Five-minute planning: position, two ideas, development
9 min
The single biggest difference between a Band 5 essay and a Band 7 essay is usually decided before the writer types a sentence. Spend five minutes on three steps. Minute 1: decide your position and commit to it — for opinion prompts, pick a side you can actually defend, not the "correct" or safest-sounding one; for discussion prompts, decide how you will balance both views and where you personally land. Minutes 2–3: generate exactly two main ideas that support your position, not three or four. Two ideas you can develop deeply beat four ideas you can only mention — examiners reward development, not quantity. Minutes 4–5: for each idea, jot one line of development — a reason, a specific example, or a consequence — so that when you reach the paragraph, you are elaborating a plan, not inventing content under time pressure.
Worked example
Prompt: "Some people think that governments should invest more in public transport rather than roads. To what extent do you agree or disagree?" Five-minute plan: Position — mostly agree. Idea 1 — public transport investment reduces congestion at scale (reason: one bus replaces dozens of cars; example: cities that expanded metro lines saw measurable drops in peak-hour traffic). Idea 2 — road expansion tends to induce more driving rather than solve congestion (reason: wider roads lower the cost of driving, so more people choose to drive; consequence: congestion returns within a few years). Concession — acknowledge that some road spending remains necessary for freight and rural areas, then restate that the overall balance should shift.
Notice what the plan is not: it is not sentences. It is a skeleton — a position, two ideas each with a reason plus either an example or a consequence, and a planned concession. A writer working from this skeleton never has to stop and think "what do I say next?" mid-essay, because every paragraph's job was decided in minute one through five. The concession line is what pushes a plan from Band 6 territory toward Band 7+: it shows the writer can handle nuance instead of arguing only one flat, unqualified position.
One more discipline worth building: before you commit to an idea, silently test it with "why" and "so what". If you cannot answer "why is that true" with a real reason, or "so what" with a real consequence, the idea is too thin to carry a full paragraph and you should swap it for one you can actually develop. This test, run during planning rather than while writing, is what prevents the common failure mode of a paragraph that restates the topic sentence three different ways because there was nothing else to say.