You play a team sport with some friends. Last week a member of the team had an accident and wasn’t able to play with you at the weekend. You decide to write to him in hospital, telling him about the match. Write a letter to your friend. In your letter: - Tell him which team won - Describe the conditions on the day - Say how you felt about the match
Sample Response
Dear Parthiban,
I hope you are feeling better in hospitalfeel better now in hospital and we are gettingcarrying on well with our friends. I’m delighted to tell you how I felt about our victory in the latest tournament matchexpress my feelings about our victory at the last tournament match in this letter.
First of all, I’d say that it was an unexpected victory for our Chennai team during our last district tournament cricket match conducted at Chepauk stadium with the Trichy team. Despite losing five wickets in the first two oversDespite 5 wickets from 2 overs, our team played stronglyvigorously from the third over and eventually scored an impressive totalscored unbelievable runs at last. Besides, our opponents, Trichy,our opponent team Trichy also played just as wellplayed equally to achieveget a good score. However, Krishna from our Chennai team scored 36 runs in a single over, which was the most surprising moment for everyone in the audienceevery audience in the stadium.
Finally, we won our important matchour dream competition with a score of 150/10 which brokebreaks the previous year'syear record. As you know, we were delightedfelt very happy about this success. However, we missed having you theremissed your presence in the stadium. I truly believeI strongly say that our success would have been easier if you had played forin our team.
Expecting to meet you soon with our friends.
Kind regards,
Why this response received Band 6.0
The letter gives a lively account of the result and communicates genuine excitement while acknowledging the absent friend. However, it does not describe the conditions on the day, so a major part of the task remains unaddressed, and some sporting expressions are imprecise. The most important improvement is to include clear details about the weather or playing conditions before polishing grammar and collocation.
IELTS Writing Criteria Scores
Task Achievement
The winner and the writer's feelings are clear and developed, but the required description of the day's conditions is missing.
Add specific information about the weather, pitch, or other playing conditions and maintain a consistently natural tone for a friend.
Coherence and Cohesion
The letter follows a generally clear sequence from greeting to match account and reaction, though connectors are sometimes mechanical or imprecise.
Organize the match description around the three bullet points and use fewer formulaic transitions such as 'First of all' and 'Finally'.
Lexical Resource
There is sufficient sporting vocabulary and some less common language, but collocations such as 'played equally' and 'every audience' are inaccurate.
Use natural match-reporting phrases, for example 'played equally well', 'the spectators', and 'broke last year's record'.
Grammatical Range and Accuracy
The response uses a range of sentence forms, but frequent errors in tense, articles, prepositions, and agreement reduce accuracy without obscuring the message.
Check tense consistency when recounting the match and revise noun phrases and relative clauses for accurate agreement and article use.
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IELTS General Training Writing Task 1
You play a team sport with some friends. Last week a member of the team had an accident and wasn’t able to play with you at the weekend. You decide to write to him in hospital, telling him about the match. Write a letter to your friend. In your letter:
- Tell him which team won
- Describe the conditions on the day
- Say how you felt about the match
Your response
Write the task yourself, then compare your choices with the annotated response.