You only have to write 250 words: how long does that take? At 10 words a minute, 25 minutes. Think of TOEFL where you need to write 300 words in 30 minutes – it obviously can be done. I can normally persuade students into this by getting them to time a paragraph in class – typically it takes 5 minutes. Then all you have to do is repeat that 4 times – simple really.

The benefit of this approach is that it leaves you time to think of vocabulary to use in the essay. The more time you give to this, the more chance you have of getting the words right. As you so correctly say – it is a test of English not ideas.

The second point is in the planning stage you don’t need to think of ideas at all really. You don’t need ideas because the ideas are simply “I agree” and “I disagree” – it works for almost all known IELTS essays. What you do instead is think of “reasons” and “examples” why you agree or disagree. This is much easier to do under the pressure of exam conditions and has the huge benefit of making your writing coherent. In fact, if you have too many ideas or too complex ideas, the chances are that the essay will become overcomplex. It’s an exam essay, not an academic essay.

I do tell students that IELTS ‘task 2 is a ‘strange animal’ because they have to write about a topic without having any expert knowledge (unless they get lucky with the question) and yet make it look ‘academic’! I do teach them some skills which I hope are transferable to academic writing:

Hedging: ‘there seems to be a general trend towards…’, ‘it has been suggested that…’, ‘there is evidence that …’

Reductio ad absurdam (though I don’t usually teach the phrase) ‘it would be irresponsible if …’ ‘one cannot merely assume that …’, ‘the consequences of X would be disastrous/counter’productive/unpredictable…’

Alternating long and short sentences.

Thinking long and hard before using ‘you’ eg: ‘If you wish to be successful in your professional life, you have to acquire good time management skills’ (not very appropriate if the reader is an IELTS examiner!)

Ways of avoiding redundancy without falling into the trap of ‘false synonyms’ – I find a lot of students who try to pack words like ‘citizens’, ‘inhabitants’, ‘residents’, ‘consumers’ etc into their essay in order to avoid using ‘people’ 15 times. Actually, as you know of course, academic writing tolerates more redundancy than most – I’m thinking of the sciences and law, for example. The solution is often a pronoun or other basic word: ‘many’, ‘some’, ‘those who’

The best answer to a complex question in Task 2 Writing and in part 3 of the speaking test is usually ‘it depends’. That is why they ask candidates ‘to what extent do you agree or disagree’.

Not over-simplifying – if a problem were that easy to solve it would have been solved by now.

Not just saying ‘the government should do X’ – which government? Local or national? State or federal? Which countries?

Leave their prejudices and received opinions outside the test hall. I had one student who, when writing about how parents should share the burden of raising children, ‘went off on one’ and produced a 350-word rant on why fathers should discipline their families (wife included!)

From time to time, define terms (without patronising the reader) If the question is vague, pounce on those elements in the question which need to be clarified before any sensible discussion can take place. For example:

‘Studying the English language in an English-speaking country is the best but not the only way to learn the language.’ Do you agree or disagree with this statement?

The question doesn’t say who the learners are – are they affluent youngsters whose parents can afford to send them to the UK for 3 months? Are they less well-off but hard-working and resourceful 20-somethings who can come to the UK on their own? Are they complete beginners or do they have a sound basic knowledge? Are they keen to learn or not?

‘The position of women in society has changed markedly in the last 20 years. Many of the problems young people now experience, such as juvenile delinquency, arise from the fact that married women now work and are not at home to care for their children. To what extent do you agree or disagree with this opinion?’

Well, for a start the statement is obviously not applicable to any number of countries – in some countries it could be argued that women have less freedom to go to work now than they had in the 1970s. In others, juvenile delinquency hardly exists at all because children are busy working the land, making mud bricks or picking through piles of rubbish to scrape a living. Moreover, the statement presupposes that all mothers are married! It seems to me that if a test-taker is faced with a question like this, s/he is faced with two alternatives – (1) write about the statement as if s/he lived in the UK and shared that social reality ie be a ‘good student’ and do what seems to be expected of her/him, or (2) disagree with the statement on the grounds that it misrepresents the situation in at least half the globe! I know which approach I would be inclined to go with.

From here:

http://iatefl.britishcouncil.org/2009/forum/ielts-and-toefl