Does reusing a story sound memorised to the examiner?

Only if the language is fixed rather than the facts. A reused story sounds rehearsed when the opening sentence, the sequence words and the closing judgement arrive in the same form every time. It sounds spontaneous when the entry point moves, the adjectives change and the last sentence answers the card actually in front of you. The public descriptors treat memorised utterances as a low-band feature, not a rule about content, so the target is flexible wording over stable events.

Record one version and run two checks before deciding the story is safe to reuse. The deletion test: remove every adjective from your transcript; if the story still stands, the detail was doing the work and the adjectives were decoration. The follow-up test: ask a practice partner to interrupt with a detail that is not on the card, for example the words the person on the phone used or the weather on the way to the airport. A rehearsed script collapses there because it has no unused detail, while a remembered event answers in one sentence and returns to the main line. Keep three spare details per story for this reason, and never rehearse the sentences that deliver them.

IELTS Speaking Part 2: Adapting One Story to Three Different Cue Cards →