IELTS Writing Task 1 General Training: How to Write the Letter

An IELTS General Training Task 1 letter is written by first identifying the tone the prompt requires - formal, semi-formal, or informal, based on who you are writing to - then opening and closing in a way that matches that tone, and covering all three bullet points from the prompt in at least 150 words, usually across three or four short paragraphs. The letter task rewards a clear, appropriate register from the first line to the last far more than it rewards elaborate vocabulary, which is where most tone mismatches quietly cost marks.

What the General Training Letter Task Asks For

General Training Task 1 gives you a situation and asks you to write a letter responding to it, always with three bullet points you must cover - for example, a situation where you need to write to your landlord about a repair, explaining the problem, describing what has already been tried, and requesting a specific action. Unlike Academic Task 1, which describes visual data, this task is about producing an appropriately toned piece of real-world correspondence, and it is marked on the same four criteria as every other Writing task: Task Achievement, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy.

Because the situations are everyday and the format is familiar, candidates sometimes underestimate this task relative to the essay in Task 2. In practice, tone and completeness are just as easy to get wrong here as structure is in an essay, and Task Achievement is scored just as strictly.

Identifying the Required Tone

Formal

Write formally when you are addressing someone you do not know personally in a professional or official capacity - a company, a landlord you have never met, a local council, an editor, or an unnamed manager. Formal letters open with “Dear Sir or Madam” if you do not have a name, or “Dear Mr/Ms [Surname]” if you do, and close with “Yours faithfully” (no name given) or “Yours sincerely” (name given). Contractions (“I’m,” “didn’t”) and casual phrasing are avoided throughout, not only in the opening line.

Semi-Formal

Write semi-formally when the recipient is someone you have some relationship with but not a close personal one - a landlord you have met, a colleague in another department, a neighbour. The tone sits between the other two: polite and organised, but not as stiff as a formal letter, and it typically opens with the person’s first name (“Dear James”) and closes with “Best wishes” or “Kind regards.” Semi-formal is the register candidates most often get slightly wrong, usually by drifting too far toward informal phrasing partway through the letter.

Informal

Write informally when writing to a friend or family member. Contractions, casual expressions, and a warmer, more personal opening and closing are all appropriate here - “Hi Sarah” and “Take care” or “Lots of love,” depending on the relationship implied by the prompt. An informal letter that reads like a formal one - “I am writing to inform you” to your own sister - is a tone mismatch in the opposite direction, and it is marked down just as an overly casual formal letter would be.

The Same Situation, Three Tones

The clearest way to see the difference is the same piece of information written three ways. Explaining a delayed order: formally, “I am writing to inform you that the item I ordered on 3 March has still not arrived, despite the confirmed delivery date having passed nearly two weeks ago.” Semi-formally, to a supplier you have dealt with before, “I wanted to let you know that my order still hasn’t turned up, even though it was meant to arrive almost two weeks ago now.” Informally, to a friend who recommended the shop, “You won’t believe it, but that thing I ordered still hasn’t shown up, and it’s been almost two weeks.” The underlying information barely changes; the vocabulary, contractions, and sentence rhythm do.

Opening and Closing Conventions

Getting the greeting and sign-off right is necessary but not sufficient - the tone has to hold across the whole letter, not just bookend it. A common mistake is opening formally and then sliding into casual vocabulary and short, clipped sentences in the body, or opening informally and then writing stiff, over-formal sentences once past the first line out of habit from essay practice. Before you finish, it is worth rereading your own letter and checking that a sentence pulled from the middle would still sound consistent with the greeting you chose at the top.

The closing line just before your sign-off also carries tone: a formal letter typically ends with something like “I look forward to hearing from you,” a semi-formal one with “Please let me know if you need anything further,” and an informal one with something closer to “Let me know how things go” or “Hope to see you soon.”

Covering All Three Bullet Points

Every General Training letter prompt gives exactly three bullet points, and Task Achievement is scored partly on whether all three are addressed, not just the ones that were easiest to write about. A common and costly pattern is writing an excellent, detailed paragraph on the first bullet point, a shorter paragraph on the second, and then running out of things to say - or running out of words - before properly addressing the third.

The safest structure is one bullet point per paragraph, after a short opening paragraph that states why you are writing. This keeps the three points visually and structurally distinct, which also helps Coherence and Cohesion, since the letter’s organisation becomes obvious to the reader without needing explicit signposting phrases. A closing paragraph then wraps up the letter in line with the tone - a specific request, a next step, or a simple friendly sign-off, depending on what the prompt actually calls for.

Word Count and a Realistic Time Budget

The minimum word count for the letter task is 150 words, and writing under that is penalised directly under Task Achievement in the same way a short Task 2 essay is. There is no fixed maximum, but this task is normally allotted about 20 minutes out of the hour given for the Writing test, since Task 2 carries more weight toward the overall Writing band. A workable split is a couple of minutes identifying the tone and planning what goes in each paragraph, around 15 minutes writing, and a few minutes checking - a letter this short leaves little room for the tone to drift unnoticed, so a final read-through matters more here than the length of the letter might suggest.

Common Tone Mismatches That Cost Marks

The single most common issue is a formal letter that turns casual partway through - often the moment a candidate starts explaining a problem in their own natural voice rather than maintaining the register they opened with. A second common issue runs the other way: an informal letter to a friend written in stiff, essay-like sentences, which reads as unnatural given who the letter is supposedly addressed to. A third issue is a semi-formal letter that cannot decide which direction to lean, mixing “Dear Mr Johnson” with contractions and slang later on.

Beyond tone, the other frequent loss of marks is a letter that addresses only two of the three bullet points in real depth, treating the third as an afterthought squeezed into a single clause at the end - the same completeness problem that affects two-part questions in Task 2, just applied to three points instead of two.

Practising This Task Efficiently

Because the letter task is shorter than the essay, it is realistic to practise several in a single study session rather than one at a time. A useful drill is to take five different prompts covering all three tones, and for each one write only the opening line, one sentence per bullet point, and the closing line, timed to five minutes per prompt. This builds the habit of correctly identifying tone at a glance and planning three balanced points quickly, which is usually what determines whether the full letter, once written out, stays consistent and complete from greeting to sign-off.