Writing 3 — a letter to a friend and an opinion essay

A third full General Training Writing paper, and the first in this set with a personal letter — the register the paper can set that the other two leave out.

Task 1 gives you an old friend, Sam, who moved abroad some years ago and is coming to your town for four days next month. The three bullets are why you are pleased, an invitation to stay with the arrangements explained, and a suggestion for something to do together. Personal does not mean careless. The letter opens with a first name, uses contractions and sounds warm and direct, and it closes to match — "Love" or "Best wishes", never "Yours faithfully". What it still needs is everything a formal letter needs: all three bullets covered properly, one paragraph each, and the arrangements made concrete. "You can stay with us" is a promise; where the friend will sleep, how they get from the station and what time suits you is an arrangement.

Task 2 is an agree-or-disagree question on closing city centres to private cars at weekends. "To what extent" asks for a position, stated early and held to the end. Partial agreement is a perfectly good answer, provided the essay says exactly where the line falls — and an essay that lays out both sides and never decides has not answered the question at all.

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 task response, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, and grammatical range and accuracy — with length checked first, because being under the minimum is the easiest penalty on the paper to avoid. The check names what your answer did not do rather than issuing a band score: a band is a judgement a trained examiner makes against descriptors held to a common standard, and before the test a list of what is missing is more use to you than a number. Task 2 needs more room than the ruled lines give it; continue on the back or on one extra sheet and photograph that page too.

On the paper-based test this is exactly how you will work. On the computer-delivered test you will type, but the tasks are the same, and writing by hand against the clock is still the honest way to find out what 20 and 40 minutes feel like.

A deck of flashcards goes with the paper: the phrases of a personal letter set against their formal equivalents, and the phrases that state and defend a position in an opinion essay.

The friend, the town and the situation are invented by Zestly, and no IELTS material is reproduced. Each task comes with a model answer written for this paper to show one way of meeting it, not the only one.

• Write a personal letter that sounds warm and natural — first name, contractions, a matching closing — without sliding into text-message style
• Turn an invitation into real arrangements: where the guest will stay, how they will get there, and when
• Cover all three bullets of a Task 1 letter in three developed paragraphs, whatever the register
• State how far you agree in an opinion essay and hold that position from the introduction to the conclusion
• Answer an objection without abandoning your own position
• Budget sixty minutes between a task worth one share and a task worth two

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the ielts.org description of the General Training Writing test (Task 1 letter, Task 2 essay, four assessment criteria).