Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about General Training Writing: Writing 1 — a formal letter and an essay, Writing 2 — a letter to a neighbour and an essay.
← IELTS Academic & General Training
A letter and an essay, printed, answered by hand, photographed and checked task by task against the criteria an examiner uses.
Two tasks in 60 minutes, and they are not worth the same.
Task 2 counts for twice as much as Task 1. The most expensive mistake in the whole paper is polishing a letter for half an hour and then writing 180 rushed words on the thing worth double.
Notes and bullet points score nothing — both tasks must be continuous prose.
Everything that follows in Task 1 depends on this: the bullets are not suggestions, they are the mark scheme. All three must be covered, and covered properly. A letter that deals with two of them at length and mentions the third in a clause cannot reach the top of task achievement, however good the English is.
They are also unequal in effort, and the ordering on the page is not always the order that reads best in a letter. Decide in the first minute which bullet is the reason you are writing, which is the detail, and which is what you want to happen next — that is usually three paragraphs, and usually the right shape.
Who the letter is to decides everything about how it sounds, and the task always tells you.
Mixing registers is the most common fault on this task and the easiest to avoid: pick the relationship before you write the first line, and let it decide the greeting, the contractions and the sign-off together. Writing Dear Sir or Madam and then Yours sincerely is a small error that tells an examiner exactly how much letter-writing you have done.
Four criteria, equally weighted:
The check you get back here is built on those four, with one more in front of them: length. Under the minimum is a penalty on the real paper, and it is the easiest of all five to avoid.
The check names what is missing rather than issuing a band score. A band is a judgement a trained examiner makes against descriptors held to a common standard; what is genuinely useful before the test is a list of what your answer did not do, and that is what comes back.
You print the paper, write on it, photograph the pages and upload them. On a paper-based test that is exactly the task. On the computer-delivered test you will type on the day — the composition is identical, and writing longhand is still the fair way to find out what 20 and 40 minutes actually feel like, and how much of a page 250 words is in your own handwriting.
Task 2 needs more room than the ruled lines allow. Continue on the back of the sheet or on one plain sheet and photograph that too — the upload accepts one page more than the paper has.
Every task here is written by Zestly. No IELTS material is reproduced.
