The most common failure is arguing both sides evenly and never saying what you think.
• Discussion (discuss both views and give your opinion): you owe the examiner three things — view one, view two, and your own opinion. Students routinely deliver the first two and forget the third, which caps Task Response immediately.
• Problem and solution (or cause and solution): a balanced essay with the problems or causes in one body paragraph and matching solutions in the other. Each solution should visibly answer one of the problems you raised, not float free.
• Advantages and disadvantages: check the exact wording. "Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages?" demands a verdict; "discuss the advantages and disadvantages" does not. Answering the wrong one of these two is a pure Task Response loss.
• Two-part question: two direct questions, both of which must be answered — usually one body paragraph each. This is the easiest type to structure and the easiest to half-answer under time pressure.

One essay skeleton that works for every type

• Two developed body paragraphs beat three thin ones. Depth is what Task Response rewards; a third paragraph usually means three shallow ideas instead of two explained ones.
• Every body paragraph starts with the idea, not with a linking phrase. "Firstly" is not a topic sentence — "Public transport reduces congestion more effectively than road-building does" is.
• Examples do not need to be true or citable. A plausible, specific illustration is fine, and inventing statistics is unnecessary — "in many Indian cities, metro expansion has shifted commuters off the roads" works without a fabricated number attached.
• Plan for five minutes before writing: question type, your position, two body ideas, one example each. Students who skip planning write themselves into a paragraph with nothing to say and lose more time than the plan would have cost.
• Leave three minutes at the end to check articles, plurals and subject–verb agreement specifically. These are the highest-frequency errors for Indian English writers and the easiest marks to recover.

The mistakes that keep good English speakers at band 6

• Memorised opening phrases. "In this modern era of globalisation, it is a burning issue that…" is recognisable to every examiner, adds no content, and reads as padding. Rephrase the actual prompt instead.
• Answering the question you prepared rather than the one on the page. A rehearsed essay about technology, bent to fit a prompt about education, reads exactly like what it is.
• Linking words as decoration. "Moreover", "furthermore" and "in addition" stacked at the start of every sentence signal cohesion without providing it. Cohesion comes from ideas that follow each other; the linker only labels a relationship that is already there.
• Reaching for the biggest word available. Thesaurus vocabulary used slightly wrong costs more in Lexical Resource than the simpler correct word would have. "Ameliorate the plight of denizens" is not an upgrade on "improve people's lives".
• Articles and plurals. Dropped "a"/"the" and singular-plural slips are the single most frequent grammar errors for Indian candidates and are heavily represented in the Grammatical Accuracy score. They are also entirely fixable by proofreading for them specifically.
• Writing under 250 words, or padding past 320. Both are penalised — the first directly, the second through repetition and the errors that creep in when you are rushing.
• Ignoring the second half of the prompt. "…and give your opinion" or "…what can be done to solve this?" are separate obligations. Missing one is a Task Response cap regardless of how good the rest is.
• Illegible handwriting on the paper test. An examiner who cannot read a word cannot award marks for it. If your handwriting is poor under time pressure, the computer-based test removes the problem entirely.

A worked example

Prompt: "Some people believe that university education should be free for all students, while others think students should pay for it themselves. Discuss both views and give your own opinion."

This is a Discussion type, so three obligations: view one, view two, your opinion. A skeleton that satisfies all three:

• Introduction: "Whether higher education should be publicly funded or paid for by students themselves is widely debated. This essay will consider both positions before arguing that a means-tested model serves students best." — the topic is rephrased, and a definite position is on the table.
• Body 1 (the case for free education): topic sentence — "Free university education widens access for students whose families cannot absorb the cost." Explain: talented students from low-income households drop out for financial reasons, not academic ones. Example: students in smaller towns who choose a nearby college over a better-suited one purely on fees. Link: the country loses capability it has already partly paid to develop.
• Body 2 (the case for student contribution): topic sentence — "Charging fees, however, allows universities to fund teaching quality that general taxation may not stretch to." Explain: laboratories, faculty and equipment are expensive and compete with other public spending. Example: well-funded private engineering colleges maintaining facilities that stretched public institutions cannot. Link: quality matters as much as access, since a free degree of little value helps nobody.
• Conclusion: "Both access and quality are legitimate concerns. A system in which fees scale with family income — free at the bottom, full at the top — addresses the access problem without starving universities of funding." — the position is restated, and nothing new is introduced.
• Notice what this essay does not do: no memorised opener, no invented statistics, no stacked linking words, and a clear opinion appearing in the introduction rather than surfacing only in the conclusion.

A 4-week Task 2 plan

• Rewriting an essay you have already had feedback on teaches more than writing a new one. Most students only ever write first drafts and never see what their own better version looks like.
• Get feedback against the four criteria by name, not as "this is good" or "add more linkers". If you cannot tell which criterion is costing you, you cannot target it — and that diagnosis is the whole game.
• Practise on real prompts from official practice material rather than invented ones; the phrasing conventions matter, and misreading the wording is the most common failure mode.
• Four weeks of honest Task 2 practice moves most students who are stuck at 6.0 because of structure rather than language. If the gap is grammar accuracy, it takes longer, and the work is different — targeted error correction rather than more essays.

What band do you actually need?

Requirement patterns above are indicative and set by individual universities and visa authorities, not by IELTS — read your specific programme's wording, since per-module minimums are where applications quietly fail. One Skill Retake, where available, lets you re-sit a single module rather than the whole test, which is worth checking before booking a full retake for a Writing band alone.

A realistic caveat: no guide can promise a band. Task 2 scoring is examiner-assessed against the four criteria, and the honest claim is narrower — structural mistakes are fixable quickly, while grammatical accuracy improves slowly. Knowing which of the two is holding you back is what decides whether four weeks is enough.

Frequently asked questions