Email and discussion 1 — professors and the social sciences

Eight writing tasks of the two kinds the revised TOEFL iBT® writing section includes alongside Build a Sentence: four Write an Email tasks and four Write for an Academic Discussion tasks. The published specification sets both at the CEFR range from B1 to C2, and each is worth up to five points.

The emails are all written to faculty: a professor, after a missed in-class quiz; an academic advisor, about adding a minor; a professor you took a course with, asking for a letter of recommendation; and a teaching assistant, about a comment on a lab report you do not understand. Each gives you a situation and three things to do. Most failures here are failures of task, not of English: an email that apologizes at length but never actually asks for the make-up quiz, or that asks for a recommendation letter as if it were owed, has not done its job. The model answers show the request made plainly, in the register a professor expects — a title and family name, "Would it be possible…", a full-name sign-off.

The discussion posts answer a professor's question after two students have already replied: whether personal finance should be a graduation requirement, whether high schools should start later, whether working from home strengthens or weakens neighborhoods, and whether cities should tax sugary drinks. The marks go to a clear position in the first sentence or two, a reason that is explained and illustrated rather than asserted, and a contribution of your own. Summarizing both students politely and never landing is the most common way a fluent writer loses points.

How it works. The eight tasks print as a sheet you answer by hand, then photograph and upload. The check comes back task by task: for an email, whether each of the three required points was actually done, whether the register suited the reader, and its organization; for a discussion post, whether you took a position, supported it with something specific, added something the two students had not said, and how much range and accuracy your grammar and vocabulary showed. You get a list of what each answer did and did not do, not a score. The flashcards drill the phrases these tasks keep needing.

How this differs from test day. On the test, the two tasks are typed, and they share a 23-minute writing section with ten Build a Sentence items — the specification times only the section as a whole. The 7 and 10 minutes printed on each task, and the 100-word target, are our pacing suggestions, not published rules. If your test is close, also do at least one email and one discussion post typed and timed.

Every situation, discussion and model answer here is written by Zestly. No official test material is reproduced, and facts about the test format are paraphrased from the published specification rather than copied from it.

TOEFL iBT® is a registered trademark of ETS. This product is not endorsed or approved by ETS.

• Open an email to a professor by saying who you are and why you are writing
• Make a request that is clearly a request, in a register suited to faculty
• Cover all three points an email task sets, each with a concrete detail
• Take a position in the first lines of a discussion post and hold it
• Add a reason or example that neither student in the discussion has given
• Answer a classmate's objection instead of ignoring it

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the ETS description of the Write an Email and Write for an Academic Discussion tasks in the TOEFL iBT test revised in January 2026.