Every year, someone in the company where you work is chosen as the best employee. Your manager has asked staff members to make suggestions about who should be chosen this year. Write a letter to your manager. In your letter: - identify a colleague who you think should be the best employee - explain what the job of this colleague involves - give reasons why the colleague should be chosen as the best employee
Sample Response
Dear Mr Alan, I would like to express my appreciation for the valuablegreat initiative to take employee feedbackemployees' feedback whenfor selecting the employee of the year. Personally, I would recommend Alfred Simmon for the title this year. Alfred is a high achieveran achiever, and his exceptionalunparalleled leadership has fosteredbrought innovation and substantialenviable success to our company. As a project manager, his responsibility is to assign workdistribute works to the team members, coordinate their workcoordinate them, liaise withliaison to the sales team, deliver projects to clientsdeliver the projects to the clients onin time and related responsibilitieseverything in between. His dedication and friendly attitude have inspired many junior employees to work hard and be loyal to the company. He is a leader who sets an example for his subordinatessets examples to his subordinates, and this is exactly what a project manager in our company should be like. Nobody, in my opinion, deserves the title more than he does. By choosing him the employee of the year, we can show our recognition ofto the most deserving employeeworthiest employee in the office. Yours sincerely, Daniel Cabin
Why this response received Band 7.5
The letter’s strongest feature is its clear recommendation, supported by a relevant account of Alfred’s responsibilities and leadership qualities in an appropriately respectful tone. Its main limitation is imprecise wording and collocation in several otherwise ambitious phrases, while the single-block presentation slightly weakens readability; the highest-priority improvement is to use more natural professional expressions and separate the role description from the supporting reasons.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
The purpose is immediately clear, all three bullet points are covered, and the recommendation is supported with relevant detail in a suitable formal tone.
Develop one or two achievements more specifically to make the case for Alfred even more compelling.
Coherence and Cohesion
Ideas progress logically from the nomination to duties and supporting reasons, although the letter is presented as one continuous paragraph.
Divide the body into clear paragraphs for the recommendation, job responsibilities, and reasons for selection.
Lexical Resource
A good range of evaluative and workplace vocabulary is used, but collocations such as ‘distribute works’ and ‘recognition to’ are imprecise.
Use natural professional combinations such as ‘assign work’ and ‘show recognition of his contribution’.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
Varied complex sentences are handled with strong control, with only occasional errors in word form and preposition choice.
Check parallel verb forms and dependent prepositions carefully when constructing long lists of responsibilities.
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IELTS General Training Writing Task 1
Every year, someone in the company where you work is chosen as the best employee. Your manager has asked staff members to make suggestions about who should be chosen this year. Write a letter to your manager. In your letter:
- identify a colleague who you think should be the best employee
- explain what the job of this colleague involves
- give reasons why the colleague should be chosen as the best employee
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.