Writing 1 — a formal letter and an essay

A full General Training Writing paper: sixty minutes, two tasks, printed on paper and answered by hand.

Task 1 gives you a situation — you have been in a rented flat for three months, the heating stopped a month ago, and two telephone messages to the letting agency have gone unanswered — and three bullet points to cover: what the problem is and how long it has lasted, what effect it is having, and what you want done and by when. The task names the opening, "Dear Sir or Madam", which fixes the register for everything that follows, including the sign-off. This is the most formal of the three letter types the paper can set, and it is the one candidates most often get half right: a letter that opens formally and closes "Yours sincerely" has made a small mistake that tells an examiner a great deal.

Task 2 is a discuss-both-views essay on whether employers should be required to give workers paid days each year for learning that has nothing to do with their job. It is a genuine two-sided question, which is the point: an answer that only argues the side it agrees with cannot meet the task however well it is written. It is also worth twice as much as Task 1, and the ruled lines are not enough for it — continue on the back and photograph that page too.

You print the sheet, write on it, photograph the pages and upload them. What comes back is a check of each task against the four criteria an examiner uses — task achievement or response, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy — with length checked first, because being under the minimum is the easiest penalty on the whole paper to avoid.

The check does not issue a band score. A band is a judgement a trained examiner makes against descriptors held to a common standard, and inventing one before the test would tell you less than the thing that is actually useful: a list of what your answer did not do. For the letter that means the bullet you covered in a clause rather than a paragraph, the contraction that slipped into a formal register, the request with no date in it. Read it, then write the same task again — the second attempt on the same prompt is worth more than a first attempt on a new one.

The task and the situation are written by Zestly. No IELTS material is reproduced, and the agency, the flat and the dates are invented.

• Cover all three bullet points of a Task 1 letter properly, rather than developing two and mentioning the third
• Hold one formal register from the greeting to the sign-off, and match "Dear Sir or Madam" with "Yours faithfully"
• State a complaint as facts and a request with a date, instead of as an expression of annoyance
• Use the fixed language of a formal letter — I am writing to, I would be grateful if, on two occasions, as a matter of urgency
• Answer both sides of a discuss-both-views essay while keeping your own position visible throughout
• Budget sixty minutes between a task worth one share and a task worth two
• Find out what 150 and 250 words look like in your own handwriting, before the day

Writing Task 1 — 20 minutes, at least 150 words. You moved into a rented flat three months ago. The heating has not worked since the middle of last month, and the letting agency has not replied to two telephone messages. Write a letter to the manager of the letting agency. In your letter: explain what the problem is and how long it has gone on; describe the effect it is having on you; say what you want the agency to do, and by when. Begin your letter "Dear Sir or Madam,".