You now have the whole method: what the four dials reward, select-group-compare for Task 1, position-ideas-development for Task 2, this season's live questions, and why the samples you study must be built from your own material. What remains is not knowledge — it is production: actually turning your life and opinions into a bank of test-ready essays. This lesson prices out both ways to do it, honestly, and lets you choose.
The manual path: building a personal idea bank
This works. Candidates have done it for decades, and if you have the hours, it is excellent training. Here is the full recipe.
Step 1 — map the recurring themes. Task 2 questions cycle through roughly ten territories. This season's reported questions confirm it: urban development (old buildings, June, corroborated twice; transport vs roads, April–May), environment (packaging, June, twice), education and children (competition vs cooperation, reported across April and May sittings; teaching parenting), technology and behaviour (the phone/smoking ban, July, twice) — plus health, work, media, government spending, crime, and globalisation. Take the live list from this season's questions and generalise each into its theme.
Step 2 — write your bank entry per theme. For each of the ten: your genuine position, two ideas you can extend in English you control, one example from your own life or city, one consequence. This is thinking work, in writing, in English. Budget 45–60 minutes per theme if you do it seriously. ~8–10 hours.
Step 3 — draft one full essay per theme. The bank entry proves the ideas exist; the essay proves you can produce them in 40 minutes at 260–280 words. First drafts per theme, plus Task 1 practice on each chart family. ~10–12 hours.
Step 4 — find correction, then rewrite. This is the step self-study cannot skip and cannot self-supply: you cannot reliably see your own errors, and Writing has no answer key. A teacher, a strong-English friend, or paid marking on ten essays, then a corrected rewrite of each. ~12–15 hours of your time, plus the wait, plus marking fees (typically the price of several tutoring hours if you pay per essay).
Honest total: roughly 40+ hours spread over one to two months, plus correction costs. The output is real: a bank of ten essays in your own English, on live themes, that you can rehearse and redeploy. If you have two months and the discipline, this path needs no product at all — everything it requires is in the five lessons behind you and the free question feed at /writing.
The assisted path: the same bank, generated from your life
The manual path's cost is not the thinking — that is the valuable part — it is the production and correction of drafts. That specific labour is now automatable. IELTSWritingPrep takes your own experiences, opinions and target band, and generates band-calibrated essays from them in minutes: your example about your city's market quarter, developed at target + 0.5, on the exact questions being reported this season. The cost is less than a single tutoring hour.
To be precise about what it does and does not replace: it replaces steps 3 and 4 — drafting and calibrated correction. It does not replace step 1 or 2; the positions and experiences still have to be yours, which is exactly why lesson 5 insisted on them. Garbage opinions in, calibrated garbage out.
The two routes, side by side
| Manual bank | Assisted bank | |
|---|---|---|
| Time | ~40+ hours over 1–2 months | Your thinking (~8–10 h) + minutes per essay |
| Cost | Free, or marking fees per essay (often more than the alternative in total) | Less than one tutoring hour |
| Memorability | High — you fought for every sentence | High — same ideas, same life, yours to rehearse |
| Examiner risk | None; it is your English throughout | None if built from your real material — it reads as yours because the content is; reciting someone else's generic samples remains the trap either way |
| Correction quality | Depends entirely on who you find | Calibrated to target band by design |
| Best when | You have 2+ months and enjoy the craft | The exam is close, or drafting hours are the bottleneck |
Both routes end in the same place: ten essays, your ideas, your examples, at a band you can reproduce under pressure. The method does not change; only who does the typing does. And both routes draw questions from the same source — the live pool at /writing and the recall wall, which stay free either way.
Your drill (15 minutes — the first bank entry, either route)
- Open this season's questions and pick the corroborated theme that worries you most.
- Write the bank entry by hand, as in lesson 4: position, two extendable ideas, one example from your own life, one consequence. This step is identical on both routes — do it now.
- Then choose: block out the 3–4 hours this week to draft and seek correction manually, or take the same entry to IELTSWritingPrep and generate the calibrated essay from it tonight.
- Either way, finish the same test: close the essay and rewrite one body paragraph from memory. If you can — the bank is working, and you have nine themes to go.