Five great tips for IELTS general writing task 1

1. Make sure your purpose is really clear

The first of our 5 tips for IELTS general writing task 1 is that you need to make sure the purpose for your letter is really clear. The first sentence in the body of your letter should tell the reader exactly why you are writing to them. You can restate this in different words at the end of the letter and expand it slightly. Make sure that the paragraphs in your body of the letter cover the bullet points in the task and don’t go off-topic. If you do go off topic, it can affect your task achievement score because the purpose becomes unclear and you include irrelevant detail

2. Pick your writing style carefully

You need to be really careful with your writing style. It should be appropriate for the situation and shouldn’t change. Think about who you’re writing the letter to and why you’re writing it. If it’s to a friend, the writing style will probably be quite informal and friendly. Sending a letter of thanks or giving feedback to a company will probably be a bit more formal. It may also be quite positive if you were happy with the service you received.

One the other hand, letters may also be more formal. Complaints tend to use very formal language. If the person receiving the letter is responsible for your problem, you may even use a slightly angry tone.  However, it’s important to get the balance right. Your letter should definitely not seem rude! Other tasks that require a formal writing style include communications with government departments or officials, public services or institutions like a university.

3. You need to be creative

Tip 3 of our 5 tips IELTS general writing task 1 is about choosing what to include in your letter. The bullet points give you a general idea of what you need to write, but you will need to think up the specific details. This might be a situation, such as how you lost something or something that someone did.

Practice looking at different general training task 1s. Think about the task and try to imagine what might have happened in a bit more detail. For example, if your laptop was stolen from a hotel, you may need to explain where it was and why you left it there. If you’re making a complaint about a noisy neighbour, you may need to think about what they were doing that was so noisy. It should be something unreasonable. Cutting the grass in their garden on Saturday afternoon is probably not a good reason to send a letter to the council (local government). Maybe they’re playing loud music until 6am and having parties every night of the week. This would be disruptive, especially as you need to go to work or classes. In this case, the complaint is more appropriate!

4. Remember to close the letter appropriately

One problem people have is not knowing how to finish a letter. This will depend on who you’re writing to and why. If you are expecting a reply, there are a number of phrases that are useful. These include ‘I look forward to hearing from you in the near future’ for something you expect to happen soon. If they may have questions and the letter is quite formal, ‘Please do not hesitate to contact me should you require any further information’ would be more appropriate. If it’s your friend and you may expect them to have questions, you would say something chatty like ‘Let me know if you need to know anything else’. When a friend is coming to visit you, you may say something like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you next month’.

The line before you sign your name will also change. If you’re sending a letter to a friend, phrases like ‘All the best’ or ‘Kind regards’ are fine. For a more formal letter, you need to consider whether you know the name of the person receiving the letter. If you do, you can close your letter by saying ‘Yours sincerely’. If you don’t know their name, you should say ‘Yours faithfully’.

5. Think about the vocabulary you’re using

For a really good task 1, you can be a bit clever with how you plan your task. Remember, you decide the details you include (within the limits of the task). If your vocabulary about taking public transport is really good and you lost something on holiday, you could say you lost it on a bus or train. On the other hand, if you’re more comfortable talking about hotels and accommodation, say you lost it at some point during your hotel stay.

These things may be limited by the task. For example, it may be that you are writing to a hotel about something that you lost. In this case, you are probably limited to talking about the hotel itself. However, if you’re writing to the police or an insurance company, you will might have a bit more freedom. This is because the task may not specify how you lost the item, so you can be creative!

Remember, though, everything needs to be relevant. You can’t force vocabulary into a letter if it doesn’t belong there. If you’re telling the insurance company about how you lost your phone on the bus, you should limit your description to the incident on the bus. They don’t need to know that you took the bus to go to an excellent seafood restaurant on the waterfront where you had a rich shellfish bisque followed by handmade lobster tortellini in a savoury cream sauce. After all, the task is about the fact that you lost your phone. The meal in the restaurant isn’t relevant, even if you can make it sound good!