Email and discussion 3 — student life and the humanities

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, set in the specification at the CEFR range from B1 to C2 and worth up to five points each.

The emails cover four jobs an email often has to do on campus, each with a different tone: asking the student activities office for a room and for funding for a club screening; applying for a peer tutor position at the Writing Center; telling a professor that a group member has stopped contributing, fairly and without labels; and apologizing to a career counselor for a missed appointment, then asking to reschedule. The apology is the one candidates most often overdo — the model answer takes responsibility in one sentence and moves on to the request.

The discussion posts take four questions from business and the humanities: whether a four-day work week suits most companies, how far consumers should trust online reviews, whether governments should fund the arts, and whether local history deserves more room in the curriculum. The model posts show a qualified position that is still a position ("a good idea, but only if…"), a view different from both students', and a classmate's objection answered with a comparison rather than waved away.

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.

• Introduce yourself by your role and make two separate requests to a campus office
• Open a job application email and link your experience to the position
• Report a problem with another student fairly, with facts instead of labels
• Apologize briefly, take responsibility, and move on to the request
• Qualify a position without hedging it away
• Answer a classmate's objection with a comparison or a counter-example

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.