You have seen an advertisement in an English newspaper for a job working in the City Museum shop during the holidays. You decide to apply for the job. Write a letter to the director of the Museum. In your letter: - introduce yourself - explain what experience and special skills you have - explain why you are interested in the job
Sample Response
Dear Sir/Madam, I amI’m writing to apply for the holiday job which you advertised recently in the newspaper. I am a twenty-one-year-old student and I speak English quite well. At present I am in my second year studying historyHistory at Lincoln College and I am very keen to have a holiday job this summer. I am highly accurate with calculationsextremely good at adding up, so I think I would be an asset to your shop. My term finishes on 55th July and I am free until 2020th September. Last year I worked in a restaurant serving tourists from all over the world and I enjoyed it very much. I would like to have the opportunity to meet people and practise my English again. I enjoy going to museums and am particularly keen on history. Last year I went to an exhibition of Ancient Greek objects held in Londonwhich was held in London. I have often visited your museumbeen in your museum and am familiar with the exhibits on displayitems you have. I do hope you will be interested in my application. I look forward to hearing from you in the near future. Yours faithfully, Dimitris Boudramis
Why this response received Band 8.0
The application is persuasive and complete, linking the writer's studies, customer-facing experience, numerical ability, and interest in history directly to the museum-shop role. The main weakness is the dense single-block presentation, while a few expressions could be more professional; the priority is to group qualifications, experience, motivation, and availability into distinct paragraphs.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
The letter establishes its purpose promptly, covers every bullet point in relevant detail, and sustains an appropriately formal application tone.
Make the connection between restaurant service experience and the museum shop's likely customer-service duties even more explicit.
Coherence and Cohesion
Ideas progress logically from the application and personal background to skills, experience, motivation, and a polite closing.
Use separate body paragraphs to distinguish qualifications and availability from experience and reasons for applying.
Lexical Resource
The response uses a flexible and generally precise range of vocabulary suited to employment, study, tourism, and museums.
Replace conversational wording such as 'good at adding up' with a more professional phrase such as 'confident handling transactions.'
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
Complex and simple structures are varied and consistently well controlled, with accurate agreement, tense, and sentence formation.
Refine the occasional awkward construction, such as 'have often been in your museum,' to sound fully natural.
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IELTS General Training Writing Task 1
You have seen an advertisement in an English newspaper for a job working in the City Museum shop during the holidays. You decide to apply for the job. Write a letter to the director of the Museum. In your letter:
- introduce yourself
- explain what experience and special skills you have
- explain why you are interested in the job
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.