Hate writing?

Writing prompts to make your IELTS writing practice more interesting

I hear many students tell me that they HATE WRITING. Many of them have had a terrible experience with it. One of my students from Turkey told me about a teacher who made mean comments about an essay she wrote. This teacher told her she would never be good at writing. This traumatised her and she has hated writing ever since. Many other students told me about similar experiences or simply finding writing tasks very boring.

I get that. If you are doing boring writing tasks over and over for assignments or to prepare for a test, you are bound to be bored. Very few people like doing that. The key to improve your writing skills is in changing that mindset and looking for something more interesting to write about. First of all, we need to get rid of the assumption that to improve your writing for the IELTS you need to do writing tasks. You do not! Repeat with me:

I DO NOT NEED TO DO LOADS OF IELTS TASKS TO IMPROVE MY IELTS SCORE.

Good. Now that we got that out of the way, think about things you would enjoy writing about. That’s where you should start. Once you start writing and find pleasure in it, it will become easier and easier. Eventually those boring IELTS writing tasks will become a lot less difficult.

One thing that you can do to make writing more interesting and fun, is to use writing prompts to get your creativity flowing. The book 642 Things to Write About by The San Francisco Writers’ Grotto (2011) has lots of fun prompts. I selected a few for you to try:

Describe yourself in the third person – your physical appearance and personality – as though you were a character in a book.
Write a short story that is set in Argentina in 1932, in which a teacup plays a crucial role.
Write a recipe for disaster.
Your friend calls to say she saw you in the back of a police car yesterday. What happened?
The thoughts of the first man to eat an oyster.
Pick a person, then ask yourself: what is the hardest choice this person has ever had to make?

I picked the first prompt to write an example for you. Let me know if you like it. 😀

Describe yourself in the third person – your physical appearance and personality – as though you were a character in a book.

The first thing people noticed about her was how thin she was. The illusion was aided by her bony wrists and fingers, always hanging in front of her like she did not know where to store them. Her resting pose was that of a praying mantis, with her arms and long hands zigzagging ahead of her torso. Her shoulders looked constantly tense, as if frozen half-way through a shrug. Years of reading and typing in the very position physical therapists advise against accentuated a mild kyphosis that was only visible when she was seen from the side. There is no point in describing her hair as its colour and style changed almost as often as her comfortable clothes, always too warm for the weather. Her oversized hipster glasses disguised the size of her curved nose and its deviated septum.

Many people have been described as having a type A personality, but Susan had enough anxiety, ambition, and assiduity to have a triple A personality. She needed a clean environment to work, despite having no time to clean it, which made her very anxious. In fact, she hardly had time for anything, but that could not stop her. She vigorously planned her day, her week, her month, multitasking at every opportunity. Working while eating was a common occurrence, as well as doing her nails while on a video call. She had a meal plan, a cleaning plan, an exercise plan, not to mention the timetables. She had plans and timetables for so many things, she had to make a plan for updating each plan.