Your ability to communicate about typical everyday concerns is assessed by the IELTS General Writing Task 1.
You have 20 minutes to answer a question by composing a letter to either an individual person, a business, or a company.
You are expected to write at least 150 words with an addition of 10% maximum, hence ranging 150 words to 165 words.
Your response is scored separately from the Task 2 essay and is tested on four different criteria.
The content provided below contains study guides, expressions, test-taking tactics, example questions, sample letters, and references.
Utilize it frequently to monitor your advancement and you may get more bands than your desired band scores!
Tips for GT Task 1 Letter:
- Read the Question Statement Carefully: It is extremely important to read the question and prompts given to you very carefully.
This is because in task 1 you are clearly instructed about what you are supposed to write. And in order to score more it is necessary that you answer accordingly and skip nothing.
- Be Clear About the Tone of the Letter: Once you have read the question, you would certainly know who the letter is addressed to.
Here comes the role of the tone in writing your answer. The letter is basically divided into 3 parts:
- Formal: Written to someone in authority, a person you are not acquainted with.
- Semi-formal: Written to someone who you are acquainted with, but do not know much about personally.
- Informal: Written to friends, family and relatives.
Based on whom the letter is for, the tone of the letter is set and writing accordingly affects the scores a lot!
- Use a Proper Format for Writing a Letter: Although some don’t consider it to be of any importance, the format of your letter makes a lot of difference.
Every letter should have a clear starting and ending and paragraphs written in such a way that all prompts are covered and written in evident progression.
- Use a formal sentence and paragraph to start a formal or semi-formal letter.
Get to the point and explain your motivation for writing.
Since you don’t know the person you’re writing to, resist the urge to be cordial. - Begin an informal letter with a brief, welcoming paragraph.
Before stating the purpose of your letter, first acknowledge your friendship.
The opening sentence could be nothing more than a cordial small conversation irrelevant to the topic of your work, just like it is in real-life settings.
- Improve your Knowledge of Lexical Resource: We employ a number of standardized idioms and phrases while writing letters in English.
These not only save the reader time and effort, but also help them get our message.
To these common phrases, you can add the specific information you want to convey.
Apart from these, there are a lot of general things that can help you score 7+ in Writing Task 1 like avoiding spelling mistakes, writing in a clear and legible handwriting, and completing the task on time.
To Check How the Writing Task 1 GT Letter is Marked, Click Here!
Now let’s check a Sample Letter GT Task 1 with Answer:
You should spend about 20 minutes on this task. Write a letter to the manager of the HR department of a company requesting information about the interview that you attended but still waiting for results. In your letter,
Write at least 150 words. You do NOT need to write any addresses. Begin your letter as follows: Dear Sir or Madam, |
SAMPLE ANSWER:
Dear Sir,
I am writing this letter to seek information about the result of my interview conducted for the post of Junior Programmer last week.
I applied for the position with my expertise being in Java and my intuition is that the interview went quite well because I was able to quickly complete the technical round of the interview with a score of 100%. Apart from this, the person conducting my interview informed me that I was the most deserving candidate on that day as compared to others.
I am eagerly awaiting the result of the interview because I have received another high-paying job offer from a competing firm a day after the interview and have to respond to it by the end of this week. However, since I find your company to be more professional, I would like to be a part of it. Nonetheless, if you deem me unsuitable for the post, I shall accept the other offer.
Kindly let me know the result of the interview as it is extremely important for my career.
Yours faithfully,
Pooja Khanna
