The structure is fixed. You get a card with a topic and three or four bullet points, a pencil and paper, and one minute to prepare. Then you talk for one to two minutes while the examiner says nothing. Then two or three follow-up questions, and on into Part 3.
Everything about that format is designed to expose whether your English holds up without support.
Take the whole minute
Finishing preparation early earns nothing. There is no credit for looking ready, and the examiner will not start early because you stopped writing.
What the minute is for is deciding the shape of the answer, and that is a different job from thinking of content. Content arrives on its own once you start talking. Shape does not, and an answer with no shape is where the pauses come from at the ninety-second mark.
Write notes, not sentences
The most common self-inflicted wound in Part 2 is writing out sentences and then attempting to read them. It fails twice: reading aloud sounds nothing like speaking, and glancing down breaks your run every few words.
Four short notes, one per bullet, is the working format. Two or three words each. Their job is to stop you losing your place, not to supply the language.
If a specific word matters to your answer - a job title, the name of a place, a piece of vocabulary you want to use - write that word down. That is exactly what notes are good for.
Answer the bullets in order, then leave them
The bullets are a scaffold and following them guarantees you never run dry in the first ninety seconds. But they are not a contract. Nothing requires equal time on each, and the last bullet is almost always the open one - "and explain why" - which is where the interesting language lives.
A workable division: about twenty seconds each on the first two or three bullets, then the rest on the last. That puts your best material in the part of the answer the examiner is still listening closely to.
Aim to be stopped
This is the single most useful piece of Part 2 advice, and it is counter-intuitive.
Being cut off at two minutes costs you nothing at all. The examiner will interrupt and move on, and that is a normal, expected end to the turn. Running out at seventy seconds and standing in silence costs you visibly - it is a fluency failure, and it is also the moment most candidates panic and produce their worst thirty seconds of the exam.
So plan to overrun. Have a fourth thing to say that you will probably never reach.
The mistakes that show up in a transcript
Record a long turn and look at where the pauses cluster, and you will usually find one of three patterns.
Front-loaded collapse. A strong opening thirty seconds using prepared material, then a rapid decline once the script runs out. The fix is fewer memorised openings and more preparation on the last bullet.
Bullet-boundary pauses. Fluent within each bullet, a two-second gap between them. That is the notes doing too much work - you are stopping to read. The fix is transitions rehearsed as habit, so the next bullet starts before you have finished thinking about it.
The tail-off. Everything fine until around ninety seconds, then increasing hesitation as material runs out. That is the "aim to be stopped" problem, and it is a preparation issue rather than a language one.
Part 3 is not more of the same
The follow-up questions after the long turn move from your own experience to abstraction: not what you did, but what people in general do, whether it has changed, and what might happen next.
This shift is where a lot of otherwise strong candidates drop half a band, because the language of speculation and generalisation is different from the language of narrative. Practising Part 2 without the Part 3 discussion that belongs to that card means practising the easier half.
The habit worth building: every time you do a long turn, do the follow-ups attached to it. They are where the complex grammar the descriptors want actually becomes necessary rather than optional.