Speaking Part 2: how to use your 1-minute prep time

Part 2 hands you a cue card, a pencil, a piece of paper, and exactly one minute to prepare before speaking for one to two minutes without interruption. Sixty seconds feels short the first time you face it, and the instinctive response for many candidates is to try to write as much as possible in that time — ideally, in their mind, something close to a full script they can then read from or closely recall. This instinct is understandable but works against you in every practical way. You will not finish writing full sentences in sixty seconds for a genuinely developed two-minute answer, so you'll end up either speaking from an incomplete script and improvising the rest anyway, or reading from notes in a way that noticeably flattens your intonation and fluency compared to speaking from an internalised structure. The one minute is enough time to plan a structure — not enough to plan a script — and treating it that way from the start changes how you use it.

The cue card gives you a main topic sentence and three or four bullet points you're expected to address (for example: describe a book you enjoyed — what it was, when you read it, what it was about, and explain why you enjoyed it). The single most useful thing to write during prep time is one keyword per bullet point, in the order you intend to cover them, not full sentences. A keyword like "university library, exam week" for a "when you read it" bullet point is enough to reliably trigger a full, natural sentence when you actually speak, without costing the time or fluency penalty of trying to draft and then read that sentence from paper.

Beyond the bare keyword for each bullet point, add one further expandable detail you can develop into on the spot — a specific memory, a sensory detail, a reason, a small anecdote. This single addition is what separates a thin Band 5 answer from a well-developed Band 7 answer on the exact same topic, and it has almost nothing to do with vocabulary complexity. Two candidates describing the same book can use very similar vocabulary; the one who adds "the ending completely surprised me, actually — I remember re-reading the last chapter twice because I couldn't quite believe how it resolved" is giving the examiner concrete, developed content to score, while the one who lists facts about the book in sequence is not, regardless of how accurate either candidate's grammar is.

A useful way to organise the one minute itself, rather than just filling it randomly, is to spend the first thirty to forty seconds on the bullet points in order, jotting the keyword-plus-detail pairs described above, and to deliberately reserve the final ten to fifteen seconds specifically for planning your ending rather than polishing your opening. This is a genuinely underused technique: a surprising number of candidates plan their first thirty seconds carefully, run out of prepared material with thirty or more seconds still remaining on the clock, and visibly trail off or repeat themselves while searching for something more to say. Having one closing thought already decided — how you feel about it now, what changed as a result, why it mattered to you, whether you'd recommend it — gives you a reliable place to land the answer confidently rather than fizzling out.