Writing 5 — a letter of suggestion and an advantages-disadvantages essay

A fifth full General Training Writing paper: a letter of suggestion and an essay that has to weigh one side against the other.

Task 1 is a semi-formal letter to your own manager, Ms Helen Carter, who has asked everyone in the department to suggest one change that would make the workplace better. The bullets are the change, how it would help both the staff and the organisation, and an offer to help put it into practice. The register sits between the neighbour letter of Writing 2 and the formal letters: a title and surname, a polite and constructive tone, a few natural contractions, and "Kind regards" at the end. The two traps are specific to a suggestion. The first is complaining about the office instead of proposing a change. The second is an offer of help that says nothing — "I am happy to help" does not cover the bullet, while offering to draw up a booking system and collect prices does.

Task 2 asks whether the advantages of renting everyday items — tools, clothes, furniture — outweigh the disadvantages. The question is not "list the advantages and disadvantages". It asks which side weighs more, so the essay needs a clear verdict, stated early, supported by both sides and explained in the conclusion.

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 language of making a suggestion and offering help at a semi-formal register, the correct patterns after "suggest", and the phrases that weigh advantages against disadvantages and reach a verdict.

The manager, the workplace 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 semi-formal letter to a manager: title and surname, a polite constructive tone, "Kind regards" at the end
• Make a suggestion with correct patterns — suggest that we open, propose turning — and never "suggest you to"
• Show the benefit of a proposal for two different groups, as the bullet asks
• Make an offer of help concrete enough to count as covering the bullet
• Reach a clear verdict in an advantages-outweigh-disadvantages essay instead of stopping at two lists
• Signpost the turn from one side to the other and explain the verdict in the conclusion

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).