How to Plan & Write ielts opinion Essays

Main Body Paragraph 1
The topic sentence summarises the main idea of the paragraph. That’s all it needs to do so it doesn’t have to be complicated.
It plays an important role in ensuring that your ideas flow logically from one to another. It does this by acting as a signpost for what is to come next, that is, what the paragraph will be about.
If you maintain a clear development of ideas throughout your essay, you will get high marks for task achievement and cohesion and coherence.
We’ll now take the idea for our first main body paragraph and create our topic sentence.


Main idea 1 – concerns about the risk of stress-related ill-health
Topic sentence: 
Employees earning a large income are generally under significant mental and emotional pressure to perform well and achieve targets.

Next, we must write an explanation sentence. This explains to the examiner what we mean. It expands on our first idea.

Explanation sentence: 
This causes many individuals to suffer high levels of stress which can result in both mental and physical health problems.

Finally, we add an example to support our main point. I thought of this in the planning stage so I have it ready to use.

If you can’t think of a real example, it’s fine to make one up, as long as it’s believable. The examiner isn’t going to check your facts.
Example sentence:
This happened to my uncle. He used to boast about his huge salary but the boss kept increasing his sales targets and in the end, the stress became too great and he had a nervous breakdown. Now he regrets being driven by the money.

That’s the 3 parts of our first main body paragraph complete. Here’s the finished paragraph.

We now follow the same process for our second main body paragraph.

Main Body Paragraph 2