General Training Task 1: the letter
Everything in this task follows from one decision you make before writing a word: how formal it is. Get that wrong and the rest cannot recover it.
Read the relationship, then pick the register
The prompt tells you who you are writing to. That single fact sets your tone, your opening, your sign-off and half your vocabulary.
| Written to | Register | Opens | Signs off |
|---|---|---|---|
| A friend | Informal | Dear Anna, | Best wishes, / Love, |
| Someone you know by name in a work or service role | Semi-formal | Dear Mr Patel, | Yours sincerely, |
| An unnamed manager, company, council | Formal | Dear Sir or Madam, | Yours faithfully, |
The pairing in the last two rows is a real convention and examiners notice it: sincerely with a name, faithfully without one.
Mixing registers is the most visible failure in this task. Contractions and exclamation marks in a complaint to a council, or stiff formulas to a close friend, are noticed immediately because tone is explicitly part of the criterion here.
The three bullet points are the task
Every GT Task 1 prompt gives you three things to cover. They are not suggestions. They are the specification, and a letter covering two of them is capped no matter how well written it is.
The reliable structure is one paragraph per bullet, in the order given, plus a short opening line stating why you are writing. That is four paragraphs and it fits inside 150 words comfortably.
Say why you are writing in the first sentence. "I am writing to complain about a washing machine I bought from your store last month." The reader should never have to reach paragraph two to find out what the letter is about.
Inventing detail is allowed, and expected
The prompts are deliberately thin: a faulty appliance, a delayed order, a friend visiting. You are meant to supply names, dates and circumstances. Doing so is not cheating and it is not penalised — a letter that stays as vague as the prompt usually fails to develop the bullets.
Keep the invented detail plausible and consistent. A purchase date in the letter and a different one later is an error of coherence, not of imagination.
Where letters actually lose marks
- Register drift. Formal opening, chatty middle. Decide once and hold it.
- A missing bullet. Usually the third, because it is the one people run out of words for.
- No stated purpose. Buried or absent.
- Under 150 words. Same cap as Academic Task 1, and letters run short more often than reports do — see the word count guide.
- A sign-off that does not match the greeting. Small, but free to get right.
What this task is not
It is not Academic Task 1. There is no data, no overview, no trends. If you have practised describing charts and then meet a letter, the habits transfer badly: nobody wants an overview of their broken washing machine.
Not sure your tone is consistent? IELTS Writing Checker scores General Training Task 1 against the same four criteria an examiner uses, and flags register problems in your own text. Try it — writing is free, or see pricing.