You want to rent out a small apartment to a family, and you have decided to advertise it. Write a letter to the editor of a local newspaper asking to advertise your ad on the front page of the newspaper. In your letter: - give details of the ad that you want to publish - mention that you want the ad to be published on the front page - say how you would like to pay for the advertisement
Sample Response
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am a resident of Longhorn Citycity, and I thought that your local but very popular newspaper would be a great place to advertise my small apartment for rentplatform to publish my ad for renting my small apartment.
This advertisement should include information like how many peoplepersons can stay in the apartment, what kind of amenities or services it offers to its tenants, and how long the initial lease should be. Apart from these, the advertisement should include my contact details so that prospective tenants can contact me.
So, based on the information above, I want you to publish an advert for me in your newspaper, and I think that it should be a few lines long. But, regardless of how many lines or words my advertisement containshow many lines or words should my advertisement contain, I want it to be published on the front page of your newspaper so that it reaches as many readers as possiblegets a maximum number of views.
RegardingAnd as for the payment of the advertisement feepublishing cost of the ad, please send me an invoice, stating the amount dueciting the amount of money to be paid, and I will immediately send a check to you. If you want, I could deposit the money into your bank account insteadalso.
I hope to hear from you soon.
Yours faithfully,
Peter Lazarus
Why this response received Band 6.5
The letter’s strongest feature is its clear request for front-page placement and its flexible payment proposal by cheque or bank transfer. Its main limitation is task fulfilment: it never supplies the actual apartment details needed for the advertisement, instead listing categories of information that an ad should contain. Prioritise drafting the concrete advert content—capacity, location, rooms, amenities, rent, lease term, and contact details—before discussing placement and payment.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
The front-page request and payment method are clear, but the essential advertisement content is not provided with any concrete apartment details.
Supply the property’s actual capacity, location, rooms, amenities, rent, lease length, and contact information for publication.
Coherence and Cohesion
The letter is logically divided into purpose, proposed content, placement, payment, and closing, although some paragraph openings are mechanical.
Replace openings such as ‘So’, ‘But’, and ‘And as for’ with direct topic sentences appropriate to a formal request.
Lexical Resource
The vocabulary is adequate for advertising and payment, but several phrases such as ‘platform to publish my ad’, ‘maximum number of views’, and ‘publishing cost’ are unnatural.
Use concise terms such as ‘place an advertisement’, ‘reach the widest readership’, and ‘advertising fee’.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
The response attempts varied structures, but errors in tense, embedded-question word order, articles, and conditional phrasing are noticeable.
Correct the indirect question to ‘regardless of how many lines my advertisement contains’ and keep the request consistently in the present.
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IELTS General Training Writing Task 1
You want to rent out a small apartment to a family, and you have decided to advertise it. Write a letter to the editor of a local newspaper asking to advertise your ad on the front page of the newspaper. In your letter:
- give details of the ad that you want to publish
- mention that you want the ad to be published on the front page
- say how you would like to pay for the advertisement
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.