IELTS General Writing Task 1 — What to Confirm Before You Build a Letter Template

“Just write a personal letter for Task 1, it’s the easy one.” That’s the line people repeat about IELTS General Training Writing, and it undersells how much of the score depends on the letter structure itself — register, bullet-point coverage, length — details that need to come from the right source rather than a secondhand summary.

Why this is a checklist rather than a template

We’re not going to hand you a register-by-register template here. The specific content rules for the General Training Task 1 letter — exactly how formal, semi-formal and informal register should be signalled, how strictly every bullet point needs addressing, the precise length expectation — are genuine exam-content detail we haven’t verified against a primary IELTS source, and getting a detail like that wrong in a blog post could cost you real marks. What we can responsibly give you is the checklist of what to go and confirm properly, plus the one piece of scoring mechanics that is sourced.

The checklist

• Confirm you’re booked for General Training rather than Academic. Express Entry only accepts the General Training module — the Academic module doesn’t count, and it doesn’t test the same Task 1 format at all. This is the single most common and most expensive mistake South African candidates make, often because they already sat Academic for a university or professional-registration purpose.
• Get the register rules from IELTS’s own official materials rather than a forum summary — formal, semi-formal and informal letters are marked on genuinely different criteria, and an official sample answer is worth more than a paraphrased description of one.
• Get the length requirements for the letter task from the same official source, and practise against it with a timer, not against a vague “keep it short” instinct.
• Practise against real past prompts, marked by someone qualified to assess IELTS writing specifically — general essay-writing feedback doesn’t map cleanly onto how this task is scored.
• Know your target band before you start drilling technique. The IELTS-to-CLB conversion for Writing runs flat at 6.0 for CLB 7 — the Federal Skilled Worker minimum — across all four skills, so know which number you’re actually aiming for before you decide how much polish the letter needs.

What actually matters here

The checklist above exists because a task that “sounds easy” is exactly the one people under-prepare for, and Writing is graded on criteria specific enough that guessing at the rules costs marks quietly, without ever telling you why. Twenty minutes with an official sample answer beats an hour with an unverified template someone else built from memory.

Why this matters more than it looks like it should

Writing is frequently the ability South African candidates score lowest on relative to their target, and Task 1 is worth a real share of that mark — not a warm-up question to rush through so you can get to the essay. Treating the checklist above as a genuine pre-test routine rather than a box to tick once is the difference between a letter that hits the assessment criteria and one that merely reads fluently.

Once you have a real result in hand, our companion piece on deciding whether to retake a language test walks through what to do with it.