Your local hospital has advertised people to do unpaid work helping at the hospital. You would like to do some work at the hospital in your free time. Write a letter to the hospital. In your letter: - explain why you would like to do unpaid work at the hospital - say what type of unpaid work you would be able to do - give details of when you would be available for this work
Sample Response
Dear Sir or Madam, In response to a recent advertisement broadcast on television, I would like to apply as a volunteeroffer myself as an enlistee for volunteer workthe unpaid work at your hospital. I consider this a great chance to serve the patients and best utilise my spare time for humanitarian workworks. I hope you will allow me to volunteer.I am hoping that you would let me offer my service. My parents are doctors and they devote their professional lives to servingserve people and society as a whole. I am highly inspired by them and want to make a contribution myselfdo something of my own for people who need care. What better place could there beWhat can be a better place to assist people than in a hospital? Moreover, I have around two hours to spare each day in the evening and I live nearby. I would like to best use my spare timethe superfluous hours of my daily routine in philanthropic work. I have previous experienceexperiences of doing voluntary worksome voluntary works for our community. I can assist nursesassist a professional nurse, help care for babiestake care of babies, help patients to move and bring them meals. I amI am, in reality, ready to learn to do any type of work to help people in this hospital. I can work from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm every day except on SaturdaysSaturday. Hope you hear your positive response and start my work soon. Yours faithfully, Sara Sandler
Why this response received Band 7.0
The letter addresses all three requirements with convincing motivation, several relevant ways to help, and precise availability, maintaining an appropriately formal purpose. Its strongest feature is the detailed task coverage, while the main limitation is a recurring pattern of unnatural word choice and countability errors, compounded by the lack of clear paragraph breaks. The response would improve most by using simpler, idiomatic wording and grouping each main point in its own paragraph.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
The letter fully develops the reasons for volunteering, suitable duties, and detailed availability in a consistently appropriate formal context.
Refine the closing request so that it asks politely and directly about the next stage of the application.
Coherence and Cohesion
Ideas progress logically through motivation, experience, duties, and availability, but the absence of paragraph breaks weakens the overall organisation.
Divide the body into focused paragraphs matching the three requested points and keep closely related details together.
Lexical Resource
Vocabulary is varied and ambitious, but recurring unnatural choices such as “enlistee,” “superfluous hours,” and “hear your positive response” reduce precision.
Prefer natural formal wording such as “volunteer,” “spare time,” and “I look forward to your response.”
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
A range of sentence forms communicates the message clearly, although countability, complementation, and clause errors occur noticeably.
Correct patterns such as “devote their lives to serving,” “voluntary work,” and “I hope to hear from you.”
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IELTS General Training Writing Task 1
Your local hospital has advertised people to do unpaid work helping at the hospital. You would like to do some work at the hospital in your free time. Write a letter to the hospital. In your letter:
- explain why you would like to do unpaid work at the hospital
- say what type of unpaid work you would be able to do
- give details of when you would be available for this work
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.