IELTS Writing Task 1: the marks you lose here are not about your English

There are two completely different tasks called Writing Task 1, and the first thing worth knowing is which one you are sitting.

• IELTS Academic Task 1 gives you a graph, chart, table, map or process diagram and asks you to describe it. The rubric on the official sample papers is the same every time: "Summarise the information by selecting and reporting the main features, and make comparisons where relevant."
• IELTS General Training Task 1 gives you a situation and three bullet points and asks you to write a letter. The official sample tasks add two lines that catch people out: "You do NOT need to write any addresses," and an instruction telling you exactly how to begin.

Both are meant to take about 20 minutes inside the single 60-minute Writing test, and both require at least 150 words. Both are marked on the same four criteria. And both fail in the same place — a criterion that has almost nothing to do with the quality of your English.

This is written from the marking side; we build the engine that scores writing on Hilingo. Every descriptor quoted below is from the official IELTS writing band descriptors, updated May 2023.

The four criteria, and the one sample answers cannot teach

Checked against IELTS's own key assessment criteria document, these are the names — and note that Task 1 and Task 2 do not share the first one:

Criterion	Task 1	Task 2
First criterion	Task Achievement	Task Response
Second	Coherence and Cohesion	Coherence and Cohesion
Third	Lexical Resource	Lexical Resource
Fourth	Grammatical Range and Accuracy	Grammatical Range and Accuracy

IELTS states that "the criteria are weighted equally and the score on the task is the average," and — the part almost nobody quotes — that "the assessment of Task 2 carries more weight in marking than Task 1."

So be precise about the size of the prize. Task Achievement is a quarter of your Task 1 mark, and Task 1 is the lighter of the two tasks in your Writing band. That is still the single biggest lever on this page, for one reason: it is the only criterion you can lose without writing a single bad sentence.

The other three criteria are about your English. Coherence, vocabulary and grammar improve slowly, over months, and a bank of sample answers can genuinely show you what better English looks like. Task Achievement is about what you selected to report and who you decided you were writing to — a decision you make in the first ninety seconds, before any English happens. A finished sample answer shows you the result of that decision. It cannot show you the decision.

That is why people read fifty model answers and score the same band. They are studying the output of a choice nobody explained to them.

Academic Task 1: the overview is named in the descriptors

Here is the clearest thing in this entire article, and it is a direct quotation rather than an opinion.

The Task Achievement column of the Task 1 band descriptors says this about the overview:

Band	What Task Achievement says (Academic)
7	"It presents a clear overview, the data are appropriately categorised, and main trends or differences are identified."
6	"A relevant overview is attempted."
5	"The recounting of detail is mainly mechanical." — the same band also names "a tendency to focus on details (without referring to the bigger picture)", wording the document applies to both variants

Now read the instruction printed at the top of every page of that document: "A script must fully fit the positive features of the descriptor at a particular level. Bolded text indicates negative features that will limit a rating." The overview wording above is plain type — a positive feature you have to meet, not a bolded penalty.

Put those together. If your response contains no overview, it does not fully fit the band 6 positive features, because band 6 requires one to be attempted. The bigger-picture wording sitting in band 5 is exactly the shape of a script that reports every number in order and never says what the data shows overall.

This is not a claim about a secret algorithm. Scripts are marked by trained and certificated IELTS examiners against these published descriptors; what is not public is the examiner guidelines behind them. What follows is what the published descriptors say, read in the order the document tells you to read them.

And the official examiner comments show the overview being applied. On one Academic sample script, the examiner writes that it "fails to present an overview and some of the key features are not adequately covered" — named first, in an overall Band 5 comment that goes on to criticise the vocabulary and the grammar as well. The overview is not a stylistic extra an examiner notes in passing; it is the first thing the Task Achievement comment reaches for. (IELTS publishes these scripts as illustrative rather than definitive examples of a band.)

What an overview actually is: one or two sentences, no numbers, that say what the whole picture shows. Not "the chart shows the number of men and women in further education" — that is the introduction, and it is a paraphrase of the rubric. The overview is the next thing: which line is highest, which direction everything moved, which two categories split apart, how many stages the process has and where it starts and ends.

A structure for Academic Task 1

Four paragraphs, and the second one is the one people skip:

1. Introduction, one sentence. Paraphrase the rubric. What is shown, where, when. No data.
2. Overview, one or two sentences. The two or three biggest things a reader would notice from across the room. Still no data — you are stating the shape, not proving it.
3. Body one. The first group of features, with the figures that support them.
4. Body two. The rest, with figures, and the comparisons the rubric asked for.

For a process diagram there are no trends to report, so the overview becomes the number of stages, where the process begins and where it ends. For a map, it becomes what changed overall between the two states.

The single most common failure inside the body paragraphs has the same root as the missing overview: writing every data point in the order they appear on the chart. The rubric asks you to select. IELTS's own criteria document describes Academic Task 1 as an information-transfer task and says Task Achievement assesses "selecting key features of the information" and "comparing or contrasting the information by adequately highlighting the identifiable trends, principal changes or differences in the data and other inputs (rather than mechanical description reporting detail)."

A complete, accurate transcription of the chart is the wrong answer. You were asked to choose.

General Task 1: the prompt names your recipient and never names the register

The General Training letter has a different trap, and it is the same problem candidates hit on the CELPIP email: the register is part of the task, and the task will not tell you what it is.

Look at a real sample prompt. It tells you that you share a college room, that there are problems, and that you must write to the accommodation officer. It gives you three bullets. It tells you to begin "Dear Sir or Madam,". It never uses the word formal.

Judging that is your job, and it is marked inside Task Achievement — not somewhere else, not under vocabulary. Here is the tone wording from the same descriptor column, and notice that it moves band by band:

Band	What Task Achievement says (General Training)
7	"It presents a clear purpose. The tone is consistent and appropriate to the task. Any lapses are minimal."
6	"The purpose is generally clear. There may be minor inconsistencies in tone."
5	"The purpose may be unclear at times. The tone may be variable and sometimes inappropriate."
4	"The purpose of the letter is not clearly explained and may be confused. The tone may be inappropriate."

Read the 7-to-6 step carefully. The difference between them is not grammar and not vocabulary. It is consistency. A letter that opens formally to a manager and then slips into "anyway, thanks a lot!" at the end has minor inconsistencies in tone, and that is band 6 language in the document.

Tone is worth a quarter of this task, and it is the quarter you can fix fastest: the other three criteria move over months, while an inconsistent decision is visible — and correctable — in a single sentence.

Reading the register off the prompt

Three questions, in order:

1. Does the rubric give you a name? The opening line it tells you to use is the strongest signal in the prompt. "Dear Sir or Madam" means you do not know the recipient, and that is formal. A name means you do know them, which puts you in semi-formal or informal territory depending on who they are.
2. What is the relationship? A stranger in an institutional role — manager, officer, editor, landlord's agent — is formal. A person you know in a role — your own landlord, your manager, a teacher — is semi-formal. A friend or family member is informal.
3. What are you doing to them? Complaining, applying and requesting pull the register up. Thanking, inviting and apologising to someone you know pull it down.

The consequences are mechanical. Formal means no contractions, no phrasal verbs where a plain verb exists, "I am writing to request" rather than "I wanted to ask", and "Yours faithfully" for "Dear Sir or Madam", "Yours sincerely" when you used a name. Informal means contractions are correct, "Hi Sam" is correct, and stiff formality is itself an error — writing to your brother in the voice of a solicitor is a tone failure in the same way round as the reverse.

The sign-off is part of the mark

One detail from the official examiner comments, because nobody mentions it and it is free marks: on a band 6 General Training script, the examiner writes that "the format of the letter is incomplete as there is no 'closing' (e.g. Yours Faithfully, Best wishes), this impacts Task Achievement."

The greeting, the closing and the paragraphing are format, format is inside Task Achievement, and a missing sign-off costs you there regardless of how good the four paragraphs above it were.

A structure for General Task 1

1. Greeting, matching the rubric's instruction exactly.
2. Purpose, one sentence. Why you are writing. IELTS lists "clearly explain the purpose of the letter" as the first thing Task Achievement assesses on this task.
3. Bullet one, a short paragraph.
4. Bullet two, a short paragraph.
5. Bullet three, a short paragraph.
6. Closing line and sign-off, matching your greeting.

The bullets are not suggestions. IELTS's criteria document says Task Achievement assesses whether you "fully address the three bullet-pointed requirements set out in the task" and "extend these three functions appropriately and relevantly." Covering two well and one in half a sentence is the most common way to lose this criterion while feeling like you wrote a good letter.

The memorised opening problem

Every sample-answer bank teaches you a sentence to start with. You should be extremely careful with that, and the reason is in the descriptors rather than in anyone's opinion.

At band 4, the Lexical Resource column names "inappropriate use of lexical chunks (e.g. memorised phrases, formulaic language and/or language from the input material)". At band 3 it names "over-dependence on input material or memorised language." And band 0 is reserved in part for cases "where there is proof that a candidate's answer has been totally memorised."

There is a second rule in the same family. The key criteria document states that scripts may be penalised if they are "partly or wholly plagiarised" or "not written as full, connected text (e.g. using bullet points in any part of the response, or note form, is not appropriate)."

The practical problem is duller than the rules and affects more people. Nothing in the published descriptors penalises a common opening sentence above band 4, so the argument against one is not the rulebook — it is that a template opening spends your first sentence saying nothing, at exactly the moment you wanted the marker to notice something.

What does transfer from a good sample answer is the shape: paragraph order, where the figures sit, how a comparison sentence is built. Steal structure. Do not steal sentences.

What band are you actually aiming at

If this is for Canadian immigration, the IELTS General Training band-to-CLB conversion is official and exact — unlike raw-answer-to-band conversions, which move with each paper. For writing, these are IRCC's official per-skill numbers:

Writing band	CLB level
7.5	10
7.0	9
6.5	8
6.0	7
5.5	6

The important one is 6.0 to 7.0. Three of the four criteria in that jump are slow work. Task Achievement is not — a missing overview and an under-covered bullet are band-5 wording, an inconsistent tone is band-6 wording, and all three are things you can stop producing this week.

The full per-skill picture is on our IELTS band score chart, and the listening column is the one that usually surprises people.

Twenty minutes, spent properly

Writing is one 60-minute block with nothing cutting Task 1 off, so the 20 minutes is a budget you impose on yourself rather than a window the test enforces. It is still the reason people skip the thinking and go straight to sentences. Spend it in this order:

Minutes	What you are doing
0–3	Deciding. Academic: which two or three features go in the overview. General: who the recipient is and what register that means.
3–17	Writing, in the structure above, without stopping to edit.
17–20	Checking: is the overview there? Is the tone the same in the last line as the first? Are all three bullets covered? Is it over 150 words?

Those three minutes at the start are the whole article. They are what a sample answer cannot give you, because the sample answer is what came out the other end.

And on length: the 150-word minimum is a floor, not a target, and it lives inside Task Achievement — the key assessment criteria document defines TA as how fully the response fulfils the task "using a minimum of 150 words". Significantly underlength is named separately in Lexical Resource, but only at band 3. Aim for roughly 170 to 190 and stop — extra words in Task 1 buy nothing and cost you Task 2 time, which carries more weight.

Find out which criterion is actually holding you down

The reason Task Achievement stays broken is that you cannot see it in your own script. Your letter has a tone, and it is the tone you intended. Your chart description reports the features you decided to report. Re-reading it confirms the decision rather than testing it.

Hilingo gives you one full scored mock free, with no card — full Academic and General Training mocks in the library, plus section tests you can sit on their own, so you can sit writing by itself when that is the part you are fixing. Writing comes back marked on each of the four criteria separately, with a band for each — an estimate against the four official criteria rather than an official band — so a 6 in Task Achievement next to a 7 in the other three is visible instead of averaged into a single number. The Study Centre carries the Task 1 tips for the variant you are sitting, and the AI teacher works from your own result, including those four criterion bands, in any of 51 languages.

Take a free scored mock

• The IELTS mistakes you cannot see yourself — why one criterion is usually a band below the rest
• CELPIP Writing Task 1 — the same register problem in a different exam
• IELTS General Reading: your error budget — if reading is the section holding you down
• The last week before your IELTS — what actually moves a band late
• IELTS band score chart — band to CLB, per skill

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between IELTS Academic and General Writing Task 1?

Academic Task 1 gives you a graph, chart, table, map or process diagram and asks you to summarise it by selecting and reporting the main features. General Training Task 1 gives you a situation and three bullet points and asks you to write a letter. Both are meant to take about 20 minutes inside the 60-minute Writing test and require at least 150 words, and both are marked on the same four criteria — but what Task Achievement is measuring is completely different: selection of data in one, purpose and tone in the other.

Do I need an overview in IELTS Writing Task 1?

For Academic Task 1, yes. The band descriptors name it directly: band 7 requires a clear overview and band 6 requires one to be attempted, and the document states that a script must fully fit the positive features of a level. A response with no overview therefore cannot fully fit the band 6 Task Achievement descriptor. The General Training letter has no overview requirement — its equivalent is a clearly explained purpose.

How many words should I write for IELTS Writing Task 1?

At least 150, which is the stated minimum for both Academic and General Training — the key assessment criteria document builds it into Task Achievement, defined as how fully the response fulfils the task "using a minimum of 150 words". Around 170 to 190 is a sensible working range. Significantly underlength is named separately in Lexical Resource, but only at band 3, and going far over eats the 40 minutes Task 2 needs — and Task 2 carries more weight in your Writing band than Task 1 does.

Is IELTS Writing Task 1 formal or informal?

Only the General Training letter has a register to decide, and the prompt never states it. Read it from the recipient and the situation: an unnamed official is formal, someone you know in a role is semi-formal, a friend or family member is informal. The opening line the rubric gives you is the strongest clue — "Dear Sir or Madam" means you do not know the person. Tone sits inside Task Achievement, and the descriptors separate band 7 from band 6 on consistency of tone alone.

How is IELTS Writing Task 1 scored?

On four equally weighted criteria: Task Achievement, Coherence and Cohesion, Lexical Resource, and Grammatical Range and Accuracy. IELTS states that the score on the task is the average of the four. Note that Task 2 uses Task Response rather than Task Achievement, and that Task 2 carries more weight in marking than Task 1.

Should I memorise a template for IELTS Writing Task 1?

Memorise the structure, not the sentences. The band descriptors name memorised phrases and formulaic language in the Lexical Resource column at bands 4 and 3, and band 0 exists in part for answers shown to be totally memorised. Beyond the rules, a copied opening spends your first sentence saying nothing — a paragraph plan gives you the benefit of a template without making your script indistinguishable from the rest of the pile.