IELTS Writing Task 2: Every Question Type, With Real Topics

IELTS Writing Task 2 is a 250-word essay you have 40 minutes to write, and it carries about two thirds of your Writing band. Every prompt you will ever meet is one of five question types: opinion, discussion, advantages and disadvantages, problem and solution, or a double question. The instruction line tells you which one you have, and each type wants a different shape of answer. This page gives you the shape for all five, 16 real practice prompts taken from the timed tests on this site, and the part most guides leave out: what our own marking of 3,954 Task 2 essays shows about which of the four criteria is actually holding candidates back.

What Task 2 actually asks of you

You are given a statement or a situation, then an instruction telling you what to do with it. You write a formal essay of at least 250 words in response. There is no upper word limit and no choice of question: you answer the one in front of you.

The paper gives you 60 minutes for both writing tasks and the official advice is to spend 40 of them here, because Task 2 is weighted at roughly twice Task 1. That weighting is the single most useful fact about the paper. If you are running late, an unfinished Task 2 costs you more than a thin Task 1, so protect the 40 minutes even if Task 1 is not as good as you wanted.

Academic and General Training candidates sit the same kind of Task 2, marked against the same four criteria. General Training prompts lean towards everyday and social subjects and Academic prompts reach further into education, technology, environment and public policy, but the types and the structures are identical. That is why the prompts below are not split by version.

A sensible target is 260 to 290 words. In the 3,954 marked essays behind this page the average was 267 words, which is about right: comfortably over the minimum, with time left to read the essay back.

The five Task 2 question types

Learning types beats learning topics. Topics rotate endlessly and you cannot predict them, but the instruction line comes from a small fixed set, and each instruction has a structure that satisfies Task Response reliably. Each type below has the wording that identifies it, a structure, the mistake that costs the most marks, and the real prompts from our timed tests so you can practise the type rather than read about it.

How Task 2 is marked, and what actually costs you the band

Four criteria, each worth a quarter of the Task 2 mark. Task Response asks whether you answered the whole question and developed a position. Coherence and Cohesion asks whether the reader can follow it, paragraph by paragraph. Lexical Resource is the range and precision of your vocabulary. Grammatical Range and Accuracy is the range of structures you control and how often you get them right.

Most advice treats these as equally likely to be your weak point. Our marking says otherwise. Across 3,954 Task 2 essays scored on this site between 8 May 2026 and 25 September 2026, the two language criteria were almost always the floor, and Task Response almost never was.

Percentages in the third column add to more than 100 because a criterion counts whenever it ties for the lowest, which is common at the same band.

Grammatical Range and Accuracy was the lowest of the four criteria in 87.2% of essays and Lexical Resource in 82.3%. Task Response was the lowest in only 15.9%, and it had the highest mean of the four at 5.60. Read plainly: candidates on this site generally understand the question and get an answer organised. What holds the band down is the English.

That has a practical consequence for how you spend preparation time. Reading another twenty model essays raises Task Response, which is already your strongest criterion. If your Task 2 band is stuck around 5.5, the faster route is narrower and duller: fix the sentence patterns you get wrong repeatedly, and build precision in the vocabulary you already half know rather than collecting rare words you will misuse. The grammar topics and vocabulary sets are organised for exactly that, and the linking words guide covers the cohesion half.

The 250-word minimum, and what our data shows about it

Write at least 250 words. Going under is the one mechanical mistake in Task 2 that you can rule out completely before the exam, and 22.2% of the essays we marked still did it.

Those short essays averaged band 4.22, against 5.62 for essays of 250 words or more. Be careful with that number: it is a correlation, not a controlled experiment. A candidate who runs out at 190 words is usually a weaker writer to begin with, so padding an essay to 260 words will not by itself buy you 1.4 bands. What is more telling is where the gap sits. Task Response averaged 4.41 in the short essays against 5.94 in the rest, a wider gap than the overall one, which is what you would expect when an argument is stopped before it is developed. The words are not the mark. The development the words carry is.

A workable plan for the 40 minutes: five minutes deciding your position and your two reasons, thirty minutes writing, five minutes reading back for the errors you know you make. Do not count words as you go. Learn roughly how many lines of your own handwriting, or how much of the on-screen box, 270 words takes, and check once near the end.

Band 9 and Band 6 sample answers

Structures are easier to trust when you can see them working and failing on the same prompt. Each sample below gives a Band 9 answer and a Band 6 answer to one real Task 2 question, with examiner-style notes on exactly what separates them. The Band 6 version is the more useful of the two, because its mistakes are the ones our marking sees most.

• Online learningBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• Artificial intelligenceBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• Working from homeBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• Urban air pollutionBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• School life skillsBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• Citizenship educationBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• Traffic congestionBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• Reducing crimeBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• Social media and relationshipsBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• Health spending and preventionBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• English as a global languageBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• International tourismBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• Advertising and societyBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• Ageing populationBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes
• Public transport and roadsBand 9 and Band 6 answers, with notes

Which Task 2 topics come up

Task 2 topics are drawn from a stable set of public subjects rather than anything specialist. Across the 16 prompts on this page the recurring areas are education and schooling, work and careers, technology and artificial intelligence, environment and cities, crime and punishment, health and sleep, and money and spending. You are never asked for expert knowledge. Every prompt can be answered from ordinary informed opinion, which is deliberate: the test measures English, not subject expertise.

What that means for preparation is that you do not need to research topics. You need two or three usable ideas and one concrete example for each of those seven areas, flexible enough to be bent to whatever instruction the prompt carries. A single example about remote work can serve an opinion essay, a discussion essay and an advantages and disadvantages essay, because what changes between them is the structure, not the content.

If you want to see which subjects have actually been reported recently, our recent Task 2 topics for 2026 post tracks them, and the sample essays from the January to April 2026 window show how those subjects were phrased.

Six mistakes that cost the most marks

1. Answering a different question. Reading the topic and ignoring the instruction is the classic Task Response failure. Two prompts about remote work can want completely different essays.
2. Half an answer. Discussion essays that never state your opinion, double questions where only one is answered, and solution paragraphs that do not match the causes you named.
3. Listing instead of developing. Five undeveloped reasons score below two reasons taken properly through a because and a for example.
4. Linking words as decoration. Moreover and furthermore at the head of every paragraph do not create cohesion. They are marked as mechanical, and they cost Coherence and Cohesion rather than helping it.
5. Vocabulary reaching past its control. A rare word used slightly wrongly damages Lexical Resource more than a common word used exactly. Our data has this criterion below band 6 in 73.8% of essays.
6. No time to read it back. Repeated errors in articles, subject and verb agreement and tense are the usual content of the 87.2% of essays where grammar is the lowest criterion, and many of them are catchable in a five-minute reread.

How to practise so it actually moves the band

Reading about Task 2 does not move the band. Writing under the clock and finding out where the marks went does. A cycle that works: pick one question type from this page, write one of its prompts in 40 minutes without looking anything up, get it marked against the four criteria, then fix one criterion before writing the next. Working on one criterion at a time is slower to feel productive and much faster to show up in the score.

When you want the whole paper under exam conditions rather than one task, the full mock tests run all four sections in one sitting, and Writing Task 1 has its own hub covering every chart type.

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