How many IELTS essays should I write per week?

Three timed Task 2 essays, one Task 1 and one rewrite is plenty for most candidates. Writing more without acting on feedback repeats the same pattern. The rewrite, where you fix one criterion and test it on a fresh prompt, is where the band actually moves.

Should I write Task 1 or Task 2 first?

Task 2 first if you tend to overrun, because it is worth roughly twice as much and losing time on it is the most expensive mistake in the section. If your timing is reliable, the order does not matter as long as Task 1 stays within 20 minutes.

How long should my IELTS essays be?

Task 1 around 170 to 190 words against a 150 minimum, and Task 2 around 270 to 300 against a 250 minimum. Being comfortably over protects you from an under-length penalty; going far over eats proofreading time and is not rewarded.

Why is my IELTS Writing stuck at 6.5?

Almost always one criterion, most often Task Response. Under-developed ideas, an unclear position or not answering the full question caps the whole band regardless of how good your English is. Get a band per criterion, find the lowest, and fix only that.

Writing 9 min read· August 2026

IELTS Writing practice online: a routine that actually raises the band

Writing more essays is not the answer. The weekly routine that fixes one criterion at a time, plus the timing discipline that protects your Task 2 band.

Writing is the skill where effort and improvement correlate worst. Candidates write thirty essays and score exactly what they scored on the first one, because they repeated the same pattern thirty times and nobody named it.

The routine below fixes that. It is less writing than most people do, and it works better.

The timing rules that come first

60 minutes total for both tasks. Task 1 gets 20 minutes, Task 2 gets 40. Task 2 is worth roughly twice as much, so an overrun on Task 1 is the most expensive mistake in the section.
Write Task 2 first if you tend to overrun. It protects the task that carries the marks. Plenty of high scorers do this deliberately.
Spend the first 5 minutes of Task 2 planning: your position, two body-paragraph ideas, one example each. Five minutes of planning saves ten minutes of drifting.
Leave 3 minutes at the end for proofreading. Articles, plurals, subject-verb agreement and tense slips are the cheapest marks available and there is no spell-checker in the exam.

The weekly routine

Three timed Task 2 essays a week, one timed Task 1, and one rewrite. Not more. The rewrite is the part that does the work and the part everyone skips.

Session structure: write under strict time, submit for scoring, read your band per criterion before reading any commentary, note the lowest one. Then open the official band descriptor for that criterion at your band and the band above, and read both. The difference between those two paragraphs is your instruction.

Then rewrite only the part of the essay that closes that gap, and write your next essay attacking the same weakness. Check whether the criterion moved. If it did, move to the next lowest. If it did not, you have not understood the gap yet, so read the descriptors again.

What each low criterion actually means

Task Response lowest: you did not answer the whole question, your position is unclear or inconsistent, or your ideas are listed rather than developed. Fix: point, explain, example, link back. Two developed ideas beat five mentioned ones.
Coherence and Cohesion lowest: paragraphing or linking. Fix: one clear idea per paragraph with a topic sentence, and drop the mechanical "Firstly, Secondly, Moreover" chain, which signals weak cohesion rather than strong.
Lexical Resource lowest: repetition or imprecision, usually of the topic's own keywords. Fix: paraphrase deliberately, and learn collocations rather than isolated synonyms. A rare word used wrongly scores worse than a common word used well.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy lowest: not enough range, or not enough control. Fix: force complex structures in deliberately (conditionals, relative clauses, passives) and proofread for your own recurring errors. Error-free simple sentences cap around Band 6.

Keep an error log

One page. Every recurring mistake, written once, in your own words: "I drop articles before abstract nouns." "I use 'moreover' three times per essay." "My conclusions repeat my introduction word for word."

Read it for two minutes before every writing session. This is the highest-value two minutes in a Writing preparation, because errors that stay in a log get fixed and errors that stay in your head get repeated.

Practise the prompts you avoid

Everyone has a type they dodge. For Task 2 it is usually two-part questions or the discuss-both-views essay. For Academic Task 1 it is processes and maps; for General Training it is informal letters.

Deliberately write the ones you avoid. The comfortable prompt tells you nothing you did not know, and on test day you do not get to choose.

Write in the exam's conditions

Type it. The exam is computer-delivered in most markets, so handwriting practice trains the wrong motor skill.
No spell-checker, no grammar checker, no dictionary, no thesaurus. None of those exist in the exam.
Use the word count only to confirm you are over the minimum, not to pad. Over-length essays are not rewarded and cost you proofreading time.
Timer visible and enforced. An untimed essay measures what you can write, not what you can write in 40 minutes, and only one of those is on the mark sheet.

Get every essay scored by criterion

On IELTSVega you can write real Academic and General Training Task 1 and Task 2 prompts in a typed editor with a live word count and no spell-checker, then get an instant AI band for Task Response, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource and Grammatical Range and Accuracy separately, with specific feedback on what is capping the lowest one. That per-criterion split is what makes the rewrite routine above possible.