IELTS Writing Task 1 Letter Structure Explained
Twenty minutes. One letter. Three bullet points buried in a one-sentence prompt that’s easy to skim past too fast. That’s the whole task, and it trips up plenty of strong English speakers who assume a letter is the easy half of the writing paper. The IELTS Writing Task 1 letter structure is fixed enough to learn in an afternoon; the trap sits elsewhere.
Which test you’re actually sitting
IRCC accepts IELTS General Training for Express Entry rather than IELTS Academic — the single most expensive mistake South African applicants make, since many already hold an IELTS Academic score from a university application or professional registration process, and it simply doesn’t count. Check which module you’re booking before you pay for the test.
The GT letter three bullet points rule is the whole task in one sentence. General Training’s Task 1 always asks for a letter — formal, semi-formal or informal, depending on who you’re supposedly writing to — and always gives three bullet points to cover. Missing one caps your score regardless of how elegant the prose around it is.
Openings and closings, by register
A formal letter to someone whose name you don’t have opens “Dear Sir or Madam” and closes “Yours faithfully.” A formal letter to a named person opens “Dear Mr/Ms [Surname]” and closes “Yours sincerely.” Semi-formal and informal letters open with a first name and close more casually — “Best wishes,” or similar. Getting this wrong throughout — an informal opening paired with a formal closing — reads as inconsistent, and inconsistency costs marks on its own criterion, separate from bullet coverage.
Why templates get spotted
There is a plain reason why memorised templates score poorly: examiners read hundreds of these letters. A template phrase repeated verbatim across thousands of test-takers is recognisable on sight, and using one signals a candidate isn’t actually responding to the specific prompt — which is exactly what the task measures. Memorise structure instead: how many paragraphs, roughly how each bullet maps to a paragraph, which opening and closing pair the register calls for. Fill that structure with language that responds to the prompt on the day.
How to lay out the paragraphs
Most of the work in paragraphing the IELTS letter is deciding how many you need. A workable shape: one short paragraph establishing why you’re writing, one paragraph per bullet point, and a short closing paragraph. Twenty minutes doesn’t allow a fourth or fifth paragraph of throat-clearing — get to the first bullet quickly, and skip circling back to restate what’s already covered.
Covering all bullets: Task One, checked every time
Before you finish, reread the prompt and tick off each bullet against what you actually wrote. Under time pressure this is the single most common thing test-takers skip, and a beautifully written letter that misses one bullet scores lower than a plainer one that covers all three.
If your education and professional practice have both been entirely in English, some Canadian regulators exempt you from language testing for certain purposes — worth checking against your specific occupation and province before assuming you need to sit this test at all. It’s a five-minute check against your regulator’s own page, and it can save you both the fee and the twenty minutes spent perfecting a letter you never actually needed.
Booking the wrong module is an expensive mistake — our IELTS, CELPIP & Language Scores guide sets out exactly which tests IRCC recognises.