Planning Your Response (Including Time Management)

In this lecture we’re going to look at what to do before we even start writing our response which is writing an effective and efficient plan for Task 1. Now it’s important to ask the question why plan. Particularly because in Task One the time limit is so short just 20 minutes. Some people argue that there is no point in wasting time on a plan. However a good plan not only organizes your thoughts and arranges the data coherently. Very important for your coherence and cohesion but also saves you time. What’s more a plan does not need to take very long at all particularly in task one. You can write a plan for task one in just a minute or two. Explain how we can save so much time in a moment. So this lecture will focus on how to plan effectively and efficiently saving you time in the exam and allowing you to structure your response in a logical format. Let’s have a look at a model here. Now here we can see a graph of the trend looking at the number of participating students of different sports at a school in different years. Now what will come up on the right hand screen here is the plan. Now you might be looking at that and thinking what on earth is that. And I don’t blame you. It looks like algebra or something it looks like some weird form of math. Maybe something like that but there is a reason that we are doing it this way. I’ll explain why all of these things mean on the next slide. Basically the key point here is that to save time you do not need to write in full words let alone full sentences and tasks too of course you need to organize your ideas and so complete spelling helps. And often we need to write in complete spelling so that we make sense of our ideas but in task one it’s much easier to do this as the ideas are already in front of you in the form of data. So you really only need to use letters numbers and symbols which helps to remind you of that data. So this is basically a much more detailed version of the plan on the previous dream on the previous slide. So the overview that was basically that running figures go up football figures stay consistently high basketball figures are high at first and then they fall. And swimming figures rise at first and then drop. Notice the letters here are goes up f stays high goes down B is high then goes down and goes up and then goes down with P3. Basically And this we’re looking at what happened to running and what happened to swimming running our and swimming S was Paragraph four. What happened to football and what happened to basketball football. F and basketball. B so you can see this here. Hopefully it makes a bit more sense now. Running goes up football stays consistently high. Basketball starts high then goes down. Swimming goes up and then goes down in paragraph 3. We look at running and swimming in paragraph 4 we look at football and basketball. You might be asking yourself why is the introduction here. We have the plan for the overview and the detail paragraphs. Where is the intro. Well don’t worry about planning the introduction. The introduction is the easiest paragraph to write. There are a couple of difficult exceptions but on the whole we can usually use a template or a formula. So planning the introduction is unnecessary and will therefore only waste time. So about those templates and formulas will come to those in a later lecture in Section 4 which is just titled introductions so let’s ask the question what is involved exactly an effective task one plan. We’ve got the efficiency down. What about turning it into an effective plan. What’s the plan. Well here is the formula for an effective and efficient plan. And as mentioned make sure you don’t plan the introduction to start with the overview in the overview. This is where you need to write about main trends differences or stages. Don’t worry about that too much right now because we’re going to talk about identifying trends in a later lecture. But just recognize that this is where that should be. In Paragraph 3 we should try to focus on one set of grouped data. Trying to look for similar lines similar bars in a bar chart. So maybe we can group the data in a more original way like ball sports and then solo sports or something like that. And it’s the same for paragraph four. You want to look at the rest of the data in a logical way trying to split the paragraphs about 50 50 in length although it’s not always possible. Now just like the overview we will be using a lecture in Section 4 to look in more detail how to write a detailed paragraph so don’t worry about this too much. We are going to cover it in more detail later on. And it is possible to write up fifth paragraph when there are too many categories to cover but do consider yourself whether this is really necessary. Is it possible for you to combine the information into two paragraphs P3 and P4. If you write P 5 you won’t lose any marks but you will lose time and that could lose you some marks on task achievement if you don’t finish in time. And that’s relevant for our next slide. Looking at time management now planning as I mentioned at the beginning should take no longer than a couple of minutes any longer than a couple of minutes and you really are damaging your chances of finishing in time but the rest of the response should be split as follows. The introduction should be written within two or three minutes no longer than that doesn’t need to be any longer than that. The overview should be just three to five minutes. If you’ve got a task with not much information in it not much data is probably going to be more like three minutes. That’s often the way with process tasks a map task and some some graph tasks as well otherwise go for five minutes and then paragraph three or four. You’ve got five minutes each to make 10 minutes on the detail paragraphs all together. Now use any time left over to check your work and ideally they should there should be somewhere between one and three minutes there. And this can be the difference between a band six and a band seven in your grammatical range and accuracy score. You might be able to use that time to fix an article mistake or a preposition mistake or a tense mistake or a verb conjugation mistake that you hadn’t noticed earlier. So I do intend to leave yourself at least a couple of minutes at the end to check your work.