How I Kept Stalling (and Finally Improved) with IELTS Writing
About seven years ago, when I was racing to clear the IELTS requirement to graduate, Writing was the skill that hurt the most—even more than Speaking.
It wasn’t a vocabulary or grammar problem. The wall was ideas. I followed every self-study blog and Facebook group, and the top advice was “write as much as possible” and “get as many essays corrected as you can.” I even had an amazing teacher who marked anything I sent her. Mechanically, I mastered the “standard structures,” yet the moment a new topic appeared, my mind went blank.
My teacher said it was because I lacked real-world experience and hadn’t lived enough, which sounded fair. But the comment didn’t get me closer to the score I needed (and the bar at my university was high).
Only when I studied CELTA later did the real issue click: the problem wasn’t that I hadn’t written enough—it was that I hadn’t read or listened enough. Writing is a productive skill; it is language output. Without solid input, there is nothing to produce.
Imagine a prompt about the fashion industry—“Should society pour significant money into fashion and the arts?” If you’ve never thought about it, never read or watched anything on the topic, you simply sit there. No ideas, no angles. You can’t even draft a sentence, let alone a 250-word discussion.
The fix is to load up on listening and reading around a theme before you write. Then you recycle those ideas, phrases, and structures in your own response. When the input and output align, everything flows; the pressure drops, and practice feels natural again.
Most people rely on the Cambridge IELTS series. It’s fantastic because you get listening, reading, and writing samples from real exams. The only drawback is that the four sections inside a test are not about the same topic, so balancing input/output requires extra effort.
Bottom line: no input, no output. Feed the mind first, then writing becomes doable.